On a damp night in the early spring of 2009 I gave a reading in Berkeley about my recently published book, The Triple Bind. In front of the sizable crowd I discussed the book’s central premise, that cultural pressures have made teenage girls ever more vulnerable to depression, binge eating, and self-harm, especially those with genetic vulnerabilities or experiences of maltreatment. As girls increasingly experience the message of needing to be both nurturing and kind and academically and athletically competitive—while doing so effortlessly and with a “hot” look—helplessness and internalization frequently result.
Once the question-and-answer period began, an elderly gentleman sitting near the back was among the first to raise his hand. He stood up shakily. The crowd strained to hear his articulate yet faltering voice. “I want the audience to know,” he said, “that I am experiencing déjà vu. Many years ago I was a student of Professor Hinshaw’s father, the esteemed Virgil Hinshaw, at the Ohio State University.” An audible murmur sounded.
Trying to mask my shock, I replied to his question and several others. Afterward, he slowly walked to the podium and introduced himself as Joel Fort—a prominent Bay Area psychologist with strong interests in legal and ethical issues as well as substance abuse. He had fought for progressive policies all his life and had even testified in the Patty Hearst case during the seventies, countering the defense claim of “brainwashing” after her abduction. The topic he most wanted to discuss, however, was Dad. We ended up seeing each other a number of times before he passed away in 2015. During those years Joel surpassed 80 years of age and showed progressive signs of physical decline. Yet he was still enthusiastically engaged in remembrance.
In 1946, I learned, he had been admitted to OSU as a precocious 16-year-old, in an early version of today’s honors programs. He was drawn to the fields of philosophy and psychology. Particularly captivating, he said, was a magnetic new professor in the philosophy department, Virgil Hinshaw, Jr., from whom he took an introductory course. He’d met with Hinshaw in the professor’s office, and the young faculty member and his colleagues had invited him and other students to talks in the community. New worlds were opening up. Joel deeply appreciated the mentorship, particularly because he lacked a real peer group on campus.
The next year he signed up for an advanced course, an erudite tour of the philosophy of science. The dense syllabus, mimeographed a bright purple, rang out with major questions: In what ways do scientific theories form? Can ethics be based on a foundation of logic? How can progress in human thought be measured? Sitting at a restaurant in Berkeley, his hand shaking from a palsy he was developing, Joel told me that each lecture was more enticing than the last. The philosophy department was transforming, he said, inspired by their most recent hire to pursue twentieth-century logical positivism as well as the classics.
Toward the end of the fall ’47 quarter, chairs creaked as the students hurried into the small amphitheater. Joel, the enthused sophomore, marveled at his good fortune. Whispers and bustling ceased as Professor Hinshaw entered the classroom, black hair swept back over his forehead, his gaze intense. What new vistas might be revealed today?
But from the first words at the podium, Joel knew that something was terribly wrong. Hinshaw gazed above their foreheads, a far-off look in his eye. Haughty and self-assured, he spoke without notes, his voice strangely commanding.
“Today we consider our origins,” he proclaimed. “Behold the primordial era, filled with dinosaurs, cavemen, and primitive love. The secret of humanity lies therein!”
The students stared at their notebooks, but the syllabus yielded no connection between the scheduled topic and these rash pronouncements. Hardly pausing, their professor wove a tale of the beginnings of modern humans, focusing on the emergence of empathy from the caves, with man and woman in eternal rapture.
“Battling the elements,” he was now shouting, “overcoming predators, finding its way, humanity prevailed. Cooperation emerged from stark, brute competition! Primitive lust transformed into sensual, deep love! The human species rose to new heights!”
Was this some kind of joke? Joel had initially wondered. But the conviction in his professor’s voice made it clear that whatever was happening was no laughing matter.
Hinshaw was finishing his impromptu lecture. “The Lord has overseen the evolution of our species. The newly formed human spirit will never be broken!”
