Racing to Retake a Beloved Trip, Before Dementia Takes Everything

My dad always remembered his childhood journey through Europe. Now, with Alzheimer’s claiming his memories, we tried to recreate it.

The source images for the photo illustrations accompanying this article were taken by the writer’s father’s family during their trip to Europe in 1966. Credit: Matthew Brandt for The New York Times

By Francesca Mari

Francesca Mari is a contributing writer at the magazine and an assistant professor of the practice in the literary-arts department at Brown University.

Before we begin, would you repeat these three words? Apple, penny, table. I had my dad do something like this, too.

The evening before he was supposed to catch a cross-country flight to me, in Providence, R.I., my 72-year-old father said he didn’t need to set an alarm because he always wakes up at 6 or 7, a statement I knew to be untrue — or, at the very least, unreliable. He lives near Half Moon Bay, Calif., and now that he is retired, he usually rests in bed until 10:30 or 11. I suspected he no longer remembered how to set an alarm, and I couldn’t stop myself from asking him.

“I don’t need an alarm!” he bellowed. And so I set mine for 10:30 a.m. my time, 7:30 a.m. his, to allow him a fat hour and a half to get ready. When the bells startled the silence of my office the next day, I called him, and he sent me to voice mail. I dialed again.

“I’m up!” he snapped, panicked. Then he hung up. Ten minutes later, he phoned: “Why didn’t you give me any information? I don’t know the flight number or anything. I’m flying blind here.”

I had texted and emailed him his itinerary several times and discovered, with surprise, that he had lost the ability to open emails and text messages on the phone he’d had for years. He lives alone. His wife, my mom, was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was 7 and died when I was 10, and he never remarried. I have no siblings. He has no nearby friends on whom I felt comfortable imposing to help him. I decided that I should just instruct him to check in at the ticket counter. The only thing he really needed was his passport and a credit card.

“We have a problem,” he said, calling me again. “My passport is expired.”

“We only applied for your passport in 2018,” I said. It would be good until 2028, I told him.

“That’s not what I’m seeing,” he said. I imagined the 8, in his eyes, looking like a 3.

“Trust me,” I pleaded.

The cab I’d scheduled would pick him up at 9 a.m., and at 8:15 a.m., I called to make sure he was either showered or about to be. At 8:58 a.m., I called to tell him the cab would be outside in two minutes.

“Huh?” he said.

“The cab will be outside in two minutes,” I said.

“Hmph, OK, bye.”

I knew he would call, triumphantly from the cab as it descended the hill on which he lived, and so when I still hadn’t heard from him at 9:07, I called. “Just finishing up my cereal,” he said.

Who does that? The cab was going to leave.

Finally, at 9:21 a.m. his time, my phone rang, and to my relief, I could hear the familiar static — the sound of the interior of a car as it breaks down a hill, the hill I grew up on: “Is this ticket paid for? What do I do at the airport?”

Eighteen calls to get him from the door of his house into a cab. Step 1 of air-traffic-controlling a man with dementia on a voyage to Italy.

It has been a couple of minutes. Please repeat back to me the three words with which we began. Now spell “world” backwards. No, wait, you’re looking at the word. That’s cheating. State your Social Security number backwards. No looking at your phone — what day of the week is it? What is the date, month, year?

A few years ago, my dad faced a battery of similar questions. Tests like the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), administered by his primary-care doctor, helped establish that something really was wrong. My dad was convinced that the first two times he took the tests, earlier that month with the nurse or medical assistant, he was too nervous. Now, sensing his doctor’s impatience, he was even more so. “Is that all you got?” his doctor said, and I winced.

Years earlier, my father told me about watching his mother take these tests at the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, and desperately wanting to help her. Now, as I watched him search for keys and clocks within an image, I closed my eyes to stop myself from frantically scanning.

