“He’s been through a lot,” Kim says. “What he’s been able to accomplish, in terms of his education and ultimately his professional life, was nothing short of remarkable.” Still, Kim says he “clashed a lot” with his father: “It’s hard to expect someone who didn’t have parents to be able to know how to be a dad,” he adds. “I can’t say he was always what I had hoped. We’ve had a hard, hard time getting along with each other.”
Yet his father was there a year ago—with Kim’s mother, wife, and kids—as Kim was sworn in as the first Korean American senator in the nation’s history. At the appointment where Kim’s father was officially diagnosed, the doctor asked his father what Kim did for a living. “I don’t know,” the elder Kim replied.
His father didn’t remember what he himself did either. “My father was a geneticist, a medical researcher who spent his life trying to cure cancer and Alzheimer’s,” Kim said in his Senate speech. “And now, as I was there witnessing Alzheimer’s erase from my father’s memory any recollection of his efforts to erase Alzheimer’s from our world, I couldn’t help but feel that Alzheimer’s had won.”
Kim says his father has been losing his ability to speak English. While heading to a recent doctor’s visit, Kim struggled to explain the concept of a seatbelt to his father. He knows things will get worse. It feels, Kim says, like a dark version of his early days as a parent. “It feels like I’m in the trenches again, but this one doesn’t have a happy ending,” he explains. “It’s in the trenches again, but everything’s going in the wrong direction.”
That pain is unique in its particulars because of the nature of Kim’s work—scheduling his father’s appointments around votes, scrambling from doctors’ offices to the Senate floor. But it is surely recognizable, in broad strokes, to millions of Americans. Over the last decade, the number of family caregivers has increased by 45%, according to a report this year by AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving. “Over that period,” NAC president Jason Resendez tells me, “we’ve seen caregiving become more intense, more complex, and it’s lasting for longer.”