As he recounted the story, Joel’s face filled with a blend of compassion and horror. It had dawned on him during the lecture that Hinshaw’s inspiration had come from the 1940 film One Million B.C., starring Victor Mature, Carole Landis, and Lon Chaney, Jr. A fable depicting the plight of early humans, the movie was woefully inexact, mixing cavemen and cavewomen with dinosaurs. Even so, it had been nominated for two Oscars. Completely lacking in accuracy and utterly melodramatic, it was just the kind of film that Dad would have lambasted when in his right mind.
Indeed, how did the thread of the course relate to this Hollywood epic? The linkages, it was clear, existed solely in the professor’s fantasies. Despondent, Joel realized that his beloved mentor had become floridly psychotic right in front of the class.
Following the mystifying tirade, the students filed silently from their seats, eyes averted. Thinking fast, Joel formed a strategy. Back in his room, he pulled out the campus telephone directory. Lifting the black receiver from its cradle, he dialed the chair of the psychology department, Professor Julian Rotter, a noted personality and clinical psychologist. To Joel’s surprise, the secretary put him right through, and he recounted what had just occurred in the classroom. Rotter was compassionate and forthright, giving assurance that he would take necessary steps. Indeed, rumors had surfaced regarding the new professor’s instability once he’d finished grad school at Princeton, though no one could ever say precisely what had happened. When illnesses are stigmatized, mystery and innuendo take precedence over any truth.
A visiting professor was brought in to cover the final class meetings, but what would become of Professor Hinshaw? It was the suddenness that stayed with him, Joel lamented, the utter surprise of witnessing such complete irrationality from a mind he’d revered. Joel’s first experience of serious mental disorder had floored him.
The following year Joel departed for the University of Chicago to complete his undergraduate years before pursuing graduate studies in psychology. Yet his lasting remembrance of Ohio State was how his professor’s usual intellect and demeanor had vanished overnight.
Within days of the incident, I’ve surmised, Dad was committed to his first stay at Columbus State Hospital, the massive mental facility on the west side of the city. This was his third involuntary commitment, following Norwalk as a teen—where he received no intervention whatsoever—and Byberry as a newly minted Ph.D., with its insulin coma therapy and reported beatings. This time, his wild thoughts and fantastic pronouncements were masked by sedative medications and his initial experience with ECT. Why, he wondered, must I once again replace my clothes with the drab uniforms of inmates, with no belts allowed over the baggy pants, to prevent self-hanging? Each day’s routine was interrupted by shouts of despair and rage in some corner of the wards. Who would get sent to solitary lock-up today?
Somehow, the episode abated within a few weeks and he was released. Back on campus for winter quarter, he never spoke of his detour into madness. He’d learned to pick up the pieces and forge ahead. If anyone were to know, they’d understand only that he’d become one of the forgotten—less than human, little more than a beast.
Although he wouldn’t have phrased it as such, by that time Dad was clearly experiencing anticipated stigma: the fear of what might happen if the world were to know about his flaw, his mark. This expectation is a particular concern for groups with hidden or potentially concealable stigmas, like mental illness. If everyone can readily see your “difference,” such as skin color or being bound to a wheelchair, there’s no secret to keep. But if the issue is hidden, the choice of whether or not to reveal always lurks. What friends will you lose? What jobs won’t you get? Will you ever attain an intimate relationship? Not only does anticipated stigma prevent disclosure but it stops people from taking on important life challenges. When trauma and maltreatment enter the mix, stigma and shame typically escalate, as victims tend to blame themselves—and keep such experiences secret.
Like so many others of his era, Dad did everything in his power to hide what had transpired during those periods in his life when his mind had spun out of control. He expected the worst if people were to know—for good reason, given the abject stigma of the times. How different his life might have been had he been able to safely tell his future wife, his colleagues, and his friends about his lifelong struggles. How much freer he might have felt with the support of peers who had lost their way, just as he had.
Later that year he was introduced to a striking graduate student in history, Alene Pryor. Intensely attracted to each other after their blind date, they saw more and more of each other and later became engaged. His chapter on Einstein’s social and moral philosophy was causing a stir, as were the sole-authored publications he’d written while a graduate student at Princeton. Once again, his trajectory was ascendant.
