book, perhaps the most personal story of his career. it tells the story of his father, a nationally-known physician who specialized in brain disorders, be who showed an -- and who showed an astonishing ability at the onset of his own alzheimer's disease to explain the causes of his sickness and hen to narrate step by step his slow descent into dementia. less about the loss of memory than the effort to create a testament to to forgiveness and to love. ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming jonathan kozol to the free library of philadelphia. [applause] >> thanks very much, janet. i'm honored to be here and very grateful for all the work you've done for the library. and thanks also to andy cahan, laura -- [inaudible] i hope i'm pronouncing that right -- and all the other good folks at this very special library. one of the real cultural treasures of our nation. i say that coming from boston. we have a good library too. [laughter] and thanks to even and every -- to each and every one of you for being here tonight. as janet told you -- oh, i wanted to thank one other person. i just received a card that somebody in the audience named nancy berman gable? yes, whose mother was my mother's roommate at wheaton college in massachusetts in the class of 1925, that's right. 1925. >> [inaudible] we also had dinner several times with your mother and father in newton -- >> [inaudible] probably. >> before you were born, no -- [inaudible] >> oh, i see. [laughter] anyway, i'm delighted you're here. as janet told you, i've spent almost my entire adult life working with children, especially the little ones in the early years of their life's add church but -- adventure. but meanwhile, starting in the early 1990s and largely unknown to my readers, i was forced to contemplate the lost years of our lives as my parents became elderly, and my father started to become confused by sudden lapses in his memory. one evening in 1992 when he was 86 years old, as he was born in 1906, in 1992 he sat me down. he was a neurologist, i should say. also a psychiatrist who'd been trained at harvard and johns hopkins and had practiced at the well-known mga, massachusetts general hospital, and in the boston area for nearly 60 years. sat me down one evening in a room in his apartment, closed the door so my mother couldn't hear. he didn't want her to know about this yet, and he confided in me that he'd been having a series of attacks, which he called am domestic spells -- amnestic spells and interrupted consciousness. and drawing upon the language of neurology and his decades of clinical experience, he explained to me in neurological language that he was describing in himself the early indications of alzheimer's. he diagnosed himself. two years later the diagnosis was confirmed by one of his younger colleagues who'd been one of his students, and two years after that he was in a nursing home. he lived in all for 12 more years, and during those years as surprising as this may appear to some people, we became closer to each other than we'd ever been before. a lot of people are surprised by that, but some of you maybe will understand what i mean. for one thing, i was with him more than any time since i was a young boy. earlier in my life before he became ill i was away a lot because i had to travel a great deal visiting schools in different cities. philadelphia, for example. but once he became ill, i set aside entire months in order to be close at hand and in order to see him. and this proved to be extremely important. in order to see him with sufficient frequency so that the bond between us remained strong and so that there would be some degree of continuity between our conversations. then, too, my father had been a charming and old-fashioned man. actually, in pennsylvania a couple years ago at a university here -- i won't name which one -- i met a woman who'd been one of his patients. and when she was a college student and he -- she still remembered just how pleasant it was to be with him. he was charming. he always reveled in good conversations and amusing rep party. and that delight in conversation never totally abandoned him. even when a word was missing or sentence uncompleted, he still retained a seasons of the rhythm -- a sense of the rhythm, the to to and fro of a conversation. and he still could come back with very quick wit. not always, but when it mattered to him. i used to bring my dog with me a lot to visit him. he was a golden retriever named persnickety -- [laughter] and he'd known her since she was a puppy, and he still recognized her because if i came in -- he spent most of his early evenings in the living room of the nursing home. it was a nice living room, and he'd be sitting there in a leather armchair. and when you entered the nursing home, you had to go around a corner in order to get to the living room. my dog, i'd let her off the leash, and she'd go racing ahead of me and right up to my father. she'd put her paws up on my father's knees so she could slobber him with kisses, and he'd look at her and say, is jonathan