Integrated Circuits.

The stroke that started Dad’s steep decline happened the weekend before he died. My brother Michael called, Dad was in the hospital, he was in bad shape, couldn’t use the right side of his body and he was struggling to communicate sentences longer than a word or two. I’ve forgotten what day that was, I guess the next day? (exactitude is for historians and that’s not what I’m doing here) but Chan and I left very early and drove all day to Columbus, where Dad was by then in a “skilled nursing facility.”

By now the “old sick person in a bed with a semi-circle of their kids facing them in chairs of widely varying levels of comfort for hours” routine is familiar. My siblings were already there. We chatted, Dad participating mostly by facial expressions. When Chan and I walked in, he made a face like “do you believe this shit?” The expression was so like him that I felt certain he knew me and that he was glad to see me. Of course, I don’t know for sure.

My siblings and I reminisced. After Dad began to lose his memory, it was easier, and I think also more enjoyable for him, to talk about the past. He had a firmer grasp on his long-term memories. It must have been a respite from the anxiety I think he felt in conversations about the present and recent past. Mike said he remembered him coming home from work one night in the late 1960s when he worked for P.R. Mallory, holding up an integrated circuit (which at the time probably didn’t register as any different from any of the other electronic doodads he was always making stuff with in the basement), and saying to us, “This is going to change the world.” Dad looked up, and Mike said, “Do you remember that, Dad?” and Dad’s personality seemed to suddenly inhabit his face, lit up like it had made a critical connection to his brain, and he was fully himself for a second or two. You could see it in his eyes.