cheryl
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Staff member
Football, My Dad’s Dementia, and Me - GQ
Doctors said we could blame my father’s football career for his vanishing memory. So Dad and I decided to take a road trip down south to revisit the schools that made him.
My father asks me to double-check the directions before we get onto the interstate. I tell him that, yeah, he's going the right way—we need to stay on Hillsboro Road and head toward I-40. "Hillsbur-uh," as he says, is a road he has driven thousands of times in his 40 years of living in Nashville. He's 66 now, but his typically keen sense of direction is just one more casualty of his recent dementia diagnosis.
A few months earlier, I was sitting in the same car with Mom when she first told me something was going on with Dad's memory. She was candid but controlled, as if she'd practiced how she was going to break the news to her children. "I never anticipated this happening," she said. We sat in my parents' driveway for a long time, only getting out when we remembered that there were some groceries melting in the trunk.
Once his dementia diagnosis was confirmed, doctors suggested that, if we wanted to, we could blame a lifetime of football for Dad's condition. And I do.
Doctors said we could blame my father’s football career for his vanishing memory. So Dad and I decided to take a road trip down south to revisit the schools that made him.
My father asks me to double-check the directions before we get onto the interstate. I tell him that, yeah, he's going the right way—we need to stay on Hillsboro Road and head toward I-40. "Hillsbur-uh," as he says, is a road he has driven thousands of times in his 40 years of living in Nashville. He's 66 now, but his typically keen sense of direction is just one more casualty of his recent dementia diagnosis.
A few months earlier, I was sitting in the same car with Mom when she first told me something was going on with Dad's memory. She was candid but controlled, as if she'd practiced how she was going to break the news to her children. "I never anticipated this happening," she said. We sat in my parents' driveway for a long time, only getting out when we remembered that there were some groceries melting in the trunk.
Once his dementia diagnosis was confirmed, doctors suggested that, if we wanted to, we could blame a lifetime of football for Dad's condition. And I do.