On test after test, my dad showed cognitive impairment, but he was in denial. I’d recently discovered missed payments, late payments, miscalculations and $150,000 worth of debt racked up on his personal credit cards, all for his beloved hi-fi audio-video business. He made the minimum payments when he came across a bill, forgetting that they didn’t actually pay down the debt. All the while, it was accruing interest at 20 percent. Credit-card companies kept sending him new cards; I found 14 of them in use. It turns out crashing credit scores are often an early indicator that someone is developing dementia. My dad still presented well, always had a plausible explanation for why stress was weighing on his performance. His primary-care physician hadn’t noticed any issues, but when I begged him to evaluate my dad’s memory, the tests shook out another truth. Seeing their results over two years, the doctor had agreed to stage an intervention. “Your cognitive abilities aren’t going to get any better,” he said. “You must close your store." It was like amputating his arms to save him.

What made discerning the disease so difficult was that intransigence is not entirely unlike my dad’s personality. Actually, as far as I can remember, it is his personality. Alzheimer’s was only a calcification of his most irritating tendencies, the ones I had to translate for my bewildered spouse. He exploded, for example, when, as requested, I emailed him flight options for my wedding in India five years ago. “I’m busy!” he erupted, and he hung up. I rang back, and he screened my call. Again and again and again, for days, as prices kept ticking up. I knew he wanted to come, that he wouldn’t miss it, that he would take more delight in it than nearly anyone else. Two weeks later, he called to tell me he had printed out my email to study. By then, those flights weren’t even options.

Was this the beginning of his Alzheimer’s, in 2019? Or was he just a man afraid of taking time off and traveling in a formidably foreign country? I’ll never know. What I do now know is that the disease can begin 10 to 20 years before it’s detected. And in the Alzheimer’s care community parlance, his was a classic “catastrophic reaction” — the outcome of being overwhelmed when called to process too many things at once. A brain short-circuiting. “Often a catastrophic reaction does not look like behavior caused by an illness that causes dementia,” Nancy L. Mace and Peter V. Rabins write in their caregiver guide, “The 36-Hour Day.” “The behavior may look as if the person is merely being obstinate, critical or overemotional.”

Then there was his visit to meet his 3-day-old granddaughter, Vidya, one of just a few times he had closed his store in 47 years. Taking her pruney, purplish limbs into his arms, he burst into tears, in awe but a bit forlorn. “Your grandmother would have loved to meet her,” he said. Over his weeklong stay in 2021, he was weirdly helpless. He lingered in bed and didn’t eat, and at some point, I asked him my daughter’s name. “Sethalina?” he said. What was bizarre wasn’t that he forgot her name; Vidya is hard. But there was no rationalizing the oddity of the name he generated instead. He ventured a second guess: “Citralina?”

“Your father has no insight,” a neurologist at the Memory and Aging Center at U.C.S.F. told me last year, after meeting him for the first time. Insight was defined by the psychiatrist Aubrey Lewis in 1934 as “the correct attitude to a morbid change in oneself,” and it has become a standard component of any patient’s evaluation, an influential factor in whether to hospitalize someone against his or her will. “In the starkest terms, insight measures the degree to which a patient agrees with his or her doctor’s interpretation,” Rachel Aviv writes in her book about mental illness and identity, “Strangers to Ourselves.” But a part of me wondered if my father rejected his diagnosis because he had all too much insight, the insight of someone who was a caregiver to his beloved mother, my Nonie, who suffered from the same disease and died at age 100. If you put any stock in the mind-body connection, denial was a better survival strategy.

When I was growing up, my dad, who has left the country only a few times, told me about the trip to Europe he took with his parents when he was 14, in 1966. He told me how much Nonie loved the immaculate Swiss streets and window boxes fizzing with flowers; the fireplace in the hillside home outside Lugano, where his father was born, with clever alcoves on either side for drying clothes or warming bread; the palpable poverty of the home in Pozzuoli, a city just outside Naples, where Nonie’s aunt lined her walls with newspaper to add insulation. Every so often, my father would drag out the projector and show me his Kodachrome slides.

