Free A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer Dubois

I explained. I told him that my father’s and my shared fate was in no way unique—in fact, it might be the only thing that’s truly universal. Death, anyway, is universal. And even losing our minds doesn’t really set us apart—we all lose our minds, after all, it’s just that some of us lose them with death, and some of us lose them a bit before. All we miss, really, is thirty to forty years. When you think of the time we spend alive versus the incredible amount of time we spend dead, thirty to forty years doesn’t amount to that much. But when that time is filled with the particular events of your own life, one finds it does take on an inordinate significance.
    I told him about the nucleotides, the genetic test, the prognosis. I told him that atrophying of basal ganglia starts years before symptoms present, and that right now—in this car, in this moment—parts of my brain were dying, parts that I didn’t know I needed, but parts that I would never, never be able to get back. I told him that there wasn’t an emotion or an impulse or a stumble that I could completely trust; I told him that one day—if I let it—everything I did and said and thought would be nothing more than the entropic implosion of a condemned building or a dying star.
    He listened. He held my hand lightly. I don’t know if I can call that understanding.
    The nursing home smelled, as it always did, of stewed carrots and antimicrobial cleansers and the singed coffee that the first shift had made and not had time to drink. There was a part of me that didn’t like showing my father off like this, as though he were a scientific exhibition and not a former person. At the same time, if there was a way to make Jonathan see what I looked at when I looked in the mirror, then this was it. You could talk about the degradation of cortex tissueforever. But real understanding was in the inverted mouth, the yellow concavity of the face. The dark eyes that shone like those of a prisoner who knew he’d be executed at dawn, though I tried not to sentimentalize. I didn’t think my father really knew his fate anymore. This, for him, was the easy part.
    We went to him. I rubbed my father’s thin shoulders. I gave him a chocolate. He looked somewhere beyond us. He gummed his mouth and made cork-popping sounds. His fingers forked like the shriveled arms of a dinosaur, and he pressed them so fiercely into the table that they turned white.
    “Hello, Mr. Ellison,” said Jonathan. My father, of course, said nothing back.
    “Genetics,” I said.
    “Will that be you?”
    “Not if I can help it.”
    In the car on the way back, we were quiet. I let Jonathan drive my car. Route 2 broke into a view of the city, silver buildings catching the receding light, the Prudential Building flashing palely in the murk. I opened the window and thought about my father. Like most people, I was not my best self at twelve. And it bothered me sometimes to think of this version of myself as the last vision my father had of me before his mind went—as if this made any sense. As if he was standing on the opposite end of some magic beam of rainbow light, remembering me in my youth, carrying around a smudged mental snapshot of who I used to be. Really, it was the other way around. But in weak, sentimental moments, I wanted to tell him: look. I grew up with a sense of humor, anyway. You would have liked me if you didn’t already.
    All this by way of saying that it matters to me how I am remembered.

    My father died in April. It was quiet, and strange, and unreal in the way that anything you long for long enough gets to be. It was not horrifying. It was calm, morphined, inevitable. In some ways, it was the only thing that had gone right for my father in the better part of two decades. I kept my hand on his head the whole time, and he turned cold before his pulse stopped. He turned yellow, too—this was fromhis liver giving out—and it did seem like a process, a natural compulsion, a