On Losing a Loved One to Alzheimer's—and Trumpism

I got to be with him on his 85^th birthday, to sit with him, and my sister, and our parents. My brothers got to be with him that week too. He still remembered us and loved us as he always has. I got to tell him how much I love him and how lucky I am to have him as a grandpa, and how I wouldn’t be who I am without him. I am so damn grateful for that. It’s a lot worse when you don’t get the chance to say what’s in your heart and spend the rest of your life regretting it.

And yet, I knew what I was saying wouldn’t stick. He wouldn’t remember those last days together like I would, and do, but it was still him there, with us, in the present of those moments. And he was happy to be with us — tired, eroding, but happy. And I was happy to be with him. I couldn’t get caught up dropping pennies down a well, hoping the things we were saying to him would reach some deeper core of his memory, and risk missing the genuine, luminous smile rippling over his face again and again as we sat there talking and listening. 

These were small blessings amid an altogether devastating time for our family. And I am grateful for every second we shared together. Sitting on the bed that had been moved to the living room, I was torturously aware of how precious and fleeting and final every one of those seconds was as they passed, and I didn’t take a single one for granted.

That is also why, over the course of those last two days, I became so volcanically, quietly enraged about the fact that so much of our time was consumed by repeatedly talking about Fox News, One America News (OAN) and Donald Trump.

The content of those conversations is for the family’s ears only — I won’t get into specifics here. I want to honor Gramps and celebrate the beautiful life he’s lived, to show him nothing but respect and love and support in this most vulnerable stage of his life, not reduce him to the disease that’s killing him or the things it makes him say. Suffice it to say that, as the hours passed away over those two days of conversation, reflection, laughter, and silence, rehashing the same roundabout discussion concerning the fate of the country and the only ​“news” channels telling the ​“truth,” I got to see up close how the right-wing fear machine preys on the human brain, especially when its defenses are down. 

No short-term memory, no connection to the world outside his home that wasn’t filtered through a screen. A lot of love for the people he knows, a lot of fear about the future his grand- and great-grandchildren will have to face. I saw in my dying grandpa, sitting on that armchair, right-wing media’s ideal viewer. 

Gramps was always there. Always at basketball games and birthday parties, always encouraging us and being our biggest cheerleader, next to our parents. He’s a constant, warm presence in my memories from home for a reason, and I see so much of his imprint on the person I am and the life I have today. He has always been a wonderful, loving, funny and often brutally honest grandpa. We forged a strong sense of who we are and where we come from through Gramps and his stories. Any gifts I have as a storyteller, I inherited from Gramps. And when he does take his final rest, his stories and his memory will live on in us, and it will forever be a blessing.

My mom always jokingly said that we are ​“southern-fried Mexicans,” and we’re proud of it — I still love eating scrapple with eggs and salsa. And Gramps was our living connection to those family roots in poor white North Carolina, where he was born at the tail end of the Depression. Everything and everyone else before that were still just black-and-white photographs and stories of stories in our child minds. But Gramps was walking, talking history; his stories and tall tales of when he was our age captivated us. From the story about getting kicked off a city bus after defiantly giving up his seat to a tired, elderly Black woman, to our favorite yarn about the deadly ​“whip snake,” a folklore beast of the southern wild that would supposedly put its tail in its mouth to form itself into a wheel, roll towards its prey at top speed, and then use the same tail to whip them to death. We believed in the whip snake for an embarrassingly long time, probably because we just loved hearing Gramps tell the story. On this last trip, my sister MacKenna and I asked him where the story came from before saying our goodbyes. Was it part of some deep regional lore? A family fable passed down through the generations? ​“No,” he laughed. ​“I must have just made that shit up in my head.”