As an adult, I spent years telling him that he and I should repeat the trip together — or at least a short version in which we went to Switzerland and Italy, Lugano and Naples, so he could show me where his family was from. But now that his Alzheimer’s was progressing, that proposal had taken on new significance. Revisiting the past would, I hoped, help him live better in the present. A few years ago, I read about a palliative treatment for those with memory disorders, called reminiscence therapy. The therapy involves triggering the participants’ strongest memories — those formed between the ages of 10 and 30, during the so-called memory bump, when personal identity and generational identity take shape. Reminiscence therapy can take many forms: group therapy, individual sessions with a caregiver, collaboration on a book sharing the patient’s story or just conversation between friends. But the goal is the same: to comfort, to engage, to increase connection — and to strengthen the bond between patient and caregiver.

One of the more immersive iterations of reminiscence therapy is a place called Town Square, an adult day care for those with dementia. I visited shortly after it opened in 2018. The day care consisted of an artificial village designed by the San Diego Opera to look like a town from the 1950s. It had a diner, beauty salon, pet store, movie theater, gas station and city hall. By replicating the time period during which participants’ brightest memories burned, Town Square hoped to improve their quality of life. The décor offered lots to talk about. A portrait of Elvis hung in the living room, for instance, and upon seeing it, a woman spoke of her teenage years, teleporting into her past. “There is no time machine except the human being,” Georgi Gospodinov writes in his novel “Time Shelter,” about a psychiatrist who develops memory clinics that simulate past eras. I was initially skeptical of the enterprise; warehousing people in a double-locked stage set where oldies played around the clock sounded grotesque. But what I witnessed there — spontaneous reminiscence in a cheerful setting — was perhaps the only positive vision of Alzheimer’s I’ve seen.

I wanted this for my father, wanted to give him a sense of joy now that he had shuttered his store, the place that was his world. While he wouldn’t submit to adult day care, perhaps retaking his 1966 trip would be like restoring him to a tableau of his youth. Truth be told, I also wanted to supplant memories of the last few awful years with some new ones, for me as much as for him. I had spent the past 16 months on countless calls to his doctors and banks and lawyers to negotiate discounts on the insurmountable interest. When he unwittingly undermined my efforts, making random small payments or denying he had a disease, I would snap, and he would never hold it against me. No. He would vow to do better. Sometimes he would yell back that I was a nag and a “pencil neck” (an exacting and officious know-it-all, I think). But even when I pressed him to the point that he hissed that I should get out of his house, I knew he loved me unconditionally and would soon apologize. He trusted me, even when I didn’t trust myself. For this, the ballast to my being, he demanded nothing in return, wielded not a single expectation. He never brought up a fight later, and not just because of his disease. He didn’t hold grudges the way I faintly did about the mistakes he amassed as his brain de-massed, though I knew none of this was his fault. Still: Why hadn’t he planned? Hadn’t he seen his own mother suffer and struggled to support her?

Here’s how he responded, in June, when I told him that I was going to take him on the trip we had always imagined: “Oh, GOD.”

But being a pencil neck, I believed I knew better.

“We look at the world once, in childhood,” the Nobel laureate Louise Glück writes in her poem “Nostos.” “The rest is memory.” But travel leases us childlike eyes. Novelty makes an impression, and I will never forget my dad’s first remark after we got out of the car and made our way through the cobblestone alleys of Como: “It looks like embedded eggs,” he said, with the infectious delight he brings to new encounters. A perfect description. We were a father and daughter navigating the world on indestructible eggshells.

