The Grace of a Grandfather

Personal Perspective: Family, father figures and a legacy of dementia.

By Greg O’Brien

George Walter Brown (Photo courtesy of Greg O’Brien)

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.– Heraclitus of Ephesus, 500 B.C.

On the lip of Father’s Day 2025, I’m not the same man at 75 who I once was. Today, in the throes of Alzheimer’s, I find myself digging deeper, more reflective—the waters of life forever flowing over me, as I recall the role model of my late maternal grandfather George Walter Brown and the currents of his Irish soul.

Roots matter deeply in my family; they can shape one in hard times, as when my grandfather died of dementia. It was to become a family disease, and grandfather left us a path to follow.

My first-generation Irish grandfather, whom we affectionately called “Daddy George,” was raised in Manhattan and had close ties to County Claire, Ireland. He had a heart the size of SoHo. An earnest man who owned several Upper East Side townhouses, my grandfather, during the Great Depression, compassionately forgave all missed rents, never charging for them. It was just the right thing to do, he reasoned. He was a man of great faith; had a life of doing the right things. He taught by example.

My first-generation caregiving Irish grandmother, Loretta Sinnott Brown, with roots in Kilkenny on the banks of the River Nore in southeast Ireland, was born and raised in Brooklyn. Her father, Patrick, along with his dad and brothers came to New York on a famine ship called Erin-go-Brah in 1849, settling in Brooklyn, where they became pig farmers.

My grandparents raised my mother, Virginia (who later succumbed to Alzheimer’s), her sister, and her brother on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Then the family moved to sedate Rye in Westchester County on Long Island Sound, just outside the city. My late father Francis Xavier O’Brien, himself diagnosed with dementia later in life, was raised in the Bronx. My parents raised me in Rye, where my Mom gave birth to 10.

It was a wholly innocent time for me until something happened to my grandfather in the late 1950s.

Once or twice a week, my mother would take me and sisters, Maureen and Lauren, over to see my grandmother and Daddy George. As a young boy, my maternal grandmother used to call me “snippy snooper” because I was always “snooping around,” asking too many questions, forever wanting to know the answers—perhaps a premonition of a later career as a journalist.

Grandma was petite, a woman of incalculable resolve. Daddy George was handsome, gentle, and erudite, an intellectual in his day—small in stature, large in bounty. He didn’t talk much, as we observed as kids. Grandma did all the chatting, distracting us in the kitchen with sandwiches, desserts, and piping hot chocolate in winter in a tall steaming glass, and in summer, fresh lemonade and blackberries from the backyard tree. Mom, meanwhile, sat on the couch visiting with her dad, trying to make conversation. The moment seemed awkward.

In time, I began to realize that something was terribly wrong with my grandfather. His sentences were becoming shorter as his voice trailed off. He didn’t recognize us on occasion, and he stared a lot in withdrawal. Often, he just shook his head in an acknowledgment when asked a question. I thought he was hard of hearing.

“Your grandfather is very sick,” my mother would tell us.

Earlier, there were times, my mother told me later, when Daddy George in great confusion would walk to the Rye train station without telling anyone, taking an express to Grand Central so he could stroll, on muscle memory, through the streets of the Upper East Side—a place that made him feel whole. He was trying to go home to his office on 28th Street. Local Manhattan cops knew him well from his generosities, and would phone my grandmother, then make sure he returned safely. No one seemed to grasp at the time what was happening.

Yet time was running out for my grandfather.

I’ll never forget the day we came for a visit when I was about nine, and all the dining room furniture, including the mahogany table on which I had done my grammar school homework, was gone—replaced with a stark hospital bed. Daddy George could no longer walk up the steep oak stairs and was confined to the bed.

The deterioration had a solemn impact on me. My grandfather, who had been slowly waning before us, was now in a deep slide.

Then, just weeks before he passed away, Grandma on her loving rounds was stunned one day to find Daddy George sitting up in bed. He spoke for the first time in months, and said in muted tones that he was aware of all she had done for him; he thanked her and told her how much he loved her. It was a last expression of love—testimony that those suffering from Alzheimer’s, other dementias and mental handicaps can still observe and retain far more than one might imagine. Stereotypes of the disease are just wrong. My Mom rushed over to the house to speak with her dad. Doctors counseled that the enlightenment was fleeting, a last flow of blood to the brain or a remnant brain cell flashing a final distress signal.

Daddy George quickly fell back into the abyss.

The day he died – January 8, 1960 – still haunts me. When I returned to the red brick house near Rye Beach, the hospital bed was gone and the dining room furniture was back in place, as if nothing had happened, yet I knew that nothing would ever be the same.

And it wasn’t.

Many years later, as a father of three, I was at my mother’s death bed as she battled Alzheimer’s. On a wall at the foot of her nursing home bed, I had put a photograph of Daddy George (see above)—sepia in tone, in a suit and tie in his professional Manhattan attire. I felt his presence in the room that night. I didn’t want my mother to die alone. She saw the photo of her father, and smiled in peace.

A few minutes later, she drifted off. I got up to leave. She woke up immediately, and spoke clearly from her heart: “Greg, where are you going?”

Realizing the end was near, I reached for her hand and said, “I’m not going anywhere, Mom. We’re riding this one out together!”

Moments later, she drifted off peacefully and never work up again.

It was then that I realized Daddy George in spirit was there that night for both of us.

The grace of a grandfather....

(Greg O’Brien is a career journalist, writer, and author. He lost his maternal grandfather, mother, and paternal uncle to Alzheimer’s, and before his father’s death, his dad was diagnosed with dementia.)