His father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the very early stages, shortly after his parents had moved out here. It had started with small bouts of forgetfulness: where he had placed his keys, telephone numbers, the names of neighbors.
Gray's relationship with his father carries through this novel and several others. With both men being stubborn and strong-willed, they had a tempestuous and strained relationship in the past, but with his father's failing mental state, that relationship would come to change. But it is a slow arc, something that you can only achieve in a series. It's a complicated struggle for the both of them, leading to new animosity, some resolution, and an ebbing and flowing of the tides between them. Still, that arc wasn't planned as such. It came about as both my parents began to slide into Alzheimer's (my father) and Lewy Body Dementia (my mother). I don't know if I was already sensing that change in my dad, and because of that, it led me to unconsciously add this aspect of Gray's father into this first book. Either way, I think much of Gray's relationship with his father was me working through the stress of the same in real life, to try to make sense of such a cruel disease and its impact on families.
