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In the last five years of my father’s life, he changed in a very disturbing way I could not understand. I am an only child, so my father turned to me, almost immediately after my mother died, for my help in finding a housekeeper—with privileges. At 88 he was unprepared to live alone, but his solution was to pay someone to provide companionship and sex. His plan was completely out of character for the thoughtful, principled father I’d always loved and admired, one who had, as far as I’d known, been happily and faithfully married to my mother for 60 years. How could such a person, a feminist, suddenly see sex as a function any women he hired should be expected to provide?
The handy explanation, that old age had made him lecherous, did not feel right.
Talking it out shed no light. When I reminded my father that his plan was, among things, illegal, he accused me of being a prude. “Where have you been? Haven’t you heard about the sexual revolution? What about geishas? Other cultures have arrangements.” His bizarre employment scheme aside, in every other way he seemed himself; his interests were as far-reaching, his political arguments as vigorous. He intended to live exactly as he had been—wintering in Mexico, enjoying the activities and social life of his Westchester country club—but he had no interest in dating any of the lovely widows his friends suggested.
The situation got stranger. When I arranged for us to meet the respondents to the ads I ran, he treated the interviews as a dating preamble. And then he went behind my back to hire a string of preposterous misfits who moved in only to stomp off after several months in a huff or with a threat, and in one case was removed by 911 workers to a psych ward. No matter the intellectual or temperamental mismatch, my father was delighted with his finds and tried his best to sweep them off their feet. That my brilliant father could be content with women so lacking in the qualities of my spirited, accomplished mother now seems to me even more bizarre than his sexual agenda.
What was happening should have been obvious, but it wasn't to me. Nor was it to any of the friends I consulted, though many had similar tales about their own parents: a mother whose language coarsened, a father who wanted to set up house with a prostitute, a father who made a pass at his daughter-in-law, a mother who stripped at the dinner table. Everyone waved away the conduct, however distressing, as a preoccupation with sex typical in older people.
Like my friends, I rationalized. Perhaps my father was shaken by my mother’s death and lacked the energy for another relationship so late in life. Perhaps he was nostalgic for his youth and wanted to take advantage of his sudden late-life bachelorhood. Boys will be boys, after all. Mostly, I tried not to think that an unsavory, previously hidden part of my father was being exposed. We don’t like to think of our parents’ sex lives (although we wouldn’t be here without it), and so I didn’t.
The right answer turned out to have been staring me in the face the whole time.
After his death, though, I searched for answers. Google offered links to sex addiction and hyper-sexual disorder in nursing homes, where patients with dementia may masturbate publicly or force themselves on other patients, a far cry from my father’s actions. Pushing on and on, I finally came to the symptoms of frontal lobe dementia: sexual disinhibition, a loss of judgment, and of awareness of appropriate behavior. Bingo. The diagnosis fit perfectly and immediately explained the exploitative womanizer I’d been struggling with. My father had been suffering from the same brain disorder as people on in-patient memory units but to a lesser degree.
Why had I not seen the obvious?
The facts about late-life brain deterioration that is common knowledge in the dementia world have not made their way to the rest of us. Our minds do not go to brain atrophy when we see our aging parents acting oddly around sex. And yet, as soon as the truth hit me, it seemed obvious. How could I not have seen it? Because the taboo kept me from looking closer. And because for thousands of years, we have framed the syndrome another way.
After all, the phenomenon has existed ever since human beings lived long enough to experience it, and a way of viewing it developed when no one knew about the workings of the brain. The stereotype of the “dirty old man” has been around at least since the Romans. The often farcical image of the leering, lecherous grandpa (or grandma) is so pervasive that we accept it as a normal part of aging.
But, in fact, the elderly are no more preoccupied with sex than the rest of us, who have sexual thoughts all day long (it’s what keeps the human race going, after all). The only difference is that we retain judgment and self-awareness not to act on these thoughts. The atrophy of brain cells is as physiological a change as the degeneration of the inner ear neurons that causes hearing loss—and is similarly unrelated to character.
It may seem like a small shift to realize that inappropriate sexual behavior in the elderly is not a matter of psychology but of neurology. And yet that shift is all it takes to remove the anguish of the millions of us who witness what appears to be a grotesque and shameful decline in an aged parent or spouse. In an instant, the person we love and admire is returned to us.
