A living memory of ‘Daddy Dwayne’

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Editor’s note: Dwayne Walls Jr., a resident of Pittsboro, tragically lost his father in 2008. Years before that, Dwayne Walls Sr. worked with News + Record Publisher Bill Horner III as a writing coach in the newsroom of The Sanford Herald. Walls Jr. penned this remembrance of his dad in observance of Father’s Day, which is Sunday.

PITTSBORO — As I recall, my father began losing his mind in early 2001. I say “recall” because it was a long time ago. He manifested what doctors soon diagnosed as early stage Alzheimer’s disease.

I spent some time with him that spring in Charleston, S.C., where he lived with his second wife, Judy, who happened to have the same first name as my mother. When my father jokingly said that her last name really ought to be “Two,” she laughed as long and as loud as he and I did. She was a sweet woman, a divorcee as my father had been, but with a decidedly domestic streak. She was fabulous in the kitchen. Together, they lived well in a high-rise apartment overlooking Charleston’s Lower Peninsula, and I rented another apartment they owned in the building while I worked as a stagehand for the Spoleto Festival USA. We had morning coffee together on their balcony to start the day.

There we sat, the three of us, lounging in deck chairs, gazing through the haze at boats in the harbor, ritualistically helping my father do the daily crossword puzzle as morning calisthenics for his brain. Dad was a retired writer, a journalist by trade, and a man in the habit of reading the daily newspaper front to back, including puzzles. Keeping the routine proved good for him. It also helped us gauge his mental capacities. We fed him hints to the printed clues and pointers to the obvious answers then coached him on spelling as he filled in the blanks. When he solved tough ones on his own we celebrated together. His penmanship was shaky, but his spirits were good, and his behavior was only mildly affected though decidedly odd.

For example, he peered keenly onto the baking hot asphalt of the parking lot, hunting for loose change to put in his pocket. He made kissy faces at any passing small child, driving nervous mothers to take their children by the arm and pull them away. He said off-the-wall things out of the blue; non-sequiturs tumbled out of him. He began to mumble. He became unresponsive to questions. He also grew more and more oblivious to his obvious impairment. He thought he was fine.

But the state of South Carolina and the FAA had been notified of his condition. After his diagnosis he dutifully tendered both his pilot’s license for the small airplane he had owned as well as his driver’s license. Judy drove him to and from his doctors’ offices.

There is no accuracy in predicting the pace of Alzheimer’s disease. My understanding is that the time frame of every case is unique to the individual it ravages. Symptoms often appear out of order. Several years ago, my neighbor was diagnosed with it and six months later he was dead. My father, or at least the body which belonged to my father, lived a shadow existence for years.

By the June of 2001 his mind was going and he knew it. He and Judy made arrangements for him to soon go into a VA facility. There was nothing I could do to help him, and we three agreed my going back to New York City was best choice I could make. Saturday Night Live’s new season would premier in either late September or early October, and as one of the many production carpenters for that show, I needed to be in New York City before my slot on the crew went to someone else. The SNL shop foreman was old-fashioned about his hiring. He made it plain for all to know that phone calls were not enough. I would have to stand in front of him and commit to all 22 shows before he would hire me back.

Before I took the train to New York, my father and I had a sit-down talk. I firmly believe he knew his condition was not only deteriorating, but deteriorating at an ever-accelerating rate. There was urgency in his voice, an urgency born of anxiety; not fear of dying, per se, but fear of the unknown.

“Don’t forget about me, son.” He asked softly in the end, when we were both empty of words.

“No, Dad, I won’t forget about you,” I said. “It’s you who will forget about me.”

And we laughed out loud. That was the last good laugh we had together as father and son, the last joke we shared. I need to remember him smiling and laughing and looking at me with a look that says, “I get it.”

I boarded the Amtrak from Charleston to New York on the afternoon of July the 4th. Hours later, after sunset, I watched fireworks large and small erupt from all the big cities and little towns we rolled through on the way back to NYC. It was unforgettable. It is also impossible for me to not imagine myself as a character from daddy Dwayne’s first book. The book’s title comes from the nickname of the very same northbound train I rode that 4th of July, a train known as “The Chickenbone Special.” His book of the same name is about poor country folks taking the train north to find jobs.

I called my foreman the next day. By Monday morning I was hard at work building scenery for soap operas. When the soaps were finished I took a temporary gig erecting one of the several stages used for fashion week at the World Trade Center. I was working there on September 11th.

It was my third day on the job. I somehow survived.

After being evacuated by boat to New Jersey, I found a payphone and called my father to let him know I had not been killed. It took what felt like a half an hour for him to understand how close a call I had. I had to explain to him over and over how SNL was in reruns, and how I had been freelancing at the World Trade Center. After the umpteenth time explaining it he had a breakthrough.

“Oh, nooooo,” he let out with a great groan. For a split second he sounded like he was falling. I spoke into the heavy plastic payphone again.

“Dad! Dad I’m OK. I’m OK, Dad,” which was technically true; physically, I was in one piece. I heard him mumble something but I kept talking.

“I got evacuated to New Jersey. I’m not dead. I’m just in New Jersey.”

“My God!” he roared. “The biggest story of my life and I can’t cover it!”

