My car failed emissions inspection today. I had given the car to my parents because we leased another car when we were expecting. The person doing the inspection asked if I had used the car recently, and I shared it had been pretty much un-driven for the past eight months. He said the scanners could not pick up the information, and I need to drive the car 100-200 miles.
“What? Where am I supposed to go?!” I asked, because it’s Covid time. “I’m not planning to go anywhere,” I said. They shrugged and said I had to drive the car.
My dad knows the father of the person who did the inspection, so when I told him about this, he asked me to bring him a pen and paper, so he could write him a letter. He wrote one line in Farsi with some of the best penmanship I’ve seen from him in a very long time. Then I asked him to read to me what he wrote. He shook his head and said that he could not read it. He put the pen down and said he has Alzheimer’s.
He can still remember things, he just can’t remember letters and words. This is aphasia. So I told him he doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, he just has a problem with words. Then I held back tears so he wouldn’t see me cry, because telling stories and writing emails was something my dad did all the time. I did tell him Alzheimer’s would be worse, because if he didn’t remember us or other people or events, things would be even harder.
I got to see my parents today though, so that was good.
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