here? anyway, once the nurse who loved my dog, lucinda was her name, she's petting my dog, and she looked up at my father and said this one is an angel. i think she was, you know? the sweetest dog on earth. she said, this one an angel. my father didn't miss a beat: i'm not sure i'd go that far, he said. [laughter] she, and she was great. she kept up the dialogue. she always did this. she said, what is she, doctor, if she's not an angel? he said, practicing to be an angel. wow. that was, you know, third year into dementia. amazingly to me, he also kept on speaking of his neurological condition as if he still was thinking of himself somehow from the vantage point of a physician. that was like the imprint of his years of training, very classical training in neurology at harvard in the 19 -- and and late after harvard when he did his residency at the mgh. epilepsy and brain damage, he was part of a team that did the first trial testing of a drug called dilantin which is now standard, i believe, for some kinds of seizures. so it's interesting, while he knew he was the patient, he also seemed to look upon it as, you know, as if he were the physician at the same time. and probably for this reason even as pieces of his memory were increasingly failing him, he never seemed to fall into pathos or self-pity. instead, he seemed to have an interesting and persistent sense of clinical curiosity about his own bewilderments. again, as if he were the doctor he had been, fascinated as he always was by the workings of the mind. also, of course, i'd known him for so long that even when he said something that seemed to make no sense -- and to most people would make no sense at all -- i could often pick, i could often pick up on a single word of praise that i knew had been important to him long, long before. and i found if if i repeated it with emphasis or asked exactly the right question, it would, it would frequently sort of unleash a release i probably should say, a more standard and more stirring portion of that memory. i'll give you one example i was thinking of this as i was driving over here. at one point -- and, again, this was well into, you know, probably the late, well into the middle stages of dementia, he started to talk one evening. i tended to go there in the early evening when he was most serene and when he had the living room to himself usually. and one night he started talking. it was like he had this in his mind before i got there. he said, i saw a huge man, huge fat man -- i'm quoting him -- sitting in a car. and he kept saying this in different ways. for most people that would seem to be some kind of delusion, but i knew right away what he was talking about, because he told me once he was going back almost a hundred years at that point to when he was 6 years old, and i knew the story when he was 6 years old to. his family was one of the very few jewish families in an irish neighborhood of boston called south boston. and a priest in the neighborhood really loved his mother. he always said he loved his mother's cooking, and he always showed up on friday nights. they'd have a glass of schnapps with my grandpa first. and he sort of protected them as a family. and once when my father was 6 years old, there was a big parade going through boston, and he took my father on his shoulders so that my father could see. and there was, indeed, a very large man, enormous man sitting in an open op car driving -- an open car driving along slowly, waving to people. and he had told me this once. he'd asked the priest who it was, and the priest had said the man you're looking at is the president of the united states. that's william howard taft. he was running for re-election. it was in 1912. i had, if my memory's right, that's the year that teddy roosevelt split the ticket and wilson ended up being elected, woodrow wilson, which probably was fortunate. for several years he kept on writing notes and memos to me. usually brief, some of which were sort of jagged and didn't make too much sense, but some of which were very clear and eloquent, i thought. dear jonathan, my son, one of them began, no longer than an hour ago i received some information that might improve my situation. but much has taken place beyond my capability to heal. please provide whatever information on this matter you may have, remember age and circumstance. that was quite moving. remember age and circumstance. another note even briefer, he'd heard a nurse inadvertently told him i was ill, so i couldn't visit for a week, and he said -- he said, dear jonathan: someone that we know has not been feeling well. i hope he will be better in the soon. in the soon. faith matters. we will keep in close dispatch. your one father, daddy. he also wrote a rather daring letter to a nurse. this was lucinda, the same one who loved my dog. my father loved lucinda. my father had a terrific crush on her. and she's one of the people that had these really live wire conversations with my dad. i'll come back to this again. she never talked to him in that, you know that sing-song voice that