Down to a sunless sea: memories of my dad

I’m going to be releasing a new piece every Thursday for at least 8 weeks. General content note: death, dementia, old age, mental health issues

11 min readSep 21, 2017

Desire Paths

Memory is a slippery thing. Ever since I can remember, my dad has been someone who forgets words. I often forget words too. Most people do. It sometimes takes a while to remember them. Maybe you have to think about something else, and then it will suddenly come back to you. Or you have to think of something similar and work back from there. I often find I just need to catch the corner of the word and then I can pull it fully into view.

I also often mix up words. For example, I am always saying Autumn when I mean August. Working in true storytelling has made me acutely aware of the fact that when we recount memories, we are often recounting rewritten memories: our minds smooth things out for narrative sense. Often I will ask my partner about moments we have experienced together, and she will remember them differently. Sometimes the difference is just that she remembers different details, but sometimes we disagree on the facts of the events. That happens a lot with my family too, and I have quite a big and complicated family, so there are lots of very different narratives we are all trying to tell over each other.

For a while, I didn’t fully buy the idea that my dad had dementia because initially it seemed that he was complaining about something that had always happened to him. His memory seemed as reliable or unreliable as anyone else’s and was generally better than for a lot of people of a similar age.

Wikipedia describes a desire path as “a path created as a consequence of erosion caused by human or animal foot-fall or traffic. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination.” They are also known as desire lines, herd paths and bootleg trails.

Memories are like desire paths: when you first walk down them, they are overgrown and full of details. The more you walk them, the more eroded they become; they are smoothed out and set. You get to what you remember more quickly, but what you remember has become something else. You no longer have to look for landmarks because there is a path for you to walk.

What I’ve come to realise is that my dad now forgets the pathways to the misremembered words, and he can’t find his way back to his memories whether they are rewritten or not. But the fact that he is trying to remember mis-remembered memory can mean that when he is exposed to the original source, it seems alien to him.

Recently, during a conversation about current events, I casually mentioned Adam Smith (generally considered the father of capitalism) and my dad said, “Who’s that? I don’t remember.” This shocked me because my dad once wrote a novel where every character was called Adam Smythe because they were clones of Adam Smith. Or maybe it was that they were clones named after Adam Smith. I was never really sure — it was a pretty confusing book — every character had the same name for a start. I pointed out how strange it was, considering he had included Adam Smith in a novel he’d written in such a prominent way, that he would forget who Adam Smith was. It soon became clear that he couldn’t remember writing the book either.

Maybe on a different day he’ll remember both the book and who Adam Smith is. His memory is changeable like that. Sometimes the pathways are there and other times they aren’t.

Because he is forgetting things, he has been revisiting them. This year my little sister and I finally arranged to take him on a trip back to Bristol, where he grew up. We’ve been trying to organise it for years. When he saw his childhood home, he was disoriented. Everything was in the wrong place due to the changes to the structure of the house that had happened in the 80 or so years since he was last there. Walls were there when they hadn’t been before; the front of the house was pebble-dashed; the windows were double-glazed. At the back of the house, a field he had walked to school across was now a church. He had specific images he had wanted to re-see, but they weren’t there. Everything looked wrong. He didn’t get what he had hoped to from the experience.

The next day, we took him to the Bristol Museum, which he remembered visiting regularly as a child, but couldn’t remember why he had gone there. He wanted explanation rather than re-creation. When we got to the museum, we thought this part of the trip would be disappointing to him too: it turned out that the original museum had been bombed in the war. It wasn’t even the same building, so how could it jog his memory? But the exhibits that had survived the bombing had been moved into the art gallery next door, which became the modern day Bristol Museum. So as we walked round, he suddenly found himself remembering looking at the same pieces of taxidermy that he’d seen a child. It reminded him that he’d been into animals; that he’d loved animal stories and subscribed to a magazine about zoos. It explained why he had gone there.

He’s currently re-watching the entire series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He came to that show late; he didn’t really get into it when I did. I’m a big fan of the show and have seen it lots of times. I even did my Television Drama dissertation at uni on Buffy. It’s nice that when I drop round and he’s watching it, I can sit with him and watch it too. He gets frustrated that he needs to use subtitles and will occasionally turn them off for a bit. Then reluctantly agrees that he can’t hear well enough to understand what is happening without them. He’s enjoying the show, but not in the same way that he did the first few times he watched it. He often mutters under his breath, trying to set character names or actor names in his mind as they come up. He told me the other day that when he gets to the end, he’s thinking of starting it again, hoping that frequent watching will help him to keep the story in his head.

My dad had a close friend called Charles who died when I was a child. One of my brother’s middle names is Charles in honour of him. When they first met, one of the things that cemented their friendship was reading and talking about the novel Catch 22. My dad decided to read the book again because he couldn’t remember it.

One afternoon, I let myself into his house and found him sitting in his chair holding Catch 22 with an angry look on his face. “Dave,” he said, “this book isn’t right.” I asked him what he meant, and he said, “The story isn’t the one I remember. It doesn’t make sense. I thought it was very different to this. I don’t understand why.”

