Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe "He just got more and more into his own little world." Thus Cathryn Smith describes her father's slow walk into the cluttered and perilous landscape of Alzheimer's disease. Advertisement In "The Glory Walk," she collects conversations, poetry, letters and even dreams to shape an uncommonly appealing memoir of this man's life. A poet herself, Smith infuses what might be an unrelenting dark "walk" with a kind of joyful music and light. Bob Smith was an ordinary enough man with a loving wife and three daughters, one of whom "turned out really fine," he would joke. He was a tall man, his daughter says, "like growing up with the Empire State building, except no elevator or gift shop." He loved to sail boats, taking the whole family along, and grow gorgeous flowers from seed, then sit right down on the earth among them. Advertisement The courtship of Bob and Judy Smith evokes a period of glamour, of breezing around New York drinking martinis and rum punches. Marriage means the suburbs and children but somehow never settling down to dullness and predictable routine. Bob Smith is the opposite of drab -- a father who wears Mickey Mouse ties and cooks runny poached eggs for his girls when mother is away, who tells amazing stories and trims the Christmas tree without a ladder, who loves to talk and dance and play the piano and manages to get his children to church on time, even when he is painting a room. How unbelievable when he begins to forget, not just names or dates, but how to bend his body to fit into a car. He becomes deaf and quiet or angry and stubborn. With his great strength, he breaks a fellow patient's arm in a care facility. Smith does not organize her memoir chronologically. In highly successful sections titled Disease-Man, she gets into his increasingly inaccessible head, repeating phrases as he does, re-creating those non-sequiturs and random speech patterns of his illness. We do not learn the dates of her father's birth or exact details of his youth and career. That is all unimportant, as her purpose is not biography. She gets every necessary thing exactly right, such as the "litter-boxy" smell of his room or the way he became a "man-child in a room full of adults." Advertisement Almost too poignant to bear is the author's brief description of the last image of her dad. Needing professional care but always wanting to go home, he had to be restrained at leave-takings, strapped into a blue plastic chair. With both tough and tender courage, Cathryn Smith tilts her vision slightly in order to see "a little boy playing spaceman ... waving to the cheering crowd as he prepares to blast off." Writing about one's father has become a tiny subset of literary genre. Phillip Roth several years ago and Sherwin Nuland and Sue Miller more recently have produced touching books. I would place "Glory Walk" in their company, even at the head of the line. Smith's poetic precision and creative use of language work to present a small miracle -- her father comes alive and is made known to strangers. I grieved honestly for this family's loss, even though there is not a whiff of asking for condolence. Bob Smith died on March 20, 1991, at 8:10 a.m. with a kind nurse holding his hand, telling him to hold on, his wife was coming. It happened that I read this work in a sunny garden, sitting about 20 feet from the room where my own father died. I stayed there a long time, feeling grateful for ways to re-connect. Advertisement Alfred, Lord Tennyson, wrote "Old men must die; or the world would grow moldy, would only breed the past again." I guess that is so, and he is no doubt wiser than I. It is certain that through our youth the world stays green and lush. Yet giving up the old often brings up an ache similar to seeing a fine, ancient tree cut down. The life of a vibrant man, even aged, even diseased, is a great force and presence and cannot easily be replaced with something tenuous and unformed. Once gone, he can only be held in memory and shared in words. "Glory Walk" is a gift that must be shared. ("The Glory Walk: A Memoir" by Cathryn E. Smith, VanderWyk & Burnham, 191 pages, $22.95)
