A prize- winning author looks at dementia

The Theft of Memory by Jonathan Kozol;  Crown Publishers, New York, 2015, 302pp

By David Strom

David Strom
David Strom

SAN DIEGO–My oldest sister died at the age of ninety-three. She couldn’t recognize or communicate with her children or her two living brothers. Gertie, my sister, grew up in a home where singing and music were a joyful part of our family life. On Friday nights we sang Zimirot and other Hebrew songs along with popular American songs of the day. In Gertie’s last days when I visited her in the assisted living center, I decided I would sing many of the prayers from the siddur as our conversations grew awkward because of her dementia. Within seconds she was singing them as well. We had made a connection. She didn’t seem to recognize me, nor could she talk with me, but she certainly could sing with me.

Like millions of others who care for an aging loved one, Jonathan Kozol learned about the debilitating effects of dementia as he watched his father lose his memory one day at a time. Kozol, a National Book Award winner, has been a national critic of education in the United States.  He focused on the deplorable and preventable conditions of poverty in society and our nation’s inner city schools. From his first book Death At An Early Age to his latest work The Theft of Memory, I have followed his career. As a professor, I often used one of Kozol’s books as one of the assigned readings in the course.

Dr. Harry Kozol, Jonathan’s father, was a famous neurologist and psychiatrist who taught at one of Harvard’s leading hospitals. Over the many years of his practice his patients included the playwright Eugene O’Neill with whom he became a very close friend, as well as Patricia (Patty) Hearst, and the Boston Strangler, Albert H. DeSalvo. Harry Kozol was born in 1906. And in his eighties, he diagnosed himself with having dementia and had a colleague confirm that diagnosis two years later. From age eighty-eight until the age of one hundred two Dr. Kozol lived reasonably well with this disease. He died in 2008.

Jonathan had to take on a new role of protecting his father when he was no longer able to care for himself. He placed his father in a nursing home where Jonathan observed that he had to be alert to what was going on at the facility. He learned doctors only glanced in on patients, and issued orders with no formal examination. Often orders were not followed, wrong medicine given and little attention was devoted to those residing in the facility. He recognized that the most important people in this facility were the nurses who saw the patients daily, those that fed them, read to them and were gentle and kind to them.

When Jonathan visited his father he often brought the family dog with him. Harry Kozol responded positively to the dog with both seeming to enjoy each other’s company. Over the years in the nursing home, Jonathan’s dad would periodically ask, “if he could go home?” The answer given was usually no. But eventually it changed to yes as the money for the facility was draining the Kozol budget.

Over the years his father was a resident at the nursing home, Jonathan made friends with some of the care givers, especially those that were loving, kind, gentle and resourceful. They would become part of the team that would look after his father at home. One of the caregivers was an African-American woman who Jonathan discovered was the mother of one of a student who he had in his class when he taught in the Boston public schools some thirty years before.

The “home team” of helpers helped Harry Kozol to navigate through “a system of heartbreaking and bureaucratized medical impersonality….” At 102, Dr. Harry Kozol died peacefully.

Jonathan now had time to read the many papers and files that his father gave him. Reading, writing and reflecting on his father’s life and his own interactions with him through the years gave him time to understand his parents and his relation to them.

I don’t believe this is book is a candidate for a National Book Award but is worth reading for all of us who have or have had aging parents whose memories are being stolen from them by dementia, which cannot take away our precious memories of them.

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Strom is professor emeritus of education at San Diego State University.  He may be contacted via david.strom@sdjewishworld.com