Uproar in assisted living!  My father, age 84, still handsome and gallant as Cary Grant, touched an aide’s breast and then hit on a female resident, let’s call her Margo, who responded with some avidity.  Diagnosis: dis-inhibition.  Prescription: Depacote.

I was horrified—not at my darling daddy’s expression of desire but at the grim tamping down.  My father was deep into arteriosclerotic dementia.  Still charming, as I said, and could still bid a bridge game as if he were Goren though two minutes later was playing poker; but nature and other robbers had stolen the rest.

Even in freezing weather, he had to sit outside to puff on a cigar.  He no longer much cared what he ate but didn’t know when to put down his fork: the pleasure of satiety was over. He, who almost never grumped, was querulous about the car keys I’d impounded. So much else forgotten, but every damn day he asked about the car—wanted to drive somewhere, anywhere, away.  If the soft warmth of a woman could stir or soothe him, shouldn’t he have it?

For 50 years, he had had been my mother’s magnificent consort, making every day Valentine’s Day, even after cancer came. His grief when she died was so complete, he seemed to be surrounded by extra air. But he had married at age 23; he scarcely knew how to live except as half of a couple.  He soon dated a local widow; alas, she took ill and kindly sent him away.  He had a brilliantly unsuitable affair with a young new-age masseuse, shocking the town. At age 80, he married a zesty, funny 70-year-old, who was thrilled to find romance after seeing her first husband through decades of illness.

As our mother had instructed us, my brother and I cheered him on in his life as a merry widower and new groom.  “It’s after the best marriages that the survivor loves again,” Mother liked to say, long before she fell ill.  And perhaps the same goes for the children of great marriages; my brother and I really loved our stepmother…love her still.

They had maybe two good years.  Then Daddy spiraled down and out, and our stepmother despaired. She asked my brother and me to take over, find a suitable next home for him, and we ungrudgingly agreed to do so.  We settled on Leafy Acres—nearby, run by trustworthy people, and designed to look and smell like a resort, with a high-ceilinged dining room and richly colored carpets in the corridors.

With my sister-in-law’s energetic help, we did everything we could to make his apartment a home.  We hung our mother’s vibrant landscapes of County Cork on every wall.  We positioned the all-important leather lounge chair in front of the TV.  We supplied Hitchcock movies, Steinbeck novels—at least he would read the spines, and the right kind of coffee cups.  Daddy disliked clunky cups.  But there was no gainsaying the bleakness of the single bed.

Then he found Margo, and I was summoned to a meeting. (My brother was out of the country.) The director of Leafy Acres was an old school friend, and he had great warmth for my father, but the situation was deemed untenable.  I had to agree to the addition of Depacote to his medical regimen, or he was out.

Of course no aide should have his or her person touched in an unwelcome way. And perhaps Margo should have been regarded as out-of-bounds.  She had suffered irreversible brain damage after a bicycle accident.  Her conversational style was decidedly antic.  But she had a smile that never quit and a lively, athletic air.  She still had personhood.  She also had a husband, who took serious umbrage when he heard that Margo and my father had kissed. His regard for her wellbeing didn’t extend to emotional comfort and sensual pleasure with another man.

In the wide, bright world of the fully sentient, my stepmother and Margo’s husband could assuage their pain ad lib: smack a golf ball, sip a whiskey, argue politics, fly south, maybe seek the balm of discreet romance.  I only hoped so. They had done the best they could by their damaged beloveds. (The dedicated staff, the lofty ceilings, the rich red carpets.)  But theirs was not the greatest loss.  My father and Margo had lost their very selves, with just enough left to know what was going on.  They deserved almost any anodyne.

My mother was a ferocious monogamist—oh, how we used to fight over that one.  But I like to think that if she had lived to see my father disappear in plain sight, she would have blessed his adulterous kisses, his wandering hands.   Was this canoodling true adultery, anyway? “Until death do us part,” the various couples had vowed.  What went on at Leafy Acres was sex after death.

An argument can doubtless be made that my father and Margo had out-grown consenting-adult status.  Sex could have led to bodily damage or god-awful mess: there were issues of continence.  If they had taken off their clothes and really mixed it up, they might have forgotten the pleasure even as the ripples died away.  Still, they would have had a moment’s escape from their doom.  I couldn’t bear that their trysts, such as they were, provoked Victorian pursed lips and a prescription for the modern version of saltpeter.

Funny, isn’t it?  There was a time when my parents energetically devoted themselves to preventing me from having sex.  Those were the Eisenhower years, and even though my particular parents had voted for Adlai and read Henry Miller, they thought sex—at least my sex—should wait for marriage.  It wasn’t about morality; it was about my happiness and health, as they saw it.  The world turned, and eventually they accepted, with loving grace, my thoroughly modern sex life.  I longed to return the favor and was crushed that I couldn’t.

When I was four years old, my father took me to my first movie, Gilda.  His choice became a family legend.  Again and again I heard him explain to my mother that he’d opted for Gilda instead of the cartoons at the Central because he thought it would boost my intellectual development.  Here’s what my brother and I did for that sly darling man—our last gift to him.  We bought a life-size poster of Rita Hayworth in Gilda, her hair tumbling to her shoulders in waves just like our mother’s in the 40’s. We put Rita on the wall at the foot of our father’s bed.  He died cocooned in the heat of her sultry, all-knowing gaze.  I hope Margo got a poster of Cary Grant.

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I would swear I remember reading at the time of these events—nearly a decade ago—that in Swedish old-age homes, a cadre of angelic sex workers were pleasuring ancient bodies.  Families approved, the state paid the tab, hurrah for Sweden!  But maybe I imagined it because just now I Googled the relevant search words and nothing came up.

I did find lots of interesting fact and opinion I wish had existed when my father sought a kiss before dying.

The Alzheimer’s Society (UK) worksheet on sex and dementia provides a thorough overview with thoughtful and sympathetic commentary about the impact on all involved. (http://www.alzheimers.org.uk/site/scripts/documents_info.php?categoryID=200137&documentID=129&pageNumber=1)

Two Slate articles combine close-up stories and information about sex in nursing homes:

Naught Nursing Homes by Daniel Engber (http://www.slate.com/id/2174855/0

An Affair to Remember by Melinda Henneberger (http://www.slate.com/id/2192178/)