He’d pulled shrapnel out of the skulls of servicemen at the Clark Air Base in the Philippines during the Vietnam War. He had scooped uncurled gray matter off the emergency room floor, hoping to stuff it back in the heads of accident victims. Beauregard Lee Bercaw had seen young people die of meningitis faster than their parents could get them to the hospital. But I knew that fair meant nothing to my father. It wasn’t fair or logical to ask a child to kill her own parent. My brain was unable to reconcile to his request. He knew I could shoot them because he had taught me how to.īefore I could speak, he leapt up from his chair. He collected guns and kept them under lock and key. Swear that you will put a gun to my head if I wind up like my father. I knew it meant that a drastic statement was imminent. On one of these occasions, he suddenly looked up from his Sudoku game and stared at me intensely. What are you saving your mind for, Dad? I often asked myself. He rarely uttered the name of this disease to me, reserving it for clinical use only. He was trying to stave off what had killed his father. Even when I was visiting, he would sit silently on his leather recliner with a calculator, verifying the accuracy of his mental arithmetic and his memory of the results. After retiring from his neurology practice in Naples, Florida, my father spent hours a day doing math in his head.
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