I only have a vague understanding Catch 22’s plot based on looking up its use as an idiom. I looked it up again when writing this. Wikipedia describes it as a “paradoxical situation from which an individual cannot escape because of contradictory rules.” Which sounds like dementia, I guess.

I first saw Citizen Kane as a teenager in the cinema at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff. My dad had taken me because it’s his favourite film. He idolises its director, Orson Welles. It was a film that changed his life and made him fall in love with the medium of film. It influenced his writing and his documentary making. He had never seen anything like it.

It’s understandable that it blew him away; the film revolutionised the way films were made. It didn’t have that effect on me. I found it boring and melodramatic. My dad and I had many good-natured arguments about it after that.

I may not love Citizen Kane, but I do love film and television. Because of that, I took ‘A’ Level Film Studies where we studied Citizen Kane in depth, some sections of it shot by shot. That changed the way I would talk about it with my dad. I could see even more that, to his eyes, it must have been something new and exciting.

My dad has a cinema veteran’s card, which, when I was a child, meant that he could see pretty much any film for free, and he could take another person too. We made use of it a lot, and it was part of what gave me my love of cinema. By the time I was studying ‘A’ Levels, he was only allowed to see free films before 6:30pm on a weekday, so it was generally less useful. But when I started doing Film Studies, I started going to the cinema with him every week in some of my free periods. Afterwards, we would go to the pub and discuss the films. At the time, Martin Scorsese was to me what Orson Welles was to my dad.

I didn’t revise much for my ‘A’ Level exams, but I got the highest mark in Wales for my Film Studies exam. Thinking back now, I may not have done the kind of revision that I was supposed to do, but watching those films with my dad and breaking them down afterwards was probably excellent preparation.

Coming into my dad’s flat recently, I picked up a package sent by Amazon. I opened it for him and he said, “Oh good, it’s come.” It was a DVD of Citizen Kane. I asked him why he’d ordered a new copy when he already had one. “That one’s not right,” he said. “It’s not the proper version.”

“I’m pretty sure this is the same as the one you already have.”

“No, no, that’s a different version. It has scenes missed out.”

“Are you sure? You remember how you felt about Catch 22?”

The next day when I visited, dad was again sitting in his chair looking distressed.

“This one’s wrong too.”

“Neither of the DVDs suggest that they’re different cuts of the movie. Citizen Kane is probably one of the most famous films there is. They aren’t going to accidentally put out different cuts without people noticing. And haven’t you had the first copy for years? I mean, you’ve watched it before and didn’t think it was wrong. This must be your memory.”

“It can’t be,” he said. “I’ve watched this film so many times. I know what happens in it.”

Talking to my dad about what he thought was wrong with the cut, it seemed to me that his issues fell into two categories: scenes and shots that were missing which I also remembered being in the film, and scenes and shots that I didn’t remember at all.

When we watched it together, I found the bits I also remembered for him, but he still wasn’t happy with them, saying they didn’t feel right. And he was still convinced that whole sequences were missing. He remembers scenes from Charles Foster Kane’s adolescence and from his later life that just aren’t there. We checked a few times. We watched scenes over and over. I read out two full synopsises of the film from IMDB and Wikipedia to prove that the scenes weren’t there. He greeted all of this evidence with scepticism. I can understand that: it’s a film he has seen over and over again; it’s hard to believe that he now suddenly remembers it wrong. But that is what has happened.

He can describe the missing scenes in detail, including specific shots. Some of his descriptions sound like they may have come from other films; others sound like he has just filled in the blanks in the narrative. That’s the thing about Citizen Kane: it’s a film about memory and conflicting narratives, about trying to piece together a man’s life from other people’s memories. It has a lot of blanks to fill in. It’s a film that wants its viewers to form their own ideas about its central character. Maybe my dad’s mind is making subtext into text.

I reminded him that I may not have seen the film as many times as he had, but I did know it intimately. I ran through my own history with the film. I reminded him of Catch 22 and Adam Smith and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Eventually, he came to agree that the issue wasn’t with Citizen Kane.

A few days later, we went through the loop again. It took less time to get back to the conclusion, but it still took time.

None of this has led me to enjoy Citizen Kane any more than I used to. If I found it slow when I first watched it; now I find it uncomfortably slow. I don’t find the characters in it interesting; I don’t find its observations particularly insightful or moving.

On my dad’s wall is a picture of Orson Welles, smoking a cigar and looking at the camera. I wonder if he remembered his own film properly when he died. He died when he was 70, though. Dad has 23 years on him.

I never want to see that damn film ever again. But I do wonder what version of it I will remember when I am old. I wonder how watching it with my dad will affect my memory of it. I now have memories of my dad’s false memories. Will there come a day when my mind adds them into it?

The film has already transformed for me. I’ve always thought of it as emotionally distant and clinical, but now it has a lot of powerful emotions embedded in it for me. It finally has resonances within it that will affect me.

I wonder if one day I will read this all back and find that it has some scenes missing.

This is part of a collection of essays that I will be releasing here on medium weekly over the next few months. Click here to read the introduction.

Read part 4 here: