Fifteen years ago this month, my husband and I were visiting my father in Wisconsin with the idea of placing him in an assisted living community to better help him live with dementia. We called him Mardig (Armenian for Martin). As days passed, we grew overwhelmed trying to make sense of years of disorganized paperwork. We persuaded him to visit us in California. Below are excerpts from “Where’s my shoes?” My Father’s Walk through Alzheimer’s

CHAPTER 4
Our Lives Take an Unexpected Turn

David and I spent the next few days sorting through Mardig’s papers. Mardig enjoyed our genuine interest and began reflecting on events from his earlier years. His past was a mystery to us since he did not talk about his family. Old family conflicts and misunderstandings had kept his side of the family away from ours. His mother lived her final years with his half-brother in the Chicago area. After the relationship soured between my parents and my aunt and uncle, we no longer visited them. Regrettably, my grandmother died before I had the opportunity to learn about my father’s childhood.

While looking through one of the file cabinet drawers, I came upon a tattered oversized envelope. Inside was a worn brown composition book dated 1929. It was Mardig’s composition book from an adult evening class to improve his English. Inside were pages filled with selected events from his childhood. I focused on an autobiographical assignment.

At the tender age of five, Mardig and his mother narrowly missed the first genocide of the twentieth century. They left Van (in Turkey) just in time for the relative safety of Constantinople (now Istanbul).

I showed my father his brown composition book and asked him to read the autobiography and he recounted some of the stories of when he and a friend went swimming in the sea. David asked him about the journey coming to America in 1920 on the steamship Pannonia from Patras, a port in Greece. He chuckled and recounted a few stories of running around the ship and scaring his mom who was trying to keep from being seasick.

David and I pored through Mardig’s papers. It was nearly impossible to determine  what was important and what was not. We had to leaf through it all, one page at a time, being careful not to overlook something—like a $1,000 U.S. Savings Bond tucked between two sheets of scrap paper or hiding in a one-and-a-half foot pile of newspapers my brother threatened to throw away. Despite mustering some energy after discovering more details of my family history, this overwhelming task soon exhausted David and me.

I scraped off the rubber bands and unfolded a letter-sized sheet that was protecting a stack of cards. When I turned them over to look at the front side, in the upper right corner I saw “1,000” . . . twenty-eight thousand dollars in U.S. Savings Bonds.

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