If only he could cling to the rational side of existence; if only he could maintain absolute silence about the chaos. No one might ever know.
* * *
My own name was climbing the academic ladder. I was conducting federally supported summer programs for kids with behavior disorders, writing empirical articles and theoretical papers on the development of children’s mental health problems, and giving talks at national and international conferences. I was the favored son back at UCLA, which had opened a child study center the year I returned, a terrific base for the work I was doing. Yet I realized that I’d always be viewed by my colleagues as the up-and-coming youngster, a glorified gofer, rather than a true adult, an independent scholar.
Still, I wondered whether I could make it happen anywhere else. During my second year back in Southern California, Berkeley finally listed an assistant professor position. I couldn’t imagine uprooting so soon and let it pass. By some miracle the slot remained unfilled, and the following fall I received plaintive phone calls from Berkeley faculty asking for my application. Moments before the deadline, I raced to send my materials via Federal Express. My having waited until the last minute betrayed my ambivalence.
Beneath the strategic debates over where best to thrive as a professor and father, behind the back-and-forth with Roberta about a potential return to the Bay Area, the real reason for my conflict went deeper. When he was reaching his thirties—the same age that I was now—Dad had already begun a slow, inexorable decline, fueled by his devastating episodes and brutal hospitalizations, including his journey back to 1,000,000 B.C. just as his career was launching. During the early years of his marriage, after he’d achieved tenure, he spent considerable time in hospitals following wildly erratic episodes, gradually losing his professional edge. Although many philosophers, mathematicians, and physicists perform their seminal work while in their twenties, Dad’s misdiagnosed and maltreated mental illness had clearly sped his demise.
So how could I be eclipsing Dad? He was the one who’d set out to pursue life’s fundamental questions; he was the one who’d rescued me when I’d been lost. Surpassing him felt like a betrayal. With the benefit of hindsight, I understand that I was experiencing survivor guilt, which emerges when someone makes it through a disaster while others succumb. Consequences include self-blame, guilt, and a view of one’s own life as insignificant. Maybe I hadn’t survived a plane crash, but it felt as though I were combing through wreckage of a different sort, and it was troubling to me that I’d dared to transcend the family legacy.
By winter, I’d made the finalist group at Berkeley and interviewed during torrential February rains, in the days when such storms actually happened. I spent the last morning of my three days of presentations and meetings beside the hospital bed of the former head of the clinical psychology program, Shelly Korchin. He was the psychologist who’d interviewed the Mercury astronauts years before, founded the modern clinical psychology program at Berkeley, and took a liking to me during his waning years when I did my visiting professor stint. He’d become acutely ill with a relapse of his long-standing cancer but insisted on being a part of the search committee. He cast his vote for me just in time, surviving my visit and the crucial meetings just weeks before passing away. Though it took half a year to receive the formal offer, I was clearing out my UCLA office the following fall.
Following the anguish related to the decision, a strange thing happened when I arrived on the Berkeley campus. From my first morning I felt propelled by a jet stream. I knew instantly that this was my chance to make an independent mark. I’d almost stayed back in Columbus after high school out of unspoken guilt; I’d almost decided to play out my academic career at UCLA, where things felt like a sure bet. Each time something pushed me to forge ahead. Sometimes you just have to trust your gut.
Berkeley’s psychology building is named for Edward Tolman, the eminent scientist whose classic work of the 1930s and 1940s revealed that even rodents running a maze use mental maps to guide their behavior. In essence, he was the founder of modern cognitive psychology. Yet Tolman quit Berkeley during the 1950s rather than sign the newly formed loyalty oath for California employees, a legacy of McCarthyism. After his protest registered far and wide, he returned to Berkeley in triumph a few years later, where he ended his career. Upon arriving, I felt that I was breathing rarefied air.
Still, many of my days were lonely. I was the only assistant professor in the department, and for much of the week I was a single parent because Roberta had entered UCLA’s doctoral program in public health, commuting each week back to Southern California to work toward her degree.