Going on Hour 26 of wakefulness, we did, however, look worse for wear, especially compared with the Northern Italians, who were adorned, at 8:30 a.m., in coats and scarves of the finest natural fibers. “Italians have strong opinions about aesthetics and aren’t afraid to share them,” I had read in the Lonely Planet guide to the Italian lakes. “A common refrain in Milan is che brutta! (How hideous!), which may strike visitors as tactless. But consider it from an Italian point of view — everyone in this fashion town is rooting for you to look good, and allowing you to step out in an unflattering get-up would be considered a serious failure of taste on their part.”

My dad had arrived in Providence with no pants other than the seafoam slacks he was wearing. I hated these pants, an emblem of the futility of my efforts. In the last few years, if he was stressed or waited too long to visit a restroom, he leaked — an Alzheimer’s thing or an aging prostate thing or both. And so these ’90s-era slacks that he had somehow resurfaced from his closet were faintly discolored around the crotch. I bought him two new pairs of pants — fancy Italian ones that cost more than any I owned — and reminded him to pack them.

In Providence, two days before our flight to Milan, I heard myself, in anguish, repeating for the fourth or fifth time, “I can’t believe you didn’t bring your new pants.” Something I knew I shouldn’t say, lest it provoke a catastrophic reaction.

“They were laying on my suitcase,” he said. “I don’t know what happened. Obviously, no one took them —” By which he meant his brain briefly entertained the possibility that someone did, in fact, take them.

I had been so fixated on his pants that I hadn’t noticed his shoes. Sipping my cappuccino in Como, I saw they didn’t match: same model of Mephistos, the style he’d been wearing for 25 years, but in different shades of brown, one more reddish than the other. They were splitting at the seams and had holes in the soles. I felt deeply protective of him, and I also felt wretchedly shabby myself. My black sweater was pilled and streaked with white impasto, my 2-year-old’s yogurty mark on me. Che brutta! When did we get so raggedy, so oblivious to the world in which we lived? “Time feeds on us,” Gospodinov writes. “We are food for time.”

Now here we were, copied and pasted onto a piazza in Italy, fast-forwarded into middle and elder age. I took a bite of my pistachio croissant — thick green cream oozed out, delicious. And then my phone, the device I so desperately needed to chaperone us on the drive from Como to our hotel in Lugano, Switzerland, died. The barista welcomed me to use the outlet behind the bar, but I needed a converter, and for that I needed to schlep back to the car, 10 minutes away. My father was sore from our flight, and I worried that the walk, doubled, would tire him unnecessarily. After some fretting, I told him to stay put, as I rushed off to the car, stepping on egg after egg after egg. Would he wander off? That hadn’t yet been an issue; he so rarely deviated from his routine. But he was anxious, and in those with dementia, wandering is a response to anxiety, often a behavior of those who wish to return to the security of home, whether literally or proverbially.

Twenty minutes later, a vulnerable look in his eye, he was seated just where I left him. The church bell tower directly ahead of us began ringing in 9 a.m. “Do you hear the long finish?” my dad asked. As an audiophile and salesman, he has always spoken about sound the way sommeliers speak about wine. The world sounds richer in his presence. We ambled toward the lake, in the security of each other’s company, and for a moment, I was assured that all would be well.

Retaking the trip from my father’s childhood meant visiting the Swiss home where his father was born and raised. But I didn’t have an address, only the birthplace on my grandfather’s birth certificate: Treggia, a hamlet 17 minutes away, so we would have to settle for simply seeing the surroundings.

Zigzagging up the hills in our white S.U.V., I let out light honks before blind turns, slightly anxious about the Audis — so many Audis — careering around corners.

“You didn’t go to college for nothing,” my dad said. And it was weird for this previously fearless (and excellent) driver to commend me on excessive caution. This was a man who once sped at 115 m.p.h. on Highway 1, effortlessly weaving between lanes, to shake off a tailgater, a man whose quick instincts averted many a near-crash. When I got my second speeding ticket before age 18 and was required to appear before a judge with a guardian, he left his store to accompany me without complaint or reprimand and maybe, just maybe, with a glimmer of recognition.