too many people use in nursing homes as though they're talking to an infant in a nursery? how are we feeling today, harry, you know? she talked real talk to my father. she said i don't want to bore a man who's known so many interesting people. besides, she said, i don't want to bore myself. [laughter] and he took, he had a real crush on her. one day he saw her, one day he saw her at the end of a corridor talking for a while with a much younger and very handsome man, and he wrote her this note which he showed me later. dear lucinda: i hope your new friend enjoys his opportunity. [laughter] please report to me on other gentlemen with whom you pend your time. [laughter] -- you spend your time. he asked me lots of questions, too, and most importantly, six years after he'd gone to the nursing home he began to ask me whether it was time yet to go home. i'm sure this is familiar to some of you. and he kept asking this in different ways. typically, he'd ask it when he saw me getting up at the end of an evening, putting on my coat if it was winter, to leave. and, you know, he'd look up at me so wistfully, and he'd say are we going home now? can you take me with you? and it went on far long time. at one -- and he, obviously, was thinking strategically, because once he somehow got the idea that the nursing home was a prison, and they were keeping him there, and they wouldn't let him leave. so one night he said to me, whispered to me, he said here's what we're gonna do -- [laughter] i'll go out towards the door, and if anyone stops me, i'll say my son is coming for me. and as soon as i'm outside, we'll get into your car and leave. that was almost late dementia when he said that. he'd been there almost six years. and, you know, and i start thinking about it. you know, should i take him home? could my mother handle it? because my mother was at home with helpers. there's a whole lot in the book about my mom, a lot of it very, very funny because she had, she not only had a terrific memory, she was clear right to the end. but she became increasingly irreverent as she got older and older, and she'd say things that were quite shocking, you know? the only delusion, sort of fantasy she developed was that at some point she started saying -- because i wasn't married -- she started saying, in front of one of her attendants she'd say hillary clinton wants to marry you. [laughter] and one of the attendants, who y funny, sylvia, said well, mrs. kozol, she already has a husband of her own. my mother said, yeah, but he isn't treating her right. [laughter] she wants jonathan. [laughter] i said, why me, i said. [laughter] that was a little tougher than i could handle. anyway, when he started asking if he could go home, i sort of thought about it a lot, and some of my, you know, friends said to me, jonathan, he doesn't know what he's saying. your father's a demented man. essentially, you know, ignore that. well, i mean, he was in the middle stages of dementia, but i thought he still knew what he was saying. and i thought to myself, this is something that my father truly wants. i could hear it in his voice, i could see it in his eyes. so i decided i should take him at his word, and finally one night when he looked up at me and asked again, are we going home now, i said to him, yes, daddy, this time we really are. and i took him home to live the rest of his life beside my mother. and he was so happy to be home. he'd been quite turbulent when he went into the nursing home. it wasn't safe for my mom at that point, but now he was quite serene and calm, and they'd have lunch together almost every day. not much conversation, obviously, but something wonderful about that. he got to spend the afternoons sitting at this grand old leather-covered desk which had been his office desk for more than 50 years. mom had it moved to the participant when he closed his -- apartment when he closed his office. and he kept on writing memos to himself. they made no sense at all by the point, but he had a confident and prideful look while sitting there. i still remember that. and i must say the attendants never called him harry, they called him doctor. always. around that time and starting, in fact, a bit earlier while he was still in the nursing home, i began looking new dozens of large cardboard cartons that he'd sent to my home many years before which held some truly extraordinary documents; case studies, correspondence with his peers and patients, tapes and transcripts and the like which opened up intensely detailed stories from his early and mid career. including several highly complicated and high-profile cases in which he was involved, some of which now have place in history. perhaps the case that touched my father most proto foundly was that of -- profoundly was that of our nation's greatest play wright, the nobel laureate eugene o'neill. do you remember o'neill? i ask college kids, and they -- [laughter] no, they shake their heads. they don't even remember who arthur miller was. it's extraordinary. but o'neill suffered from a tremor that resembled parkinsonism