But with the hills looming right above the campus and the Bay in sight, the quality of the air was striking. Starting in late January and stretching until June, the Northern California spring yields new blossoms every few weeks in a continual reawakening. I created an undergraduate course on developmental psychopathology, covering the continuing interplay between biology and context to shape disorder and resilience. Things continued to heat up career-wise. I was awarded a major grant, as one of six investigators for a cross-site study involving a clinical trial of medication, behavioral treatment, and their combination to alter the trajectory of academic and behavioral problems of children with serious attention deficits and impulsivity. I sailed through tenure review, which I’d delayed with the move, and received full professorship a couple of years later. I had launched.
* * *
To find order amid chaos, scientists seek patterns. To organize the vast amounts of raw material in front of them, they create schemes and hierarchies. They classify.
It worked for the periodic table of elements, where ordered rows provide insights about the atomic mechanisms underlying matter. It worked, with adjustments to incorporate modern genetics, for Linneaus’s classification of the plant and animal kingdoms into subdivisions, all the way down to species. It worked, too, for the eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages of geological time, which organize the age of the earth according to strata and striations of rock (think, for example, of the Cretaceous and Jurassic). Medical classifications, involving symptoms, signs, syndromes, and diseases, have helped to save countless lives.
Shouldn’t it be the same for people’s impairing problems of behavior and emotion, which are now termed mental disorders? If only we could organize and classify this huge array of distress, we might leave the Dark Ages of uncertainty, mystery, and fear. No more guesswork; no more stigma. Used throughout much of the world, the International Classification of Diseases includes a section on mental disorders. In the United States, the DSM is the psychiatric bible. Its third edition dominated my learning during my internship.
Emerging into the world of scientific psychology, I was convinced that answers were close at hand. Mental illness should be part of a rational science. Through the placement of a person’s unusual and troubling symptoms into a psychiatric classification scheme, progress should mount. The task would not be simple, of course, given the myriad ways in which humans interact with the world, the vast complexity of the brain, and the troubling lack of any “neural signature” for specific conditions. Still, diagnosis could remove personal and family blame by locating the problem in an ordered system. Treatment strategies would follow suit, each linked to a diagnosis within the classification. Mental illness might finally be solved!
But like many others in the field, I was slowly coming to a different realization. Such an architectural guide glosses over the realities of people’s emotions, conflicts, coping strategies, and lives. Even more, different people with the identical diagnosis, like serious depression or bipolar disorder, may actually be quite different: Their similar symptoms can betray different vulnerabilities, risks, and developmental pathways. Multiple roads may lead to Rome, but these disparate patterns are masked by traditional diagnosis.
Even more, environments shape behavior at the same time that individuals select and interpret their particular contexts, meaning that reciprocal processes are frequently at work. Over time, repeated reciprocal patterns yield transactions, when reciprocal patterns spiral and consolidate. Finally, transformations emerge when even a small change in transactions brings forth a new configuration—as when a difficult life event pushes a vulnerable individual into serious dysfunction. Putting a diagnostic box around such complicated processes can obscure the living, breathing person in question.
Unlike inanimate objects, people respond to the ways they’re classified. Receiving a diagnosis of mental disorder might lead to liberation, relief from shame and doubt, and the motivation to seek treatment, but it might also promote demoralization and dehumanization if the person’s essence is lost—and if mental illness continues to be viewed as shameful. Coming to this understanding shattered my certainties. To make sense of it all, I knew that I’d have to grasp the complexity of transaction and to comprehend people’s experiences, behind the diagnoses per se. To comprehend transformations, I needed to transform.
* * *
Dad was graduate secretary for Princeton’s class of 1945, the year he completed his dissertation. On visits home I would see him dutifully typing up the remembrances classmates had sent him for the alumni newsletter. Every June, he traveled to Princeton for the graduation ceremony. Sometimes Mom accompanied him so they could make a weekend of it.
On one trip during the late 1980s they spent the night in Philadelphia before their return to Columbus. The next morning, Dad told me in his study a few months later, he became obsessed with finding Philadelphia State Hospital—Byberry—where he’d spent five long months in the spring and summer of 1945. Dad said that he’d searched maps and finally figured out how to get there, even though suburbanization had rendered the surrounding environs nearly unrecognizable. When they finally reached the site, Dad scratched his head: The only buildings around were abandoned ruins, with apartments, office structures, and malls nearby. It dawned on him that the monolithic structure was in the process of being razed.