I drove on, following Google Maps, up the mountain in the rain. Clouds caught like lint on the trees below. After one hairpin turn, I saw a ruggedly well-dressed man in navy and brown with a felted fedora standing under a wooden overhang and looking at us. Almost to justify the sorry state of my slow driving, I decided to roll down my window, and in English, I told him we were looking for my grandfather’s house and asked if he knew any Maris.

Within a minute, he had his English-speaking wife on the phone: “Oh, there are so many Maris in this area that each bloodline has a nickname,” the woman translated for her husband. “Yours is Pionara” — or so it sounded. A brother and sister Mari had lived a mile down the road in a white house until just recently, when they moved into a nursing home, she said. In the United States, I had never met another Mari; here we were ubiquitous.

We located the white house down the hill and parked when a neighbor appeared, flush with good cheer. I showed him the scan of our Kodachrome slide and stuttered something about casa di mio nonno. He pointed decisively at a pink house perched above. I said we should go up and look. My dad balked — later I would learn that his socks were soaked through because of the holes in his soles — but he wouldn’t be left behind. So, up an alley we trudged. I had my dad pose with the pink house, but as I continued to compare it with the slides, I began to think the yellow one next door was right after all. This was a cognitive test brought to life, asking us to find the hidden images: the dentil molding on the door, the iron bars over the right window.

I instructed my dad to move to the yellow house and then began snapping pictures of him smiling tentatively on the steps, in front of the door, under the pergola on which grape vines still writhed as they did in 1966.

Suddenly, the door opened, and out came a Brit. “Hello?” he said. He had thought our camera flashes were lightning. And when he glanced at his window to check, he saw my unseeing rat-face pressed against the pane.

“Would you like to come in?” he asked, when I explained why we were there. “It’s not my house, I don’t know its history, but you’re welcome.”

A loveliness of ladybugs streamed across the wall. And there it was. The fireplace. It was redone in white, modern and minimal. But it had the same proportions, the same alcoves as the one in the slides. The guest looked and thought so, too, and he would know. Beside his laptop sat a book about the architect Louis Kahn. The guest was himself a practicing architect and a professor on holiday with his girlfriend, an opera singer originally from Nevada. She had been invited to perform at Brown University, where I teach. “That’s hilarious!” my dad said. “How coincidental is that?”

He looked at our old slides. The fireplace, in a terra-cotta tile, was from a time when people sat in the alcoves during winter to keep warm. “I remember there was a chain here,” my dad said. “And they said you can put a pot of so and so here.”

Or so we thought. “It’s a memory of a memory,” Reinhard Oertli, the home’s owner, told me later when I Zoomed with him. The white fireplace was a memory of the tile fireplace, which itself was a memory of the type of fireplace with alcoves for people to sit. But the alcoves in this fireplace had never been large enough to be functional in that way. This wasn’t a referendum on my dad’s memory, so much as on memory itself. Everything was a memory of a memory, each recollection fires neurons that rewrite the file, suggesting that the more you remember something, the more you degrade it; memory becomes myth, or archetype, a father and daughter returning to the motherland.

In the 1950s, the tendency of old people to reminisce was thought to be a sign of senility. The first long-term studies of healthy elderly people began at Duke University and the National Institutes of Health’s Laboratory of Clinical Science only in 1955 — and it wasn’t until the early 1960s that Robert Butler, a psychologist then at the National Institutes of Health, realized that nostalgia and reminiscence were part of a natural healing process. “The life review,” as Butler came to call it, “represents one of the underlying human capacities on which all psychotherapy depends.” The goals of life review included the righting of old wrongs, atoning for past actions or inactions, reconciling with estranged family members or friends, accepting your mortality, taking pride in accomplishment and embracing a feeling of having done your best. Interestingly, Butler noted that people often return to their birthplace for a final visit.

Sometimes the story is told to anyone who will listen; other times to oneself, in private. Some studies have shown that life review is as effective against depression as medication. Given that depression is more common in people with dementia, reminiscence work may help.