but was not the same. a tremor that prevented him from writing and also periodic bouts of deep depression. and my father, i don't know if i've said this yet, he was trained both in psychiatry and neurology, and he was widely admired in boston for his expertise in being able to untangle the intermingled causes and symptoms of both physiological and purely psychiatric illness. so he was asked by one of kneel's closest friends -- o'neill's closest friends to come to new york to examine him, and o'neill took an instant liking to him. this happened a hot, and i don't know, something -- in this happened a lot, and i don't know, something just about the way my father examed him -- examined him, very thoroughly. psychiatrist or not, he always gave his patients medical exams, real medical exams with a stethoscope, you know? and the little knee hammer, you know? [laughter] all that. he took a liking to his personality. so he moved to boston and took an apartment directly across the street from my dad's office so that he could see him almost every day for the remainder of husband life. for the remainder of his life. and when he sometimes felt especially depressed at night, that would happen sometimes rather late at night, his wife would call my father at home, and he wouldn't ask any questions. he'd drive back into the city and maybe spend only 30 minutes chatting with o'neill at his bedside and joking with him. my father could always make his patients smile. and just long enough so that o'neill would have a peaceful sleep that night. the two of them became close friends, and to kneel confided in him for hours and hours the agony he underwent in the initial stages of creating a new play. it was very vivid. i have hundreds of pages quoted from him, but i remember the phrase he spoke of a gnawing sense of guilt as imprisoning what was in me. it was entrapped within me and struggling to come out. the only peace he ever had, he said, was in completing a new play. oh, then he added to that, he said, or else drinking. [laughter] he said couldn't do both. there are o'neill had long been distanced from the his only daughter, an extraordinary, interesting woman. a beautiful woman who, i mean, virtually disowned. do any of you remember this? her name was una. virtually disowned her when at the age of only 17 or 18, she married charlie chaplin. he disapproved when she ran away with him to live in switzerland. but o'neill now told my father that he'd had second thoughts and felt remorse for the way he treated her. harry, he asked one night, do you know what it's like to have a guilty conscience? and then before my father could answer, he said: is there any other kind? [laughter] when o'neill died, my father sat beside his bed for most of three nights and three days. i held his wrist, he wrote. i held his wrist within my hand as his pulse was failing. i didn't want to let him go. i had a sense of desperation. that was only one of many, many cases in which his personal attachment to a patient went far beyond the ordinary role of the physician. but in all his cases, even those that were purely psychiatric, as i've said, he never ceased to be the medical doctor he'd been trained to be. you don't see this often nowadays, but he always carried a doctor's bag with him. do you remember the doctor's bags? old black doctor's bag. i still have it. i opened it again recently, and there's his stethoscope and that little triangular hammer. and that thing they put around your arm to, your blood pressure gauge k i guess it's called. it also still has 16 wooden probe sticks we elastic around them and a box of sterile pads. johnson & johnson sterile pads. he later filled a very different role as a court psychiatrist, an expert psychiatric witness in some highly controversial cases. one of them was the case of patricia hearst with whom he -- i won't, i won't describe to the very young people here what brought her into court, but i'm sure -- how many of you have some sense of what it was? okay, almost all of you. in any case, after she'd been kidnapped by a group that called itself the liberation army, she then, she then joined them and began helping them in armed robberies, and she was taped, she was on tape at one of those robberies spraying machine gun bullets or semiautomatic bullets. he spoke with her for 16 hours in five separate interviews before she went to trial. and then he testified in court that he believed she acted of her own free will in spraying bullets from that automatic during a bank robbery. his defense -- her defense argued the exact reverse, stockholm syndrome, so forth. my father didn't think that that was so in her case, and he tended to take unfashionable positions. he -- a friend of mine, actually, was a defense psychiatrist, robert j. lipton, do you know his name? but my father believed she was responsible and acting of her free will by that point, and he, his testimony proved to be decisive when a jury found her guilty. a more important case in which he was involved was that of a man who strangled 13 women and is known