Learning to Love My Father as His Mind Unraveled

When I was around 10 years old, my father started hiding bananas in our house.

We found them in the dishwasher, in the junk drawer, behind the potted plants. I once came upon an entire bunch hanging from the shower head. Too often, he hid them so well — tucked beneath a pile of blankets in a rarely opened closet, say — that we found them only when they started to smell. When confronted, Dad denied it, but we knew it was him.

On their own, the bananas might have been amusing. Like a surrealist art project. But they were part of a more troubling pattern.

He had started acting strange in other ways, too: making jokes that no one could understand and forgetting things, like where he’d parked or the name of the owner of the diner where he’d been a regular for years.

A wood sculptor, he had always been obsessive, almost rabid, about his work. He was up at 5 or 6 every morning and spent every moment he could in his studio, pausing only to eat, which was done standing up over the kitchen sink. But now it was as if someone had yanked out his batteries.

He took to spending large parts of each day sitting in his car in the driveway, poring over the newspaper, circling seemingly random words and scribbling notes that said things like “Welcome to the information age” and “There’s only one way to find out!” When we asked him what he was doing, he brushed us off.

My mother took him to the doctor. They ran some tests and said he was fine, but he was not fine. He was agitated all the time. Both listless and restless. He would wander from room to room as though he was looking for something. Or else he’d sit and stare blankly at some point in the middle distance, disappearing into himself for whole afternoons.