Watching a parent’s mind slip away from dementia is difficult in any circumstance. It’s even harder when your father is a lifelong lawyer who insists he has one final case to win.
The earliest signs of my father’s cognitive slip dovetailed with his retirement. He’d somehow managed to keep it together for his clients until his very last day practicing personal injury law, and thankfully, none of them suffered because of his condition. When the day came for my mom and I to help Dad shutter his office on Congress Street in Boston, crating and cataloging his case files, we were both emotional. Not just because of the years of sweat equity that this mountain of paperwork represented, but also because of the faint unease we were feeling over Dad’s occasional loss of words.