Butler believed life reviews weren’t the unvarnished truth but rather the reconciled one, more like the authorized biography. The edited narrative is born of psychological necessity. “People who embark on a life review are making a perilous passage,” Butler wrote, “and they need support that is caring and nonjudgmental. Some people revise their stories until the end, altering and embellishing in an attempt to make things better. Pointing out the inconsistencies serves no useful purpose and, indeed, may cut off the life-review process.”

Back in the United States, I found it hard to simply sit still with my dad when there were so many other responsibilities, but here in Switzerland, a three-hour drive from our next stop in Modena, all we had was time and a cache of memories with which to fill it. My dad told me how when he was last here, his famously dapper father, Guido, wore a black suit and a fedora — embarrassed of his baldness — and clutched his aunt’s arm, so happy was he to meet her. Guido died from a pulmonary embolism just a few years later, slumped over in the backyard, when my dad was 18 and home sick from school.

But now my dad remembered him alive, in Switzerland, hosting a catered outdoor luncheon for his Swiss relatives at a long table under the eaves. Frank, my dad’s uncle by marriage, who was traveling with them from San Francisco, drank too much wine and disappeared into the bushes to nap on his back, ankles crossed. I was happy to hear these stories, some of which I’d forgotten, and not least of all because he was happy sharing them. “The individual who conducts his or her life review alone is at much greater risk of depression than those who allow another person to share in the process,” Butler wrote.

I put the Beatles on the car stereo. Music opens old cupboards in the brain, and I remembered the way melody enabled some of the Town Square participants to surface memories — the beautiful woman with her long gray hair and matching red lipstick and nails, who could no longer speak, but whose friends urged her to sing for me, her voice a portal to another era, refined and light.

The music put my dad in a romantic state of mind. He began monologuing about various girlfriends from nearly 50 years ago — Miss San Francisco, a.k.a Margie Model, a strawberry blonde with freckles, and another woman who was an evangelical and handed out abstinence pamphlets she didn’t heed. My dad said he and this woman were lying in his teenage bedroom when his mom came home early. He chuckled at the memory, and when, during the course of our drive, he launched into the same story for the second time, I realized that despite the premise of the trip, what I really wanted was the opposite of reminiscence, which too often reminded me of his disease. What I wanted, while it was still possible, was to be with him in the present, stepping on embedded eggs and listening to the long finish of church bells.

While we were speeding down the straight highway, “Long and Winding Road” came on, and I was thinking about how some people in the Andes believe that the future comes up from behind you and the past is always in front of you. It seemed to me that this loop tightens as we age. The horizons of the past and the future narrow. Suddenly I heard my dad choking back tears.

“Do you know how some memories are so vivid?” he asked me. “I just remember your mom, our first date, and seeing her and thinking, Wow, she is so radiant.”

My mom, the person who, by all accounts, would have wanted to go on this trip from the get-go, the person I have to assume that I am like, because I am so unlike my father. One of my last memories of my mom in motion: stiff and head-scarfed, sliced and poisoned and radiated into remission, leading us on a walk along the coast that she’d read about. Wild irises were in abundance. We’d brought scissors, and we filled our arms with her favorite flower. Every room in our house adorned.

Not long after that, while she was driving me home from school, her leg froze when we were stopping off at the post office. She sat in the driver’s seat, right leg in the car, left leg stuck straight out. She called out to a passerby and asked the stranger to lift her leg into the car. Somehow, my mom got us up that hill and home. She sat for a long time in the garage until at last she was able to get out of the car. This was how she learned that cancer had come back, a very rare kind in her spine. I have been told she was given two options: a surgery that would paralyze her from the waist down or a promising experimental treatment, which was meant to obliterate the cancer. If it didn’t work, however, it risked blasting the cancer throughout her body. She wagered on the latter and lost, cancer colonizing her brain.

