My biker father rode sixty miles to pick up my mother last week. She has been dead since 2009.
I want to tell you about that day the way it actually happened, because for seventeen years I told a different version of my father’s story, and I owe it to him now to tell this one instead.
Dad is seventy-nine. He was diagnosed with dementia two years ago, on a Tuesday in March, in a small office with fluorescent lights and a box of tissues nobody in our family had the nerve to reach for until we were back in the parking lot. We took his license the following week. We took his keys not long after that, my sister Karen holding them in her fist the whole drive home like they might come alive and fly back to him. And I pulled the battery out of his Harley myself, on a Saturday morning while he was at his doctor’s appointment, kneeling in his garage with my hands shaking more than I wanted to admit, disconnecting the last machine my father still trusted more than he trusted most people.
He put in a new one. I found the receipt later, folded into quarters and tucked behind a coffee can full of loose screws on his workbench. He’d walked two miles to the auto parts store on Route 9, the one with the gravel lot that floods every spring, and paid cash. Cash, at seventy-nine years old, with a disease that was supposed to be stealing his ability to plan more than a few minutes ahead. He’d planned a two-mile walk and a battery purchase and somehow kept the whole thing quiet from a family that was watching him like a house about to catch fire.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
TAP ” READ MORE ” 👇
