Mendel Letters 104–15-Minute Cycle
November 19, 2022
Dear Mendel,
In your last couple of years you lived in a Deerfield Beach assisted living home, a very assisted living home. Macular degeneration took the last of your eye sight and your last companion had died. In your nineties you were in the hospital on a regular basis because your lungs would fill with fluid and they had to be drained. I was your health proxy so between you and the doctors I heard all the gory details.
The doctors would not release you from the hospital until they were convinced you could manage. One test was to ask, “Who is the President?” That was your favorite question and you liked to break their chops. Your standard response was “The idiot.” When they asked who the former President was, you said “The other idiot.” The only problem with the game was that they interpreted your responses as dementia and wouldn’t release you. They would call and ask me if I could get you to just give them a name.
Felicia and I tried to visit you at least twice a year, but that wasn’t enough. I drove out to Hofstra on Tuesdays and Thursday mornings, usually between 10 and 11 AM and I used a Bluetooth connection to call from the car. You never figured out how I could drive and talk, I don’t think you believed cell phones were real.
By this time you were on a 15-minute memory cycle. Every fifteen minutes or so you forgot what we were talking about and asked the same questions again and then again. They pretty much followed a pattern. How were the kids? How were the grandkids? What was I doing? Did I her from anyone? And then repeat. Sometimes you added in questions about specific family members, but that became less frequent as your memory continued to fade. Sometimes we even talked about which idiot was in the White House. You died before Trump was elected so you missed the biggest idiot of them all.
I liked the chats. Eight years later, I still miss our morning phone calls during my drive to work.
Your son
Hard copies of these typed letters were discovered in an old camp trunk in the basement storage facility of one of the few buildings that remain standing in this Brooklyn neighborhood. The building is quite decrepit and is scheduled for demolition. The letters were found in November 2048 by a teenager who believes they were written by his great-grandfather. The letters are addressed to Mendel, the letter writer’s father, who appears to have been dead for at least six years when his son, whose name we are unsure of, started to write him. The son appears very agitated in some of the letters. With permission from the family, we are publishing them on the date they were written, only 28 years later.