to history as the boston strangler. his name, actually, was albert h. disalvo. and my father left behind transcripts and recordings of lengthy conversations with the strangler when he was asked by the court in massachusetts to determine if the man was insane or in popular parlance too crazy to be brought to trial under massachusetts law, my father had amazing conversations with him, and i, you know, i've read through it all. many typed form, it come -- in typed form, it comes out to 145 pages single-spaced. and it's sort of a priceless document for, certainly, for a research, psychiatric researcher, people concerned with the roots of terrorism or just the roots of seemingly irrational crime. the man could describe in some gruesome detail a person whom he strangled, but always at first without any connection to himself. as though he were watching it or heard about it, but not as if he were the one who did it. at one point he said to my father, i think it was an 85-year-old woman in one case, he said she was the one with the pillow case around her neck. and my father, you know, thought, well, okay, this is the pell low case -- there's the pillow case, who put it there? so he asked him. and, you know, finally sort of grudgingly he thought, and he said, i did. that kept happening. my father finally decided that the man was suffering from what he called a notable -- this is a quote from him -- a notable experiencial unreality. this combined with the fact that he conveyed, i'm quoting my father again, a grandiose enjoyment of the fact that he was in the public eye, he was a celebrity, he thought, led my father to believe that he'd undergone a fragmentation -- this is his word -- of the essence of his uner in being. of his inner being. which in classic neurology, one of the founders, early founders of the field called the amima, the essence of his inner being. my father described as division, a division in the soul. for those reasons, he decided the man was unfit to to go to trial. of course, the city was crying out for vengeance and, ultimately, he did go to trial, ended up in prison without any psychiatric treatment, and some years later around christmas time he sent my father the most affectionate letter. he really liked him. and, you know, wishing my father good health, he said i hope this letter finds you in good health, and i wish you a happy new year. from the man who strangled 13 women. i want to spend the last few minutes -- i go into great detail in these cases, and it's just fascinating. you know, i could have written a whole book on each of these cases, but i want to spend last few minutes now talking about my father's final days. i was very fortunate to find some blessedly unselfish people to take care of him at home. one of them had been also visiting him as a companion while he was at the nursing home. most of all, two women who i'll just give their first name, sylvia and julia, who were just blessedly unselfish people. and just like lucinda, they never spoke to him in that phony sing-song language. they talked real talk. and sometimes he would say something that really was beyond the pale. you know, he seemed to become -- just like my mother, he seemed to become more irreverent as he got older. sometimes he'd say something that was really outrageous, and they'd give it right back to him. once when sylvia was trying to the bathe him and bathe, what sylvia always called, quote, his privates, or his private parts, he got red in the face. he looked right at her, and he said, you're not gone that get it. [laughter] she came right back at him, she said, i don't need it, doctor, i have a husband of my own. [laughter] i loved it. i was glad she talked to him like that. same way she talked to other human beings. it made him smile. it kept that light there in his eyes. there are people i'm sure you know who will tell us, at least i've read some writings that tell us this, that victims of alzheimer's very quickly lose their personalities entirely, essentially cease to be the persons whom we knew and loved prior to their illness. they become, quote, the stranger. the other. and as a boston journallest wrote recently, quote, pray for them to to die as soon as possible. pretty chilly. i never prayed for my father to die. i wanted him to live as long as he was comfortable and took some satisfaction in existence. in the end, it was an error on the part of his physician that brought about his death. i had a hard time with that doctor. i disguise her carefully, by the way. hi -- my publisher insisted on it. [laughter] but i had a hard time with her, and so did sylvia and julia, because she was almost never reachable. when, you know, when sylvia or julia would call her sometimes in a moment of emergency or just deep concern about my dad, she would tell them she'd call them back, not without a long delay. she was, you know, she was buffered, walled off in a sense from her patients by all these layers of assistants. and assistants to assistants. she was never there as a presence in hi father's life -- in my father's