Had the events there really happened? Were his recollections of the terror, beatings, and insulin coma treatments real? Or had he imagined the whole thing? He needed proof, but the proof was vanishing before his eyes.
* * *
With the raw material of Dad’s writings now available to me, I felt like an astronomer with a more powerful telescope. One afternoon I scrutinized an undated yellow legal pad from his mass of files. The frenetic writing was a jarring shift from his usually elegant strokes. He described those months at Norwalk County Hospital when he was turning 17, following his abortive attempt at flight to save the world from Fascism.
• At one with the world—‘in, but not of, this world’
• Celestial music of the spheres, all night long, since I slept so little
• In the Hallway of Hell, with micro-and macrocephalics …
• Tried to relive my own infancy and childhood, or the infancy of Vergil, the Roman Poet, especially as to the learning of language. Likewise, to probe the origin of all language, from the baby Vergil’s/Virgil’s first words. Are many of the Latin words echoic in origin, and related to the breathing patterns of a baby? Was I, in some respects, the Vergil of the Aeneid? Is there metempsychosis? Reincarnation?
No mention of refusing to eat the food—which he’d imagined to be poisoned—at the facility, leaving him at a skeletal weight and near death, yet plenty of evidence as to his grandiose thoughts.
Other pads revealed crowded passages, where his notes in the margins were dizzyingly connected by a series of wild arrows in some sort of jumbled code. Although recalling earlier times of mind expansion, he must have been plenty elevated at the time he wrote these lines, as well:
In madness and high enthusiasm, bizarre behavior is explained by the presence in the world of a mysterious power, which may enter the person and make him/her its instrument. In the Old Testament, power called ruah or breath. Thus Sampson’s strength, the insanity of Saul … An age was anticipated when God would “pour out his spirit on all flesh” … Cf. applications to feels, grimaces, gestures, etc., that “recall,” however subtly, some previous gesture in a similar situation: A hand to wipe away a tear now when there is no tear … an apparently warm buttocks when now thinking of or contemplating doing something for which such an act, when done as a youth or child, was thoroughly punished.
Why had it taken me so long? Dad completely anticipated his hospitalizations, which were as inevitable to him as the strappings his stepmother had meted out decades before. Mental illness and hospitalization were a deserved series of tortures, punishments he’d brought on through his lack of faith and his failings of character.
In one essay Dad referred to Goffman. For some of the sociologist’s key books—like Stigma and Asylums—he had spent months living in a mental hospital in order to understand the experience. He coined the term “total institution” to describe the dehumanization inherent in giving over one’s complete identity to a prison, hospital, or death camp. In his typewritten journal, Dad likened the act of forgoing his own clothes and anticipating judgment at Norwalk, Byberry, or Columbus State to awaiting, with his pants down, his early punishments, when he had to choose their mode, timing, and severity. In Dad’s mind, the processes were one and the same.
* * *
When Jeffrey and I were back in Columbus over a holiday in the early nineties, Mom took us to the community residential facility where her older sister, Virginia—Aunt Ginny Ann—was housed. The rooms were beautiful and light, the antithesis of a traditional state institution. Now in her seventies, Ginny Ann had bobbed white hair. We noticed the staff’s devotion to her, even though she hadn’t walked or talked since she was a girl and even though it was clear from her vacant expression that she never would again. Still, her behavioral goals for independent functioning were posted each week for all staff to see. Years later, Jeffrey told me how frightened he was of the facility, with the wheelchairs and grunts and vague smells of antiseptic from the bathrooms. Silent tragedy had become the legacy of not only Dad’s side of the family but Mom’s. Still, the setting gave me renewed hope that the movement toward humanization might continue.
