Losing North

Losing North

by Catherine Jagoe

Photo by Alan Attie

My father’s hands are large and dry, with broad, spatulate fingers and short nails. The backs are thickly freckled and hairy, with swollen blue veins meandering across them like rivers on a map. I know these hands almost as well as my own. In the land of my childhood, they are formidably capable. They deal with things that hurt, frighten, stink, or stain: the toxic white blocks of Zip firelighters, electric fences, stinging nettles, barbed wire, blocked toilets, turpentine, razorblades, mousetraps, spiders, carving knives, creosote, and bicycle chains.
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Polaris, the North or Pole Star, lies almost directly in line with the axis of the Earth’s rotation above the North Pole. It stands almost motionless in the sky, and all the stars of the Northern Hemisphere appear to rotate around it. Therefore, it makes an excellent fixed point. For much of human history, when it was obscured by cloud, navigators had no way to chart a course.
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My father’s hands don’t know how to iron a shirt, cook a meal, bake a cake, or soothe a crying child. When we kids misbehave, he smacks us hard, making a loud, hollow sound. When sorely provoked, he threatens to leave the marks of all five fingers on our backsides. He has a short fuse, and sometimes makes good on this threat.
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In the beginning, we all assume he’s going deaf. When we have to back up and explain things, we think it’s because he’s missed a crucial point in the conversation—too many people talking at once, not the right register, the dog barking in the background. He’s impatient, as always, as if it were someone else’s fault. He refuses to consider a hearing aid. My mother says he could never bear to wear something that would advertise a handicap.
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Dad is good at orienteering, a sport that became popular in Britain in the 1960s. It’s cross-country running minus the trail. Competitors start individually, at staggered intervals. They are given a map and have to find their way to a set of checkpoints with the aid of a compass. The runner who locates all the points in the shortest time wins. Dad comes back from these events muddy, soaked, and jubilant. He plans our Sunday hikes, unfolding one of the dozens of Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 maps and tracing a route with his blunt forefinger. Sometimes he measures the distance with a piece of string. Walking in the mountains, he often pauses ahead of us with his hands on his hips, scans the landscape, checks our bearings, and announces in ringing tones, “All right, press on, press on!”
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When the information he’s missed involves something I’m saying, I take it personally, as a sign of his longstanding inattentiveness to me. I think, bitterly, that my life isn’t of enough interest for him to concentrate on what I’m saying. Over the next couple of years, however, he begins asking questions about things we’ve just explained. Occasionally, he repeats himself in conversation. These moments cause an excruciating frisson of embarrassment for everyone present. There’s a momentary hush, and then we rush to fill the silence, erase what’s just happened.
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He handles so much, as a father, a biology teacher, an officer in the school’s Combined Cadet Force, and a conservationist with the local wildlife trust. He is so unswerving in his opinions that he can strike people as arrogant and high-handed.
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It’s as if he momentarily loses his bearings. And we’re equally lost; there’s no way of knowing where things are headed. We confer among ourselves, in hushed tones, about his unnamed “problem.” We have no way to tell if it will get worse, and if so, how bad it will become, or how fast.
                                                                *
His hands yank the recalcitrant lawn mower into motion, change lightbulbs, wire plugs, and brush all of our shoes with Kiwi shoe polish. They fill the hod with coke for the kitchen stove. They shovel horse dung and plant runner beans, lettuce, onions, Brussels sprouts. They turn a nearby wasteland into a nature preserve, clearing brush and heaping it onto bonfires. They pick up otter scat and owl pellets. They replace roof tiles. They prune fruit trees. They wrangle heavy farm gates open. They measure the car’s leaky tires with a pressure gauge. They pull a church bell rope on Sundays. They hold the dinghy’s tiller. They bash just-caught mackerel against the side of the boat until they stop lurching.
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Dad is a teacher, but he never teaches me how to read a map. He considers this masculine territory. Every year, he leads an adventure training course in the Scottish Highlands for pupils from the boys’ school where he works. Eventually, my younger brother starts going too, but I am never invited, despite my protestations. The boys learn orientation and other mountaineering skills: the use of crampons and ice-axes, how and where to pitch a tent, how to recognize signs of hypothermia and what to do about it, how to avoid and survive an avalanche. The closest I get to map-reading is geography class at my all-girls’ school. My resentment about this rankles for decades. I wish that he’d shared his skills, taught me how to find my own way. I don’t want to have to depend on him, or anyone, to show me where to go. I want to have adventures of my own.