With her death, all family adventures ended. My aunt, my mother’s sister and best friend, did her best to fill in. But my mother’s loss still aches decades later, an absence that strikes at both milestones and unexpected moments. I wish my mom, who valued education, could have seen me graduate from college, especially since I wasn’t a particularly strong student during her lifetime. I wish she could have held my newborn while I napped, could have been here now to help my dad or simply be his companion. Perhaps I feel her absence all the more because memories must travel between people. Without pollination, they wither. Families collectively remember, they maintain narratives, fill them in and round them out and keep people close long after they’ve left. My mom died when I was so young that my dad is my memory bank, one that I seldom tapped because the loss was too raw. But as his memory fades, the memory of her does, too.

By the time we arrived in Naples, my father seemed to be a younger man. I wasn’t sure if it was reminiscence therapy or something else. Was it possible that, by expecting a lot of him with no real stakes (venturing to new places, eating new foods, navigating new rooms), I had helped him roll back his disease by engaging in the present?

“I have come to believe less and less that biology is destiny,” Dr. Ellen Langer writes in her book “Counterclockwise.” In 1979, she famously took a batch of old men on a weeklong retreat at which they were asked to care for themselves and instructed to pretend that they were 20 years younger, living in 1959. They talked about the threat of communism, the need for bomb shelters and Castro’s advance into Havana. By the end of the week, men who could barely walk broke into a game of touch football. Their vision and hearing improved, and their arthritis decreased. Sixty-three percent of the group scored higher on their intelligence test, and everyone was rated by independent observers as looking younger.

“It is not primarily our physical selves that limit us but rather our mind-set about our physical limits,” Langer writes.

Sure, at times my dad thought we were actually in Milan, which was good, because he was afraid of the pickpockets that he remembered from Naples in 1966. But in the morning, he called my hotel phone from his room, a feat unimaginable a week earlier. At home, he barely managed to walk around the block (admittedly, his home was on a steep hill), and now we were walking some 10,000 steps a day.

Before our trip, I asked Dr. Melinda K. Baker, director of education at the George G. Glenner Alzheimer’s Family Centers Inc., which runs Town Square, if she had any advice. “Empathy,” she said immediately. “I tell everyone this. They are trying the best they can.” Simplify, slow down. People with Alzheimer’s often experience sensory overload. If it’s too loud, find a quieter table or go outside. Change your expectations. Don’t treat your dad like a child. His role as father is an identity that still needs to be honored, even if he’s no longer capable of being in charge. In fact, honoring the role means less friction when relieving him of responsibilities. It turns out this was good advice for me, too. Because what I grieved most with his diagnoses was the sense that I was losing my existential protector, the only person who witnessed the worst parts of me and somehow saw the best. But that was intact. I was lucky. In the most fundamental sense, he is still my dad.

I thought that traveling with my dad would be like traveling with half a person, a toddler, if you will, and in fact I often used the parenting trick of offering two choices to give him control over simple decisions (bolognese or cacio e pepe?). But it turned out that it was like traveling with two people, or three. My mom, his memories of her and my memories of her absence were always on the trip with us. She would be almost 80 now, and I was strangely saddened to imagine her wrinkled and old. Sometimes my Nonie was present, too. In Naples, we stumbled upon the Chiesa del Gesù Nuovo. Its pyramid-studded facade gave it a campy look, like a church dressed for the San Francisco Pride Parade. My dad, a lapsed Catholic, knelt in the pew praying for his wife, while I looped around twice so that I could figure out whether the priest in purple robes sitting under a spotlight in a confession box was real or a mechanical fortune teller trapped in glass.

I lit a candle for my Nonie and my mother. I tried to keep hold of their little flickering flames among all the others and wondered whether it was inauspicious to drop U.S. currency in the donation box.

“She lasted a long time,” my dad said when he finally rose.

“Who? Nonie?”

“Yeah,” he said, remembering how she lived to 100. “I wonder if I’m going to last that long.”