People are complicated, life is complicated. Gramps is too. And he’s lived a hell of a life: Growing up with parents who couldn’t read and twelve siblings; working his first job shagging balls at the golf course of a local country club when he was six, to later cutting trees in the Bayou with his brothers to make way for the phone lines, to working at a steel mill in California before making a career in real estate; meeting my grandma, Jeannie, getting married when he was 17, raising my mom, Regina, and my uncles Mark and Evan, getting divorced, remarrying years later to Mary, a truly lovely and loving woman, then losing her to cancer; playing and loving golf throughout his life; bragging about his grandkids to anyone who would listen; helplessly watching the 2008 crash and the Recession hit his family so hard and wipe away so much of the world and industry he knew; seeing his siblings and former wives and best friends pass away one by one as old age and increasingly severe health ailments ate away at his independence and freedom of movement like termites.

I’ve always known that people can have many different reasons for supporting Trump, and that Trump supporters can come in many different forms, because I have them in my own family. I never believed that the Trump phenomenon could be explained away by reducing it to the most caricaturesque qualities and racist, sexist, xenophobic, authoritarian tendencies of the true-believing ​“deplorables.” Gramps, the man I know and love, the man you’ve been reading about here, is a Trump supporter. My dad, Jesus, a Mexican immigrant and U.S. citizen who lost everything in the Great Recession, including the house we grew up in, voted for Trump in 2016.

Gramps used to be a Democrat until Reagan, and his politics, as long as I’ve known him, have always been a mixture of mainstream Republican Party and Fox News views, love and pride and concern for his family and country, and a personal philosophy of live and let live, work hard, have a good time, don’t be an asshole, and enjoy people. (Gramps loves talking to people, which is what made him such a great realtor, and he is also a gigantic flirt by nature.) But the Trump effect has been slowly reshaping his worldview for a while. And I use the word ​“worldview” deliberately — how he sees the world at large from his physical and social life-world in Southern California — because I have noticed a direct correlation between his heightened fear of the outside world and the state of the country, his drift towards Trump’s fascist politics, and the eight-year process of his life-world shrinking down to the one living room he’s in now.

Spoiler alert: What Nick finds is that the war ended years ago and that he and his fellow anthill-dwellers have been lied to by ​“the ruling elite of both East and West,” kept underground, fearful, working diligently week after week, year after year, to produce robots and munitions to fight a war above ground that they never see with their own eyes. Carefully curated and fabricated depictions of the world on fire above are fed to people in their bunker worlds below on giant TV screens. ​“Everyone … [gazed] at the floor-to-ceiling windscreen. This was their window — their sole window — on the above world, and they took rather seriously what was received on its giant surface.”

Maybe in the pre-Internet days of manufactured consent, I thought, when cable TV was the dominant medium, Dick’s allegory would have more reality-explaining power. But our twenty-first-century world is too open, information is too freely accessible, and the real is too hard to hide from people to imagine the kind of control The Penultimate Truth​’s villains have on their subterranean subjects. Not only have our surveilling, whistleblower-persecuting government and Big Tech oligarchs proven me wrong about that, but I also failed to grasp how Dick’s allegory would become even more sinisterly relevant 60 years later in a hyper-digitalized, techno-feudal society. By their own willful accord and through political manipulation and technological conditioning, people in the digital age have sequestered themselves in their own virtual underground anthills, enveloped in distinct, preferentially curated, and increasingly incompatible visions and experiences of reality.

I was there in the virtual anthill with Gramps, seeing what he sees, seeing what the world outside his window looks like through the Dickian TV screen that only plays two channels: FOX News and OAN. It was very different from the world I see. Immigrants, the ​“trans agenda,” ​“radical left lunatics,” secularism — all are hastening the demise of America from within, and all are pieces in a larger country-destroying plot orchestrated by Democrats and ​“woke-agenda”-pushing elites. I’m betting you know someone who lives in that same anthill. And you may be living in another one yourself, a different one. When you, like me, look to screens to access the world beyond the physical realm of your daily life-world, depending on what apps you use, what accounts you follow, what channels you watch, what sites you trust, what podcasts you listen to, etc., you may be seeing and imagining a fundamentally different world to the one the person sitting next to you on the bus sees.