life. there was no personal connection. well, you know, one of the problems is we don't have enough geriatric specialists in this country. it's an overwhelming ratio of patients to physicians. and that has to be corrected, but still, i mean, she could have called them back. and when they did ask a question and they'd get the answer from an assistant, sylvia said we never know if the answer is based on what we actually asked. so it was a bureaucratic mess. any case, a time finally came when my father had a serious infection in his urinary tract. this time the doctor did call back, but she said she saw no reason at all to examine him. instead, she said she'd phone in a prescription to the drugstore across the street from their apartment, told them the dosage they should give. the trouble is, she was in a hurry. so she gave them the wrong -- she gave him the wrong medicine. she gave him medication to which he'd had a very bad reaction in the past and to which he previously told us he was allergic. but she didn't check his records. he went into cardiac arrest before they got him to the hospital. my father, as i've said, was an old-fashioned doctor. he spent hours with his patients. he knew them well. he knew everything about them. and he never cut them off when they poured out their hearts to him. and this was not solely the case even with well known people like o'neill. this was also true with the very poor, destitute people whom he treated in the clinics of the mass general in boston city hospital. and when he got a phone call, this seemed to happen all the time just as we were sitting down to dinner. phone call typically from an intern or resident at a hospital or sanitarium who said that one of his patients was in extreme anxiety or talking about suicide, he'd lee his dinner right -- he'd leave his dinner right away. my mother would answer the phone, and then she would put her hand over the speaker, and she'd say, harry, are you home? and he always said, yes, i'll take it. and he was out the door. we don't have many of his kind today. whether in psychiatry or any other field. and in any case, the entire world of medicine is utterly transformed. in this age of rationed time and rationed care, many people scarcely know their doctors anymore. examinations by assistants, examinations by technicians, examinations by other intermediaries. i find this in my old life. you know, i'm getting old, i need, i need medical attention too. and now i'm seeing it from the point of view of the patient. in an hourlong appointment, patients, you know, may get to actually be with their doctor for only ten minutes at the end. if they're lucky. and now we also hear, quote, distance health care. you heard that? by computers. well, it may be useful in some situations in rural areas, for instance. still, i worry deeply. but comfort, the warmth and consolation of the human bond between the doctor and the patient, the dialogue of life and death, hope and fear, trust and faith between them has, i i am convinced, therapeutic value in and of itself. that's one of the many lessons my father taught me. he lived in the end to be 102. so, too, did my mother. i wrote this book, most of it, when my memory of their memories was still fresh and clear. some of it's already fading now. i'm more, of course -- and more, of course, inevitably will fade in time. but i'd like to believe, i need to believe that the essence of the blessings that our parents give us outlive the death of memory. thank you. [applause] thank you v.. thank you. thank you very much. thank you. we'll do some questions now. >> thank you, jonathan. folks, if you raise your hand, we'll get a mic to you. we'll start right here in front. >> in your voice i can hear a good deal of pain at various points as you go through this, and as you go on the book tour and repeat versions of this lecture, is it leading to a catharsis of some kind -- >> is it leading to what? >> a catharsis of some kind? >> i see. that's a good question. i don't think, i don't think going on a book tour has any cathartic effect. [laughter] i see absolutely no benefit in it at all, except that i get to meet some wonderful people. but writing the book was itself in some ways a that that are tick -- cathartic experience. i started writing it actually before my father's death, but mostly in the year, well, eight, twelve months after his death. then, as you'll see in the book, i put it aside for many years. i somehow wanted to get it down while i remembered it, but then i was afraid to look at it again. just like i was afraid to look at his doctor's bag. and when i did, it made me kind of proud of him but also it was painful because it was exactly as he'd left it on the last day that he'd used it for visit. but in another sense, writing the book and then coming back to it as i did to do the epilogue just the past two years, in another sense it kept, it kept him alive for me. same with my mom. i mean, she has a very prom innocent role in the book -- prominent role in the book, and it was as if they were still there for