With their love of the desert, Mom and Dad decided to purchase a town house in Palm Springs, a few blocks from the apartment they’d rented each winter. The pool, framed by flowering trees and palms, provided an oasis, with Mt. San Jacinto straight behind, towering over 10,000 feet straight up from the sea-level desert. During my visits Dad and I found time to talk whenever we could. As always, the conversations revealed an alternate reality, more vibrant than most any other I’d experienced.
As he sat by the pool one morning before anyone else had ventured outside, I saw his poignant expression. His eyes tilted upward, a sign that he was seeking some kind of higher meaning. “Throughout my life I’ve longed for some way of understanding my difficult experiences,” he said. “I’ve sought explanation for what was happening to me.”
He took a breath. “There are times that I’d wished I had cancer.”
Temporarily stunned, I listened in silence. “Cancer?” I finally repeated. Was Dad losing his rationality before my eyes?
“Cancer is a real illness,” he calmly proceeded. “But each of my experiences was related to a mental illness. Think of the very term: an illness of the mind.” He noted what it meant to a philosopher to have such a disease: Perhaps everything he’d experienced was fabricated, just a figment of his imagination.
“How I’ve longed to have a real illness,” he summed up.
I knew better than to protest by proclaiming the reality of mental illness or reminding him of the current science regarding the role of genes in relation to bipolar disorder. The implication was clear. If people with mental disorders are convinced that the core problem lies in their own flawed character—and that their symptoms are somehow imagined—little wonder that engagement in treatment is low and self-stigma high. When brutal “care” occurs during one’s formative years, as it had for Dad at Norwalk, any later book learning won’t stand a chance of erasing one’s core identity.
Dad had smoked since he was a teen, having started in earnest during his first episode of manic grandiosity on the streets of Pasadena. As befitting a philosopher, he gravitated toward pipes but still kept up with cigarettes. At the end of the 1980s, a few months before his seventieth birthday, he went cold turkey, in full knowledge of the health risks he’d been incurring. There was little fanfare but he was proud nonetheless. Yet within several months he began to experience problems with his voice. He couldn’t maintain its volume; his words sounded raspy. When we spoke on the phone, I kept asking him to speak up. His doctor thought initially that he had a throat infection but medicines did no good. It was the first sign. Indeed, it’s now understood that the nicotine in cigarette smoke may mask the onset of movement disorders like Parkinson’s.
When he and Mom flew out to Northern California for our first Thanksgiving back in Berkeley in the fall of 1990, I watched him attempt to stand up or change direction. He would suddenly freeze, temporarily immobile. Although deeply proud that I was at Berkeley, he looked frail, having shed many pounds despite no change in diet.
The next spring he received an invitation to speak at the prestigious Gordon Research Conferences, which take place each year in New England. He prepared a paper entitled “The Dialectics of Control,” expansively blending Aristotle, Plato, Hume, Marx and Engels, and R. D. Laing. Mom traveled with him and attended his session. She told me afterward that when he tried to deliver his paper, he couldn’t quite turn the pages of his notes, losing his sequence. Sadly, she noted the vast difference from his captivating lectures so many years before when his career was launching.
Nowadays when we greeted each other, Dad gave me a stiff hug, far different from his lifelong handshake. He traveled to the Bay Area that fall for his fiftieth class reunion at Stanford, for the Class of ’41, but his facial muscles seemed encased in plaster. Classmates and friends commented on his changed demeanor and reduced strength.
The next summer I traveled with Jeffrey, five and a half, to visit his grandparents in Columbus. Dad and I took him to a playground one afternoon at the height of the stultifying humidity, watching his exuberant play on the swings and beams. Dad got an eager expression on his face; I could tell that he wanted to walk out onto the huge wooden climbing structure to join his grandson. Yet the instant I tried to help him up the small stairs to the platform, he became dead weight in my hands. He retreated with baby steps.
“What’s happening, Dad?” I asked softly.
“It’s the ‘fraids,’” he replied, once he’d backed down. “When I was a little boy and something frightened me, I called it getting the ‘fraids.’” Being afraid was now compounded by a growing inability to move. Firmly implanted on the sand, we watched Jeffrey careen through the structure.