What Dick understood 60 years ago, and what I think a lot of us who are not on the right need to remember in this perilous moment, is that people’s politics can and always do flow downstream from their perception of the world they believe they’re living in. That has always been true about us. It’s as true now as it was when people supported Red Scare McCarthyism or the Stalinist purges; when people in Germany supported the Nazis’ genocide back then or people in Israel support the Zionists’ genocide today; when people across this ever-expanding settler nation supported the enslavement of Black people and the extermination of Indigenous populations living on this land while it was all happening in front of them; when people believed their neighbors were witches and supported their executions. The darkest sides and most inhumane capabilities of human politics tend to come out when they seem like the natural, necessary, permissible, and accomplishable solution that will ostensibly address a real crisis people are feeling in their daily life-worlds, and that will eradicate an evil that a critical mass of people believe to be real and believe to be the source of that crisis.

That has always been the missing piece, in my opinion, when it comes to our pundits’ collective attempts to understand how this or that group of people could be driven to embrace Trump ever since the joke and the nightmare both became reality eight years ago. For certain sections of Trump’s base, the hateful ideology and manifestly fascist sides of MAGA are what attracts them, but that’s not what has drawn in so many other people who genuinely believe they’re not inclined or susceptible to fascist politics. The desire for fascist politics and the acceptance of fascist ​“solutions” to society’s ills develops and seeps in over time. It follows from people becoming convinced that it’s the obvious and necessary response to the right-wing presentation of reality that’s recycled on their screens over and over, hardening into the contact lens through which someone like my grandpa squintingly, fearfully observes the world beyond their daily physical sight and social connections. The same lens through which Trump and his promises appear to be the obvious and necessary answer to the crumbling world that Trump depicts at his rallies and that right-wing media and right-wing-preferenced newsfeeds redepict day after day.

What I have observed firsthand with Gramps for years, and what I suspect is true for many, many people like him, is that the worldview-defining capacity of the Trumpian lens increases dramatically the more people’s physical and social life-worlds shrink and they become more dependent on that lens to be ​“their window — their sole window — on the above world.” This is not a new phenomenon: American capitalist society is always pushing us in antisocial directions, making us feel more alienated from one another, and people’s social life-worlds have been shrinking for decades. (Robert Putnam’s analysis in Bowling Alone still remains one of the starkest reminders of this.) But these trends went into hyperdrive when Covid hit: People have gotten older and sicker and, thus, more fearful and resentful, their physical and social life-worlds have gotten smaller, and two years of social distancing and quarantine conditions provided a unique historic opportunity to have more of their connections to and perceptions of the outside world mediated through screens.

Those changes weren’t temporary and they didn’t simply reverse when the decision was made for us that COVID was ​“over” — they have lingered. Trump and the right-wing media machine have seized upon this situation and exploited it masterfully, and in their dark vision for what needs to come next, they have provided false hope to a lot of broken people who want one thing above all else on the other side: to return to a time when they recall feeling whole.

Gramps will never see that hope realized, but he will die believing it’s still coming. 

I want to be very clear: I know my sick grandpa is a unique example, and I’m not saying everyone who supports Trump and watches right-wing media will end up like him. But he is the ideal subject, the perfect captive audience, the model for the right’s ideal world-viewer that Trump and right-wing media are pushing their followers to become more like. And more of us are closer to being where he is than we care to acknowledge.

But I also saw within him, and I experienced sitting in that small living room he’s now stuck in, an ongoing struggle between this world-swallowing darkness and the lights that temporarily bring him back: direct social contact with people he loves and trusts, love from his family, memories of happiness, and all manner of interpersonal interactions that can counteract the media-amplified sense of doom and remind him that people are mostly good and that your fellow man is no less human than you and not something to be feared. That struggle is playing out on a national, history-defining scale right now, and the only thing more frightening than the view of the world as seen through the Trumpian lens is the prospect of a society ruled and supported by enough people who believe it’s all true and that the obvious and necessary solution is just around the corner.