“Do you want to?” I asked. For many years, while caring for his mother, he had spoken to me of euthanasia, had left op-eds about it on the pillow of my childhood bed for when I returned home to visit and said that if he ever had the disease, that’s what he would want. “Happy dementia” was beyond anything he could imagine.

“Probably, yeah,” he answered to my slight surprise. “To see Vidya grow up.”

The success of reminiscence therapy, like the success of a trip, can be hard to assess. “There’s no standardized way to do it,” Baker told me. “How do you do it? And how often do you do it?” Is it life review — the process of synthesizing one’s life narrative — or any reminiscence? How well does the facilitator know the participants?

Can you recall the three words with which we began?

On the final night, my dad and I were sharing a room to save money and also so I could ensure that he got up on time for the airport. It allowed another opportunity, too, though it did not occur to me until he went to the bathroom. On the trip, I had bought him a new pair of blue pants, and though the inseam was longer than he liked, he acquiesced to wearing them. Now I saw that his decades-old seafoam pants were lying across his suitcase. I walked over to them. They really were a pretty shade, the wool — merino? — from a finer time. As I heard him flushing the toilet, I wondered if I should try once more to wash them — a friend had recently recommended Lestoil — or if I should put them in my suitcase to search out something of similar cut and quality.

Then, the horizons of time cinching into a tight loop, inhabiting both my past and future selves, a naughty child and a jaded matron, I scanned the room, flung open the doors of a hulking wardrobe and tossed the pants in its dim corner. As my dad turned off the tap, I scrambled back to my bed, hoping he would not try to hang his coat and wondering if he encountered his crumpled pants, whether I would confess or play dumb. Was it compassionate to offer more information or less, to overload him or to patronize him, knowing I would contribute to his confusion either way? And then I thought: Maybe much of the confusion besieging him is me. I’m the loving spur in his side, the person clubbing him with reality, forcing him to confront his condition. I’m his best fiend, the one dragging him to places outside of his comfort, another instance of his genes coming back to bite him.

“I can’t believe it’s over,” he said, on the plane the next day. “It went so fast. Thank you for everything you did to organize this. I couldn’t have done it on my own.” He said he would pay for the next trip. It’s only fair. He was talking the way people do at the end of a vacation, like an addict itching for more. Would he even remember he loved this one? Did it matter?

“Wasn’t it amazing that we found the house?” I said to him after our rainy romp through Treggia.

“You couldn’t have planned that. And all those people willing to share information with us. Totally amazing.”

“I’m so glad we’re here,” I said. “Only I miss Vidya.”

He commented that my husband was really good with our daughter. “He’s really involved. Modern women, I’m sure, want to share responsibilities. Well, that’s what we did with you.”

“Although I think Mom took the majority,” I said, unable to check my impulse for accuracy. He worked full-time and took me on Sundays and Mondays; she reduced her nursing hours to part-time to take care of me more during the week.

“Well, yeah,” he said. “But there were days where she, you know, worked. And then obviously, she got sick. At least I wasn’t clueless.” Maybe even more so than my mother, he could get on his knees and enter a child’s world, could toss a stuffed bee back and forth for an hour. In fact, until my mother got sick, he was the parent I preferred, the fun one, the one who laughed even louder than I did while reading me Roald Dahl’s “The Twits,” my mother bristling in her room, it being well beyond bedtime.

“And then you were stuck doing everything,” I said. Every wake up, drop-off, pickup, dinner, soccer practice, all of it, for close to 10 years, with a teenager nit-picking him — for being late, for being simple, for not being my mom.

“I wasn’t stuck. It was just what I needed to do to keep everything moving along.”

“I bet it was a shock,” I said. “You didn’t bargain to become a single parent.”

“No. But look at the end result,” my dad said, his voice cracked, his face frailer than it once was. “It’s amazing.”

Source photographs from the Mari family