Once more I took on the role of advocate. Dad was seeing a senior neurologist at OSU, so I typed out a cogent life history of his episodes, treatments, and hospitalizations to send back to Columbus. No surprise: The evaluation revealed the onset of a Parkinson’s-like illness, replete with slowing, motor freezing, shuffling, balance problems, and weight loss, plus a tremor that looked different from his earlier lithium-induced one. More troublesome was the potential for Lewy-body dementia down the road, a complex variant of Parkinson’s that involves not just motor areas of the brain but regions and pathways underlying cognition. Dad was initially prescribed L-DOPA, just as Ezra had been all those years ago. Yet no miracle cure was at hand, and his decline slowly continued.
The following year I noticed a sign at Berkeley for a conference to be held in a couple of months’ time, encompassing the history of science. Cal and Stanford historians and philosophers would present on epistemology, theory of knowledge, and the progress of scientific thought. Maybe, I hoped, Dad could fly up from Palm Springs in April, stay over at our house, and attend. But could he fly alone? Mom and I decided that, if she could get him as close as possible to the departure gate and notify the flight attendants, he might be able to manage the trip. On the phone, Dad seemed eager.
On arrival day I drove Jeffrey to Oakland airport to meet Grandpa. In those pre-9/11 days we could stand right next to the gate and greet him as soon as he slowly stepped off the jetway. His face was gaunt, and the walk toward baggage claim seemed like a funeral march. At the escalator leading down, he inched his way to the edge of the moving stairs and started to lift his foot but stopped short, as though stricken. The people waiting behind us were clearly annoyed. I begged indulgence and the three of us slowly turned around and headed to the elevator. “I just didn’t know how to coordinate my foot with the moving step,” Dad said on the short ride down. “I’m sorry.”
The next morning in the packed lecture hall, I couldn’t get over how many speakers and attendees knew Dad, as they came over to greet him during breaks. It was impossible to miss their expressions as they saw his changed state. The talks were impressive: How did the first experimental science emerge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? What issues remain in understanding how knowledge advances? Are Kuhn’s ideas of scientific paradigms valid? Dad drifted off periodically but made an effort to follow when he was awake.
At the end of the afternoon we slowly walked to the other side of campus for the reception. Dad was thrilled but slightly confused. On the patio of the faculty club, drinking gin and tonics with him in the incomparable spring twilight, I understood that he had attended his last academic conference.
* * *
Nighttime in Palm Springs a year later, the sky was black velvet. Illuminated from within, the swimming pool was utterly still. Dad had deteriorated further. He could barely keep his balance when he stood up. Reading philosophy was now a thing of the past. Still intact, however, was his ability to contemplate and discuss the past.
It had been a good day. Grandpa relished the time with Jeffrey, whose happy but volatile temperament reminded him of himself as a boy. “How I wish I could go barefoot again,” he said wistfully. In spare moments, he recalled his boyhood adventures: taking the streetcar to downtown Los Angeles, serving as squad captain for his junior-high sports teams, arguing with his brothers about economic strategies during the Depression.
After 9:00, with Jeffrey fast asleep following dinner on the patio, father and son headed outside, as I eyed carefully the stone path and stairs. The stars pressed down from above. We paused to look toward the massive mountains to the west.
“I’ve been contemplating,” Dad finally said, holding on to the back of a chair for balance. I strained to make out his faint words. “What a marvelous life I’ve had. Imagine the people I’ve met, the students I’ve taught, the ideas I’ve shared. Some experiences were terrifying, especially the times in mental hospitals. But every experience was revealing.”
I marveled at his stance. Many of his experiences were of the sort that I’d tortured myself for years to fend off.
His voice gathered steam. “In fact, I wouldn’t trade any experience I’ve ever had. Not a one!” I was silent. “What a rich life I’ve had!”
When considering his plight I mainly felt agitation, regret, and anger, especially over the ignorant yet overly self-assured profession that supposedly treated him. How might I ever gain even a fraction of Dad’s philosophical attitude, his sense of wonder?
We pondered the soft blue-green of the pool for a few more moments before it was time to return. I guided him by the arm in the dark as we inched our way to the front door of the townhouse.