me. because i was summoning up all these very vivid memories. and, i mean, funny things too. like once, once my mother's assistant sylvia asked, asked me in front of her, well, you write about children, do you ever wish you had children of your own? because i wasn't married. and i said, well, i'd like to have children. and she said -- and my mother looked really happy. and sylvia said, well, first we have to find a wife for him. and my mother said, why? [laughter] he can have them anyway. she was wonderful. so writing the book kept them alive longer for me. it was concluding the book this past winter and even this past few months, putting the last proofs to rest to go to print, that, that was hard. that was painful. it was like saying good-bye to them again. other questions? yes. hi. >> oh, thank you. you describe beautifully your own reaction to your father's decline and the beautiful moments you experienced. i wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how he experienced his deklein, and -- decline, and did he have more morbid thoughts about his condition? did he wish it was over? or sentiments to that effect? >> whether he wished it was over, you mean life is over? >> [inaudible] more than you recount than you despaired. because he was aware of the losses all the time. >> i'll answer you as clearly as i can. yeah, clearly he was aware of the loss because i i think in a passage i quoted he wrote a note at one point where he said much, you know, much -- what'd he say, much is beyond my healing power or something like that. but he never expressed a wish to die. he never gave the slightest hint that he wanted his life to end and, in fact, he kept on, he kept on speaking as if if he would enjoy the future as long as he was capable of taking pleasure in life. for example, while he was in the nursing home he, prior to asking me if it was time jet to go home -- yet to go home, he was writing little notes to my mother, you know, saying that he was sorry for the turbulence or difficulty he'd given her when he first grew sick, but that he was looking forward to sending the next years with her. and, you know, so long as my father felt that way, i damn well was not going to take on this sort of presently-trendy role of, you know, the executioner, the kindly executioner, you know, who says, well, you know -- and when a couple of doctors tried to discuss this with me, i might have paid more attention to them if they, if they hadn't fallen into cliches. but they always spoke with these same cliches out of pop psychology, you know, about the value of life verse -- versus the end of life. and it often seemed to me that they were speaking semiconsciously, maybe totally unconsciously. they were summoning up sort of an ethical, an ethical reason for what wassal economically attractive to -- also economically attractive to society, you know? 100-year-old neurologist with dementia is not going to contribute to the nation's competitive edge against japan. which is the main criterion, i as an educationer -- i hear as an educator. whenever the government wants to the administer tests to make children's lives more miserable, they always justify it by saying we need those children to grow up to be useful to our corporations in sharpening our nation's competitive edge. they'll never say give them a head start because they're babies, and they have a right to be happy. so i felt some of that was brewing. i wish they'd been more capaciously honest with me. but in any case, there was no opportunity to -- i mean, i didn't sign a dnr until the very end. there was never a reason why i would. he was strong is physically, and enjoyed it. he had a great appetite right up to the end. >> yeah. lady in blue right here. >> whoever. >> first of all, i'd just like to thank you for this book. my dad has dementia -- not alzheimer's, but dementia -- and i really approached this book because a friend gave it to me. and i approached it with a lot of trepidation, mostly because i just didn't want to read something that was going to be, you know, a maudlin overview of all of the sadness and hardship. and, in fact, the book is completely not that. it's joyous, it's loving, and it's given me a lot of hope, you know? we're ten years into this with my dad. like your father, he's strong as an ox. i took him out for breakfast the other day, he ate three pancakes, bacon, on and on and on. he's 94 years old. but it just gave me a different attitude about the people who work with him and who should be working with him, the approach that they hold and the approach that we should hold as a family. >> thank you so much. >> so thank you. >> i do think it's a joyful book in a lot of ways. as i said, he never really fell into pathos or self-pity, and he did somehow -- i don't know how it was, i've said this already -- that imprint of his clinical training, just a way of looking at things, never totally abandon him. it was almost as though it didn't require memory, as though it was something that had become automatic to him, to look at illness with interest. you