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The word “handsome” derives from Middle English “handsom,” meaning “handy.” Nowadays, it means “having a pleasing and usually impressive or dignified appearance; marked by skill or cleverness; marked by graciousness or generosity; appropriate or fitting; moderately large.” At 6' 1½" my father is all of these things: straight-backed, broad-chested, and imposing, with neatly-trimmed brown (and later snow-white) hair and keen blue eyes guarded by glasses. He dresses like so many middle-class British men of his generation: button-down striped or checked Marks & Spencer’s shirts, a tweed jacket and tie for work, and well-worn leather Oxfords. On weekdays, he dons bicycle clips to ride the two miles to work.
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Dad keeps a diary—not a journal, but a to-do list. He gets a new one every Christmas, always a Lett’s diary: leather-bound, tall, and slim enough to fit in a pocket. He records upcoming appointments and events in his cramped, precise hand with a black Biro. He starts listing more and more things each day. The diary becomes a talisman: opened, closed, and pored over so frequently that the covers begin to look shabby.
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As he journeys further into the fog, my mother and I sorely miss his sense of orientation, but in different ways: she misses him as the family navigator in the car, whereas I miss his hiking skills. I rue the fact that he didn’t teach me how to use a compass. I don’t trust myself to read the map correctly on strange terrain. I love hiking in wild places, but in the mountains, as my father often stressed, losing your way can mean death.
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His hands write the checks, open the bills, grasp the steering wheel, and control the TV remote. They grade thousands of biology student assignments. They batter tent pegs into the ground with a mallet. They lift white rats out of cages by the base of their tails. They dissect frogs, and sheep’s eyes. They euthanize litters of puppies with chloroform from his school lab, then bury them.
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My father has dominion over every key in the house: the keys to the car, the front and back doors, the shed, the French windows. It is his job as head of the household to lock the doors at night. Before going to bed, he hangs the keys on a hook in the kitchen. But now he starts worrying that he’s forgotten to lock up. He begins taking the keys upstairs with him to bed. If he can’t instantly lay a hand on them when he wakes up at night, he can’t get back to sleep, and goes looking for them. He is jealous of his power over them, like Tolkien’s Smaug, afraid they’ll be filched; but also afraid he might fail to protect the household—that the car might be stolen, or the house broken into—as if some unspecified threat looms over the family, a danger he’s incapable of averting.
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In retirement, he leads my mother on long-distance treks—the 175 miles of Offa’s Dyke on the Welsh border, and the 500-mile Camino de Santiago in Northern Spain, while I am living in Barcelona and trying to make my way as a translator. I join them for the last week, envying his stamina and certainty. With him around, I never bother to check the map. There’s no need; he always knows the way. I enjoy the ease of this, but it irks me. I know it is not serving me well. I am sharp and surly with him, angry that I’m not practicing how to find my own way.
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In Spanish, the language I’ve worked with all my adult life, the idiom perder el norte (literally, “to lose the north”) means to lose your way in life, to become disoriented, to behave erratically, inappropriately, uncharacteristically; it can even mean to lose one’s mind. The saying refers to the North Star, the only thing in the heavens that appears not to move.
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Warning sign: Dad, the orienteer, the family navigator, starts getting lost in the night going to the bathroom, even that most intimate geography becoming unfamiliar.
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His hands make a rickety swing under the plum tree with a plank and some rope, and build a bench high up on the bank so we can sit and look out at the Welsh mountains. But Dad is not particularly “handy”: he has no workbench, no proper carpenter’s tools, no real inclination or skill for DIY projects. He mends or builds things, when he can, only because money is always tight and it’s cheaper than hiring someone. He says ruefully that his carpentry is of the “Heath Robinson” variety, meaning eccentric, cobbled-together and makeshift. He’s much happier out of doors, on the mountains or in the garden.
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Five years in, his sleep becomes increasingly disturbed and erratic. When not fretting about the keys, he sometimes mistakes night for day and becomes convinced he’s needed elsewhere. Once, he gets up at 3 a.m. and starts dressing, declaring he’s going to a regatta on the Nile. “I think it was the water heater chugging,” my mother says. “It made him think he was on a boat.” Such incidents become more common. At night, a shadow self emerges that is much more lost and disoriented than the person masking his difficulties by day, a person who still holds considerable authority.
