My Father's Ghost

When Suzy McKee Charnas realized that her father could no longer care for himself, she invited him to come live in the old adobe "in-law" cottage beside her own in New Mexico. This memoir of the last seventeen years of her father's life traces a parent-child relationship inverted by the changes of aging.
Robin McKee left his wife and two children to live alone when Charnas was eight years old. A children's book illustrator until the time he left, afterward he lived a meager life in Greenwich Village, dedicating himself to his painting. When he arrived in New Mexico, Charnas's father was in many ways a stranger to her. As she drove him to the grocery store or to the bank or picked him up off the floor after he had fallen, she struggled to understand this man whose former artistic ambition now hung like a shadow over his old age. In this beautifully written account of the last chapter in their relationship, Charnas reflects on the difficulty of caring for an aging parent even as she reveals that her father's inability to care for himself afforded them both the opportunity to bridge a gap they might otherwise never have bridged.