A song for my father.

• Author: Furbee, Mary Rodd
• Position: Alheimer's patient - Column

Last week, I sang to my seventy-five-year-old father, who has Alzheimer's disease. I took the hands that rarely cease their futile effort to remove the canvas restraints that tie him to his hospital bed, looked into his half-closed eyes, and sang Red River Valley. It was his favorite song.

Slowly, he raised his head, opened his eyes, and gazed up at me like a lost child who has found his mother. When the song ended, this agitated, drugged-up, tied-down, malnourished man who rarely speaks an intelligible word begged for more. So I sang--It's a Long Way to Tipperary, Get Me to the Church on Time, Daisy, Daisy, Rock-a-Bye Baby--eliciting the sweetest imaginable euphoria and calm.

For an hour he gazed at me, transfixed with a joy so powerful that tears streamed down his face. Afterward, he was more relaxed than I had seen him in five years. I was drained and devastated. After the two-hour drive home, I took to my bed, cried in my husband's arms, grieving for this man who once had a life.

The doctors say my father, William Herron Rodd II, has senile dementia of the Alzheimer's variety. Because of that, he has spent most of the last five years at a Veterans Administration neuropsychiatric hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That's more time than he spent as an Army pilot and ambulance driver during World War II.

Twice during these years the VA has discharged him to nursing homes. There, he was gradually taken off the powerful tranquilizers and psychotropic drugs routinely used as "chemical restraints" in psychiatric hospitals. Within weeks, he walked, talked, ate solid foods, gained weight. On good days at the nursing homes, my father thought he was in a fine New York hotel where he had stayed just after returning home from the war. On bad days, he herded us into corners, whispered that he was being held captive by a group of deceptively sweet-looking Mafia thugs, and insisted we come up with a rescue plan.

But he knew his children by name and sauntered proudly about in his favorite khaki pants, V-necked, navy-blue sweater, and blue-jean jacket. He chucked the nursing assistants under their chins, and nodded gallantly to residents shuffling down halls. He thought President Kennedy lived in the nicely furnished, private-pay room down the hall.

But after a few months, my father would decide that no matter how nice a jail it was, he wanted to go home. And come hell or high water, no one would stop him. It took three employees to get this...