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I move often, to places that require new way-finding skills on multiple levels. I go away to college, but have to drop out due to a breakdown. I spend half a year living in a tent in Brittany in Northern France, working for a camping firm. I am physically strong but emotionally raw and fragile, still lost in the dark fog of clinical depression that’s caused this detour off the road to getting my degree. I self-medicate my own lostness by walking for hours in my free time, exploring my new surroundings, trying to reintegrate body and soul with the earth. Early on, I embark on a loop hike. The track on the map leads past a farm, from which three large, brindled dogs erupt, baying and lunging. I quail, but stand my ground. Two young men emerge and ask me where I’m going. “Following the public footpath,” I say, and point obstinately at the map. “You’ll find the map is wrong,” they say. I refuse to believe this, and continue. But it really does dead end, in a field full of rabbit hutches. I retrace my steps, abashed. The two young farmers eye me in amusement, this eccentric and pig-headed English girl. I realize I’ve acted just like my father.
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In 2009, seven years after his symptoms first appear, Dad is still—just—able to give a speech at my parents’ golden wedding celebration. He has the outline written on note-cards, and fumbles through it. He looks disheveled, rumpled, faded, anxious. It makes me anxious too, not knowing if he’s going to get through it without embarrassing himself and other people. But, somehow, he does.
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For decades, my father’s hands operate the only camera in the house. He delivers rolls of film to be developed at the chemist’s and makes endless albums, carefully inscribing the back of each photograph with the date, place, and names of the people in it. He keeps boxes of labeled slides, and once a year puts on a family memory show, running the projector, clicking the control for each image to advance and slot noisily into place. Thus, he chronicles our family’s life in pictures, the self-appointed archivist who arranges and curates our memories.
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Over time, my parents’ social life contracts. Some of their friends are unable to handle the awkwardness of my father’s changed circumstances, his repeated questions. Long-distance travel dwindles, along with dinner parties and trips to lectures. But he continues to sing in a choral society, ring bells, go grocery shopping, drive, do the crossword puzzle, read the paper, and work in the garden. For nine years, he travels a slight incline that leads inexorably downward, although at times it appears to be a plateau.
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His hands choose, buy, and inscribe books for me throughout my childhood. He loves tales of odysseys and travel: Swallows and Amazons, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings. He reads these to me at night, in the little bedroom I occupy when we first move up north, the one with climbing roses at the window.
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He starts wetting the bed. My mother purchases a waterproof pad for the mattress, then incontinence shields, then adult diapers. He cannot remember why he has these on, and removes them in the night, perplexed by their presence. My parents share a double bed, as they have since their wedding in 1959. My mother is desperate for a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. When I ask her about the nights, she sighs miserably. He’s become a handicap for her, a weight she must now carry. “In sickness and in health,” she says, resolutely. “That’s what we promised each other, and that’s what I’ll do.”
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His hand over mine on his arm, stiff and awkward, as we walk across the churchyard, up the sandstone steps and down the aisle of Saint Anne’s chapel, on my wedding day. His hands holding the Guardian at the breakfast table, a screen from behind which he rarely speaks. His hands spreading butter and marmalade on toast, or stirring sugar into his tea. The way he sticks his finger into dishes on the table to taste them.
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I move to the US. Here, people seem to be hard-wired with internal compasses. They flummox me by giving directions using the cardinal points—east, west, north, or south—not left or right, as in England. There are no public rights of way over farmland, no maps comparable to the Ordnance Survey series I’m used to. In our new home in Wisconsin, my husband, Ned, and I feel hemmed in. So much land, and no access to it. One drives to a park and walks tamely around it on the permitted trails, which are often paved and distressingly short. In fall, the parks swarm with men in camouflage and blaze orange, carrying rifles, which precludes hiking at all. Whenever we can, Ned and I escape to Britain for long-distance, high-country hikes. He’s a lot more patient than my father and teaches me the rudiments of using a compass.
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Dad is in the hospital, where he’s had a hip replacement, but he can’t remember this. The only way to prevent him from walking out is to keep watch over him day and night. We take turns sitting by his bedside in twelve-hour shifts. We remind him he’s had an operation, remonstrate with him about the recommended way to get up and down with a brand-new hip joint, and escort him to the bathroom. At night, he stumbles around in the dark, sleepless, suspicious, and belligerent. “What the devil has been done to me? Crazy business!” At times, I’m afraid he’s going to hit me.
