When geologic specimens become rocks become something edible

A few posts back, I wrote about my father-in-law, the mining engineer and professor of geology with the beautiful mind.  As I mentioned, he was world renown for his knowledge.  He had discovered and named fourteen minerals, hand drawing the shape, color, and features he observed under his microscope, personally performing the chemical tests to confirm their composition.  He was a genius.

At 89, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, a cruel, progressive disease that shrinks and dries the brain, rendering the victim demented and unable to process mental functions normally.  I took care of Lloyd during the last years of his life. It was not a burden, but a journey that will always remain one of my fondest memories.

I was afraid to take care of him at first; he was the powerful mind and backbone of my husband's family, and I was the poor girl from the uneducated Irish-American farm family.  My in-laws had cautioned George about marrying me; what if I was a liar, or drunkard, or gold digger?  (The night before our rehearsal dinner, George brought a prenuptial agreement for me to sign at his parent's insistence, which I did, crying as I did so)  But, time had done what words could not.  They loved me as they loved their own daughters.

Now, nearly twenty years later, I was looking after the great man.  He intimidated me until I saw that he was not Lloyd the scholar, the engineer, the scientist.  He was Lloyd, the little old man who needed guidance, reorientation, and close supervision.  What an experience it was.

Once, noticing his fluttery fingers and picking at things, it occurred to me that all of his life he had kept a journal or day planner.  I bought him a black binder with empty lined pages and a couple pens.  He set to work immediately.  He wrote, doodled, planned, pored over the thing for hours.  

On one particularly fussy and fidgety day, I placed a group of different mineral specimens and a jeweler's loupe on the table in front of him and suggested he examine them and determine origin or characteristics (he talked like that) and make notes in his book.  To my sad surprise and grief, he picked one up, examined it carefully, then tried to eat it.  That cruel disease had stolen his entire professional life, over seventy decades of knowledge and learning and teaching, gone.  

Who ever called Alzheimer's disease 'the long good-bye' was right on.