"Well, I guess I’ve got to go tell him the bad news. He can’t drive and he can’t come home."

Last week, my grandfather was summoned to the hospital after the results of a blood test he’d taken came in; they wanted to do some further testing. Ultimately, it turned out to be nothing of great consequence, however, just yesterday a social worker called from the hospital and left a message inquiring about his living arrangements. From what I’ve been told, during his hospitalization, the staff monitored him and determined that he’s suffering from dementia. It is now up to my father to go and break it to him.

The man I refer to as my grandfather herein is not, in fact, my grandfather at all, though he’s played the role, with a varying degree of success, for the entirety of my life. Ted Kristensen, age 84, is my father Fred’s stepfather, having entered the family in the mid-1960s when he married my grandmother. I don’t recall when I learned he wasn’t my actual grandfather; it probably happened when I was conscious enough to realize that his last name was different that my father’s. My dad first knew him as "Ted," one of the denizens of the bar he owned, The Tavern, in Lincoln Park. By all accounts, Ted was a teller of tales, particularly when he was under the influence, and that became frequent when he was forced into early retirement against his wishes and had nothing but time. It was at The Tavern that he met both his stepson and his future wife.

It wasn’t until about 10 years ago that I met my biological grandfather and my namesake. He’d been living in self-imposed exile, apart from our branch of the family but his imminent death was enough to initiate rapprochement with his son. Their relationship was a casualty of war, my father having been held prisoner by Fred Solinger Sr. and subject to the Draconian punishments he administered, e.g. fork-stabbings; the man I met seemed incapable of even lifting a fork. I can’t remember what I called him, or if I even called him at all. "Grandpa" to me was the man who lived next door, who continued in that capacity even after the death of my grandmother from colon cancer 14 years ago.

As the family says, he put three women in the ground, the last his live-in lady-friend Madeleine who passed away peacefully at the age of 90. She was an unusually sprightly and lucid senior until the dark cloud of Alzheimer’s set in several years prior to her death. In retrospect, it seems that he was caught out in the storm himself and that those three years seriously lessened his own faculties.

If nothing else, Ted is a survivor, outliving three women, coping with diabetes, beating a brain tumor, and surviving the war that had perched the world on the precipice, WWII. To gain further insight into his experiences, I confronted him at the dining room table on Thanksgiving.

Earlier that morning, at around 11 AM, my mother had served him notice that Thanksgiving dinner would be held at 3:30 and that he had plenty of time, therefore, to shave and, most importantly, to bathe. As 4 o’clock blended into 5, it became obvious that he’d not been given enough of a warning. Perhaps he’s not as guileless as we all think, since he arrived just in time for desert. Desert for him should be his bane since he is a diabetic, but he’s never let that stop him. As I approached him, he asked if we had any "sweet cookies" that he might enjoy with his coffee. He settled for brownies and several varieties of pie, all of which he sampled.

In between his spooning Cool-Whip from the container, I asked him about the war. His memory is not what it was – several times a week he calls to ascertain the date and time – and so he’s not specific about locations or dates. As he tells it, he fought on the Japanese front and in the battle Iwo Jima. He was wounded in battle, catching shrapnel in his right elbow, and subsequently taken prisoner by the Japanese. There, he and his fellow prisoners of war spoke in Pig Latin to the great consternation of their captors who could not decode this strange language that transposed the first letter of a word to the end and appended an "a-y."

Despite his wound, he didn’t have a negative view of the war. He was set free, came home, and found work with GM, the company he’d spend the rest of his career with. Before the war, he worked in his father’s ice cream parlor, a job he loved (as any future diabetic would). But, like many a business in the Depression-fraught 1930, it ultimately went under and he enlisted. He was unaware that the U.S. finds itself poised to invade Iraq, but surely didn’t see this as a bad thing. "That whole area," he said, "we should just drop a bomb on it." His mental capacity may have diminished, but his tact remains undamaged, and yet there are many people out there, younger and more aware, who share his opinion.

Droopy-lidded for much of our exchange, once the interview concluded, my grandfather fell asleep at the table as the rest of the family gathered in the living room.

"I can’t imagine what you and Grandpa would have to talk about. He wasn’t

discussing his sex life again, was he?" asked my father.

This is a reference to a conversation – no, a conversation implies back-and-forth interaction; this was a monologue, the Confessions of a Frustrated Casanova. My grandfather’s first wife, for whom he has no good words, bought double beds after their wedding; apparently, the notion of consummation came as a complete shock to her. He told me, and I don’t know if it’s true, that she died when she contracted AIDs in the 1980s.

It continued along this course until he started talking about my grandmother, whom he referred to as "Freddie’s mother," and crushed libido morphed into a broken heart. He didn’t think that they had enough time together; that it seemed to him to be his luck that, once he found someone he was happy with, she’d die relatively young.

"No, thank God," I replied. "I had to interview him because I have to write an essay on someone who went to war for my Creative Nonfiction class."

"What? He didn’t go to war. He was in the army, yeah."

"What? But what about the Disabled American Veterans sticker? The elbow?"

"He slipped in the commissary!"

And so my grandfather shattered his elbow when he slipped on spilled soup in the commissary. When America declared war on Japan on Dec. 7, 1941, 23 year-old Private Kristensen was laid-up in the hospital. After the elbow healed, he discovered that it couldn’t bend properly and, unable to wield a weapon, Pvt. Kristensen was classifed 4F and consequently discharged.

Since I was a child, my grandfather has been telling me his tales about the army. Now, I find that they are in fact just tales, myths, and not even his. Of the war myth, Chris Hedges said:

"The myth predominates. The myth, which is a lie, of course, built around glory, heroism, heroic self-sacrifice, the nobility of the nation. And it is a kind of intoxication. People lose individual conscience for this huge communal enterprise."

Thanksgiving morning, when my mother went to alert him, my grandfather told her that he’d made breakfast for his lady-friend Madeleine and that he knew she ate it because her dish was empty, despite the fact that she’s been dead for a year now. When a man sleeps 20 hours a day, he has a difficult time discerning between his dreams and reality. He now very likely believes his lies about the war, lies originally crafted from the accounts of his contemporaries because of the predominance of the war myth. He lost his individual conscience, though more likely he sacrificed it in the fire of the guilt he must’ve felt at being unable to fight for his nation, to experience that glory and heroism firsthand. That he hurt his elbow slipping in a puddle follows the script of his life – he coulda had class, he coulda been a contender, he coulda been somebody, but he never caught a break, and when he did, his one chance at any sort of glory was taken away from him. In his dreams, however, he is tragically wounded fighting for the freedom of his nation, for the very world. And in his dreams he sees his loved ones alive again, unmarked by time: as he sleeps the clock round, he is far removed from the "grim harvest of dead."

Right now, he’s intelligible enough to understand that having his freedoms taken away from him – the right to drive, the right to live on his own – is just another one of life’s cruel practical jokes on him. But, as dementia sets in, as the myth begins to take control, he’ll forget all about this indignity and, very likely, all of the abuse he’s suffered in his life. His life nearing its close, he’ll be able to whole-heartedly embrace the world of myth and to remember life not as it was, but as it should’ve been.