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During my mother’s various operations, Dad spends short stints in a local nursing home, on the “EMI” wing, euphemistically named “Skylark.” EMI is a social-service acronym in the UK for “elderly mentally infirm.” My father has lost terra firma, his footing in the world. But how to explain how alert and intelligent he looks, in that place full of human shipwrecks—how whenever I walk in, he’s always sitting bolt upright by the exit, gripping his walking-stick, perfectly groomed, a sentinel among the vacant sleepers, hailing passers-by?
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In 2013, we move to Spain, to an apartment where you can see the mountains from every room. As always, they act on me like a magnet. I am overcome with longing to be out on them; I’m happiest when clambering upwards, smelling the thyme and jara. But Spanish maps aren’t good, and I don’t know these mountains, so I’m dependent on men—my husband, our mountaineering friend—to take me on expeditions. Sometimes this makes me desperate. I hate that I’m prevented from taking up my father’s legacy of mountain hiking because of my gender and the ignorance and timorousness it’s entailed. During that year, I come to the realization that I have to teach myself how to navigate so that I can go out in the mountains alone if necessary. I can’t wait all my life for some man. It’s not going to be easy; I will have to deal with fear and with getting lost, and with the fear of getting lost.
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Eventually, Dad becomes incapable of reading the paper, or anything else, because he can’t retain the story-line from one paragraph to the next. In a house crammed with books, he stops reading, although he often picks up a volume and leafs through it, stroking the pages. He stops being able to butter his own toast. His social filters get mangled so at a wedding he reaches across the table to the bemused guests opposite and helps himself to spoonsful of their desserts.
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In navigation, dead reckoning is the process of deducing where you are, or will be, based on your course and speed relative to a “fix,” a motionless object. It’s used when celestial navigation is not possible—when the North Star, for example, is not visible. Although we do not speak of this to each other, we privately try to estimate how long Dad has left before death, how fast or slow his trajectory will be.
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In 2014, during my vigil with him at the hospital, I stay sane by going out for two-hour walks every day. By this time, I’m trying to teach myself to use a map so I can hike alone when and where I want to. At the appointed hour, I change into my boots and hurry outside, Dad’s compass in my pocket, to explore the maze of muddy back lanes, or wend my way cross-country to the canal. Once, in driving rain, I manage to follow a circuitous right of way across the busy A5 highway and over farmland to a nearby Iron Age hill fort, returning sodden but elated. I like the challenge of finding my way on foot to new places. The process itself can be scary and frustrating, but I get a glow of satisfaction when I succeed in following a route I’ve traced on a map. This marks a change, because I’m finally getting where I want to go.
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The losses my father endures come with an unexpected solace for me: losing his skills and power makes him emotionally accessible in a way he never was before. This change is nowhere more apparent than in his hands. They are no longer authoritarian. They are needy. He reaches and calls out to people, eager for contact, although muddled about who they are and where he is.
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Despite his dignified appearance, in the thirteenth and fourteenth years he gradually loses the ability to walk, then the ability to get up out of a chair; the ability to shift position once in bed, or to get into and out of it. He has to be monitored for bed sores. He becomes unable to feed, wash, or dress himself, shave, or brush his teeth. He sees the mechanical hoist required to move him from bed to chair, and vice versa, as an instrument of torture, having no way to interpret its menacing advance, or the presence of the two strangers in uniform required to operate it. In the final months, his ability to hold a conversation of any kind is largely reduced to bellowing “Away! Goodbye!” in stentorian tones. In the last weeks, he forgets the mechanics of swallowing, leaving pouches of half-chewed food in his mouth. One day, he closes his mouth and refuses the spoon altogether.
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During his last years, everything revolves around him like the Pole Star, or magnetic north: my mother, my siblings, his various carers. He is the fixed point of our home. He is also, patently, unfixable.
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I can still feel his hands, strong but tremulous and unsure, grasping my own with surprising strength every time I arrive. Sometimes they feel cold and stiff, but they warm up when he sings. So often, the squeezing of hands is accompanied by his faded blue eyes filling with tears, a rasp as he clears his throat, flounders about for my name, gets it wrong, shouts the correction out loud. His hands wielding a white cotton handkerchief, blowing his nose noisily. There is no mistaking his hands, or his tears; no misinterpreting the pleasure on his face when I come in. For the first time, I know that I’m loved.
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My father dies at home in 2016, early in the morning, singing about traveling into the unknown. He is belting out the chorus to “Shenandoah”: Away, I’m bound away, across the wide Missouri.