know? with curiosity. he had a lifelong curiosity about the workings of the mind and had diagnosed cell degeneration, brain disorder for years and years. and it was so -- that vantage point never abandoned him. and that did give him a kind of -- i don't know what i'd say, but out certainly rescued him from a sense of pathos. >> we have time for one more question. right here. >> i haven't had the pleasure of reading your book yet, but i will. and my husband is a physician at penn. i'm also a physician, but he teaches medical students, and one of the courses is doctoring. and that is to help medical students talk to patients as they should. >> he does this at a medical school? >> at penn. >> at penn. >> and i have a request or a suggestion. if you could write an essay, because i've read your other books, and they're so helpful with education, on your experience and how people treated your dad, because when my mother was dying and she was in her 60s, they spoke to her as though she were a child. and she said, look, i have a doctorate in early childhood education, and this is not the way. and she talked to her doctor, and he said, mrs. grossman, i can teach them medicine, i can't teach them humanity. but the point is, if there were something you could write to help teach that humanity, i can almost guarantee you ld be taught -- you it would be taught at university of pennsylvania. thank you. >> thank you. thank you. [applause] i like your thought too. i might say very quickly that those of you who didn't get to ask questions, i'll certainly answer your questions during the book signing. i always -- that's really when i get to know people better. in answer to your point, i think i would love to do something like that, and i would love to spend time, actually, with medical students at medical schools if they'd put up with me, because i've had a lot of experience looking at it from all different directions. and the truth is i never felt they gave back to my father even a small piece of what he'd given unstintingly to patients throughout his life. it's not because they were personally mean-spirited, it's because of this subtle, i think, economically-driven sense of rationed time. and about talking to, talking with the patient. i think, i mean, i have a horrible memory of once i think it was on his 95th birthday he was still in the nursing home. we had a party for him, my dog there naturally, and my mom came out. one of helpers brought her out. and it would have been wonderful, but a group of people i honestly did not know but who said they were old friends of his decided to to come. i don't think they'd seen him in 30 years, but it was sort of like a dutiful visit, do you know what i mean? something they thought they ought to do. the trouble is once they got there, they sat in a circle around him, and they talked across him. they didn't talk to him. and if they did address themselves to they'd raise their voice very loud as if his problem was hearing, you know? and at one point one of them who was sitting next to him looked directly at me and in a very loud voice, a very audible voice he said, jonathan, you're fortunate to have had him for so long. when the funeral comes -- my father looked right up, and he said is someone speaking of funeral? wow. as if she thought he was a piece of stone, you know? silent stone. i got up right away, put my hand on him, and be i said, daddy, people say a lot of stupid things. and they left immediately. i'd love to talk with doctors. thank you. thanks to all of you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> booktv is on twitter and facebook, and we want to hear from you. tweet us, twirl.com/booktv of, or post a comment on our facebook page, facebook.com/booktv. here's a look at some recent authors featured on booktv's "after words," our weekly interview program. we heard from michael tanner about the national debt and entitlement reform. ralph nader remembered the unanswered letters he wrote to presidents george w. bush and barack obama. andrea mays discussed the creation of shakespeare's first folio and industrialist henry folger's acquisition of a copy of the book 280 years later. and charles murray argued that it's now possible to limit federal power through the use of technology rather than the constitution. in the coming weeks on "after words," arthur brooks, president of the american enterprise institute, argues for a new kind of conservativism. and can-el padilla peralta recalls his journey. and claire mccaskill talks about her time in politics. >> i don't think we do anybody any favors by trying to dress up politicians as if we are not real human beings that have made major mistakes and have major problems in our lives. i think if more people saw us as multidimensional and fallible and vulnerable, then maybe we could all communicate better, and maybe they wouldn't be quite so cynical about government. >> "after words" airs on booktv every saturday at 10 p.m. and sunday at 9 p.m. eastern. you can watch all previous "after words" programs on our web site, booktv.org. ..