My Father Forgot His Own Face, but He Never Forgot His Collar

Eleven Shirts on the Bed

The first time my father refused to get dressed, I found him sitting on the edge of his bed at half past nine in the morning with eleven shirts laid out around him like a hand of cards he could not decide how to play. He was still in his pyjama bottoms. He looked up at me and said, very politely, the way you might speak to a hotel receptionist, "I think someone has been in my cupboard."

Nobody had been in his cupboard except me. I had bought him a stack of soft, round-necked T-shirts the week before because the occupational therapist said they would be easier for him, no buttons, no fiddly bits, just pull it over the head and go. I had folded them neatly into his top drawer and moved his old shirts to the back. It seemed sensible. It was the most practical thing I had done all month.

He would not touch the T-shirts. He held one up to the light and said, "This is a vest." Then he put it down as if it were slightly damp.

The Man Who Ironed His Own Shirts

My father was a bank manager for thirty-four years. He ironed his own shirts every Sunday night in front of the television, five of them, one for each working day, and he did it with the same concentration he gave to everything, the collar first, then the yoke, then the sleeves. As a girl I used to sit on the arm of the couch and watch him do it. He told me once that the collar was the only part people really looked at, and that if the collar was right, a man could get away with almost anything else.

After he retired, he swapped the work shirts for golf. He played every Wednesday and Saturday with the same three men for nineteen years, and the uniform changed but the rule did not. Collar always. He had a whole shelf of golf shirts in navy and white and one faintly scandalous pink one my mother bought him for his sixty-fifth that he wore exactly once a year, on her birthday.

My mother died four years ago. The diagnosis came about eighteen months after that, though when I look back I can see it starting earlier, the car keys in the fridge, the same story told twice at one Sunday lunch. When it became clear he could not live alone, he moved into the room at the back of our house, the one that used to be my sewing room. He brought his golf clubs, which he no longer used, his photograph of my mother, and every shirt he had ever owned.

Losing the Argument Every Morning

For the next three weeks, every morning was a fight. I would lay out a T-shirt. He would look at it with a kind of wounded dignity and refuse. I would explain, patiently, then less patiently, that it would be easier, that he would not have to struggle with the buttons. He would say he did not need things to be easier. Sometimes he would get so upset that he would shout, my gentle father who never raised his voice in my whole childhood, and then he would sit down and look so confused about why he was shouting that I wanted to lie on the floor.

I talked to the support group I had joined at the local church hall, a dozen of us sitting on plastic chairs drinking weak coffee, all looking after someone who was slowly turning into someone else. A woman called Pauline, who had been caring for her husband for six years, listened to me and then asked a question that changed the whole thing. "Is the fight about the buttons," she said, "or is it about whether he is still himself?"

What the Collar Was Holding

I went home and stood in the doorway of his room and watched him for a while. He was sitting in the armchair by the window with a newspaper he could no longer quite follow, and he was wearing one of his old shirts, buttoned wrong, one side of the collar higher than the other. He kept touching it. Running his fingers along the edge, the way some people touch a wedding ring.

It came to me slowly that the collar was not a piece of clothing to him. It was a fact. It was proof that he was the man who ironed shirts on Sunday nights and walked into a bank at quarter to eight and played off a nine handicap. The T-shirts, to him, were the uniform of someone who had given up. Of a patient. He might not always know my name any more, but he knew, with perfect clarity, that he was not that.

Finding the Middle Ground

So I stopped fighting the collar and started fighting the buttons instead. I went looking for polo shirts with just two or three buttons at the neck, the kind you can pull over your head mostly done up. Soft cotton, a proper collar that stays put, nothing stiff. I bought a few in the colours he used to wear to golf, navy, white, a pale grey, and I hung them on hangers at the front of the wardrobe where his work shirts used to be, at eye level, so he would see them first.

The next morning I did not lay anything out. I just opened the wardrobe and left the room. Twenty minutes later he came into the kitchen in the navy one, with the collar sitting perfectly, and asked if there was any coffee. He looked down at his chest and smoothed the front of the shirt with both hands and said, "This is a good shirt." That was all. No argument. It was the first peaceful morning we had had in a month.

My Son and the Black T-Shirt

My son is fifteen and lives in graphic tees with skulls and band names and slogans I sometimes have to pretend not to understand. One Saturday he came down for breakfast in a black one with some picture across the chest, and my father, who by then often called him by my brother's name, looked at it for a very long time.

I braced myself. I thought he might say something cutting, the way he used to about long hair in the seventies. Instead he reached across the table and touched the print with one finger and said, "Very smart. Very modern." Then he asked my son if he played golf. My son, who has never held a club in his life, said, "Not yet, Grandpa." And the next Wednesday, without anyone asking him to, he went out to the garage and brought in the old golf bag and sat with his grandfather in the back room while my father showed him how to hold a seven iron, his hands remembering exactly what his mind could not.

They did that every Wednesday for four months. My son wore whatever ridiculous T-shirt he liked. My father wore a collar. Neither of them said a word about it.

What I Kept

My father died in March, quietly, in the room that used to be my sewing room. When the undertaker asked what he should wear, I did not hesitate. I chose the pink one. The faintly scandalous one my mother gave him. I ironed it myself on the Sunday night, collar first, then the yoke, then the sleeves, exactly the way I had watched him do it from the arm of the couch forty years ago.

I kept the navy shirt, the first one he put on without a fight. It hangs in my own wardrobe now. Sometimes, when a day with my teenagers or my job or my own ageing body feels like more than I can manage, I touch the collar the way he used to. It does not fix anything. But it reminds me that being yourself is sometimes the very last thing a person lets go of, and that the kindest thing you can do is stop arguing with them about it.