The attack was traumatizing enough, but to realize I was speaking to a man with a profoundly impaired world view was crushing. It hurt that, after this extraordinary event, an event which nearly caused my own extinction, all he could do was think like the reporter he had been all his life. All he could talk about was the big story and how to write it. I was still a refugee in New Jersey, watching Manhattan burn from the lobby of a Deutsche Bank. I was still covered in dust.

“Son, I want you to promise me right this minute you’ll write it down.”

“Sure Dad.” What else could I say? “Of course I will. Of course I’ll write it down.”

“I’m serious, son.” He paused. “It’s important. Write it.”

So I wrote it down for him. And on the one year anniversary of the attack, he arraigned to have a heavily edited version of my eye-witness account published in his hometown newspaper. I went to visit Dad and Judy and the three of us celebrated my becoming a published writer together.

But there are no pretty deaths from Alzheimer’s disease. For example, how can a person go to the toilet, unroll every square of white paper, and then wipe with an empty cardboard tube without knowing something is wrong? Taking care of him nearly killed Judy.

My father had played football in college. He was bigger and faster than Judy was. One day, not long after Elizabeth and I were married in September of 2004, my father announced to Judy that he was “going to North Carolina!” He stripped off his clothes in the middle of the room then tried to open the locked door to the balcony. She called 911, and the EMTs wrestled him onto a gurney for the trip to a VA facility in Columbia. I flew down from New York, and it was in that facility in Columbia where I saw my father alive for the last time.

His appearance was shocking.

I did not realize Alzheimer’s disease attacks the entire brain. I thought it only destroyed the memory, but his whole body was wasting away. He had just gotten over a case of pneumonia caused by his own spittle dripping into his lungs. The staff said he liked to sip Coca-Cola and nibble M&Ms, but he had no appetite for other, more substantial food. His eyes were like flat black buttons, like a set of bug’s eyes that know not but that the world is either dark or bright.

After all the years and all the miles, I looked into my fathers’ eyes and knew the man I loved simply was not there anymore. He could not say my name, and he kept mumbling, saying over and over that he had been robbed. He did not know who Judy was, either. I swore I would never visit him again. He lived on, mute and mindless, until 2008.

My wife Elizabeth and I were walking home from dinner out in our Brooklyn neighborhood when I got the call. If I think back to that evening, I think of snow falling, muffling all the sounds and the streetlights lighting up huge flakes of snow settling on the brownstone stoops. I looked at the screen on my flip phone and saw the call was from Judy, and I knew my father was dead.

But there was no snow. He died in September. I remember it with snow as some sort of mental defense mechanism. I need to think of his death as something peaceful and quiet like snow falling at night in Brooklyn because his death was so brutal.

The truth is that my father had accidentally bunked down for the night in the wrong bed at the VA facility. When the assigned owner of the bed discovered my father there, he beat my father unconscious. Dad never recovered, and ultimately died from those injuries.

Thinking back, there is a memory that sticks out like a warning sign, or maybe it sticks out only now, since at the time it made little impact on me. Many years earlier, daddy Dwayne and I had travelled to see his mother who was in a nursing home. She was almost 90 and suffering from a series of debilitating mini-strokes which left her unable to remember anything at all. Over and over, every 10 minutes or so, she asked us who we were. My father clenched his hands and his jaws with rage at the unknowing suffering in her eyes. He truly was furious, not at the doctors, but at his own impotent inability to remedy her suffering.

“If that ever happens to me, I’m flying out to sea!” he had bellowed out loud to the windshield as we drove away from the nursing home.

I am glad he chose not to end his life, because we had a chance to say good-bye. But I wonder if he knew then that his fate would be as hers. Sometimes I wonder if their dementia is my inheritance, too. But if dementia is what I have to look forward to, then my father armed me for it from an early age.

One winter’s day when I was a boy the two of us collected firewood. He asked me to help, even though my arms were not as thick as the cut limbs I added to our stack in the wheelbarrow. I think he only wanted some time in the quiet of the woods. I, too, still have need for that solitude, for the restoration of the senses only a walk in the woods may give.

“Guard, guard your mind, my son,” he said repeatedly as we bent to our shared task. “Guard your mind from everyone.”

The phrase has stuck with me over many years. In a happy accident, I discovered quite recently that it is a line from the Bible Book of Ecclesiastes, the book which reminds us that there is a season set for everything, a time and purpose for every experience under heaven.

The book goes on to declare that although the fool and the wise man both find the grave, “Wisdom is superior to folly, as light is superior to darkness; a wise man has his eyes in his head, whereas a fool walks in darkness.”

My father taught me how to walk in the light.

About the author: Dwayne Walls Jr. was born in Charlotte in 1963 to a journalist and a teacher. When he was 8, his family moved from Charlotte to rural Chatham County. Beginning in 1981, Walls worked in regional theatres throughout the Southeast, including five seasons with The Lost Colony. In 1997 he moved to New York to build sets and props for television, film, and theatre, most notably for NBC’s Saturday Night Live from 1998 until 2010. Walls is a member of the International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) local One. In 2010, he and his wife, Elizabeth, moved back to North Carolina to be closer to family.