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His hands planted dozens of oak saplings all over town. Over the decades, they’ve grown big and hoary; some are clustered on a bend of the road to the school where he worked, a bend that has now been by-passed by the new road.
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After his death, I clean out the roll-top desk that was his province. All his diaries are there. It’s heartbreaking to watch the progress of the disease in them, the number of entries rising, the evidence of increasing uncertainty as entries are crossed out or amended. He started recording not only future events, but what he had done every day, trying to anchor himself in time, with way-markers behind and in front. “Went Shrewsbury with June.” The handwriting getting fainter and more shaky, like Scott’s last entries. Days starting to go blank. Then weeks. The last entry was Friday, May 9, 2014. “John and Pippa Scorer came for coffee and brought us some delicious cake. David James came in the morning and did a spot of gardening.” He made no more entries thereafter. Along with the diaries is his compass, which I instinctively, and without asking anyone’s permission, slip into my pocket.
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“Home lies in re-membering,” writes Lauret Savoy. I have to go back to my journals, to the names and facts I scrawled on yellow pads in Dad’s last years, to piece together the fragments of what I know into a life, a family history. To re-collect a web of relationships and places, to examine and weigh them, decide how to tell the story. This, after all, is the terrain of memoir writers. The terrain I am teaching myself, slowly, to navigate alone.
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Growing up, I wished his hands could be more loving, that he’d put his arm around my shoulder sometimes. But he was not physically demonstrative, at least not with people. He could be tender to animals, though. He would stroke the dog’s soft, black-and-tan ears absent-mindedly. He always called out to strange dogs, eager to pet them. In one photo I have on my desk, he is bent over, reaching out to a baby hedgehog on the lawn. On close inspection, I see that he is holding out a bent forefinger for the hedgehog to sniff. Another time, his hands were badly bitten by fleas after he picked up a dead badger from the side of the road and brought it home to bury.
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“Memory is the only way home,” writes Terry Tempest Williams. For my father, dementia was a form of psychic eviction. Even though he was never physically homeless, since my mother—at immense personal sacrifice—cared for him at home for fourteen years, until the end of his days, it’s painful to think of him becoming unmoored from that real and ever-present place of residence, unable to find his way back to it, as his memory failed. “Dad is not sure this is his house,” reads one of my journal entries for 2012. When you cannot orient yourself, retain your basic coordinates, each day becomes a foreign country, with no way to tell whether it is benign or hostile territory. The things he clung to until the end, the only remaining constellations in his firmament: the names of his wife and four children, and the name of his home. But he was no longer sure which of us was which, and by the end, he kept asking to go home even though he was already there.
                                                                *
I bring his compass back to America with me. Not long after the funeral, on my first-ever trip to Wyoming, I drive across the Missouri, which Dad never got to see. I’m to spend a month at an artists’ colony, and while there, I’m determined to go hiking in the foothills of the Bighorns. As always, I’m afraid of getting lost. In Wyoming, there are no little wooden signposts with acorns engraved next to the words “Public Footpath,” showing the distance to the next location, no other walkers to consult; and, to my untrained eye, no readily apparent landmarks. Wave after wave of seemingly identical hills stretch before me on my first hike, and the map I have is patently inadequate. The danger of losing my way is very real and the consequences for doing so—in late November, with snow on the ground—serious, potentially fatal. Call me crazy, but I pack a bag of cornmeal and Dad’s compass; in my pocket is a small stone taken from his grave. At each fork in the track, I pour an arrow of yellow cornmeal on the ground, pointing back to the start. I try not to think of Hansel and Gretel getting lost and possibly eaten. But my unorthodox method of way-finding works, and I’m able to go exploring multiple times and return safely.
                                                                *
The last time I saw him alive, he was lying in his hospital bed in the dining room. My mother had been singing to him. It was early morning, and he was happy. When I told him I had to drive to the airport to fly back to America, he teared up. I took his hand and kissed it, kissed his cheek, gazed into his eyes. There was no need for words.
                                                                *
I have yet to master the technique of triangulation, a crucial skill for navigation whereby you connect three features of the landscape around you in order to locate your own coordinates in the triangle where they intersect. But now, at least, I can find north, which means I can always figure out roughly what direction to go in,

Photo by Alan Attie

even if I’m not sure exactly where I am. My father can no longer teach me way-finding, but the need to ramble and roam—that much, at least, he handed down. In unknown territory, I take his compass, which I wear around my neck the way he did, on its army-green cord. I feel its reassuring weight on my sternum, about the level of my heart.