LOUISVILLE - Novelist Sue Miller has written that her father, a Presbyterian minister and church historian, once told her that having faith was much like falling in love:

"For him the experience of both was as though he'd entered a room backwards ... so that by the time he was able to look around and understand where he was, he was already encircled by it, held in it."

Miller's dad, the Rev. James Nichols, a historian who worked at Princeton Theological Seminary and the University of Chicago, was not a man who wavered in his faith. "It seemed not," she said in a recent interview. "To me he always seemed serene and ... convinced."

He had ministry in his very DNA. Miller says her "grandfathers and great-grandfathers and so on back through the ages were preachers." In her new book, The Story of My Father, Miller offers a touching, insightful account of her father's long decline into the dementia and isolation of Alzheimer's disease. She was his principal caregiver for three years before his death in 1991. She said writing this book - her first foray into non-fiction, "and I assure you, the last," she says - was an effort to "snatch him back from the meaninglessness of Alzheimer's."

She said her father's faith served him well in the early stages of his decline, when he was relatively lucid and came to understand "that he had this disease and was going to slowly deteriorate." She thinks his faith accounts for the fact that he was "not unaccepting" of his condition. Because of his faith, she has said, "for him, his life and death already made sense."

It was less clear whether he was much comforted by his faith as he sank ever deeper into paranoia and terror, she said in a recent interview. "But it was always true that when you sort of tapped into the neuronal pathways that had to do with his faith, he calmed down. I often would read the Bible to him, sing hymns to him. It was something that could stop his terrors."

There came a time, she said, when she wondered "whether you could have said he was still a Christian ... or a believer, in anything like the way he'd once been. Whether he felt the presence of God, as he'd been sure he did earlier in his life."

Yet the words of scripture, and "prayer in a familiar form," always "stilled him and brought him peace."

Once, near the end, at a stage where he typically was either unresponsive or violent, his compulsive walking in the halls of a nursing home took him to a lounge where some of his fellow residents were having a hymn-sing. A nurse told Miller later: "That old man, he just threw his head back and sang along with them. Every verse. Every word." All from memory.

"It seemed ... that even longer than he knew me, even more deeply than he knew me, he knew his faith," she writes. "He remembered the words, the rituals connected with belief, and found comfort in them."

Miller, an animated, 50ish woman with joyful eyes and a cloud of honey-hued hair, is the author of several fictional best-sellers, including The Good Mother and Reinventing the Abbots. She was in Louisville for a reading at a church-sponsored conference on congregational care of older members. The March 20-22 event was held on the campus of the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

In conversation, "sort of" seems to be a favorite phrase.

"There's no sort of religion in my life," she said. "It's very sort of, in a certain way, unformed."

"Sort of" seems apt. The characters in Miller's novels long for the comfort of absolutes while coping with a moral universe where all is relative. Like the author, they are seldom explicitly religious, but "sort of" Christians.

Miller has described her parents elsewhere as "these radical, pacifist Christians - deep believers, who raised four of us kids who are really not involved in the religious life in any way. We must have seemed like savages to them."

She said her own spirituality was affected deeply by a 1993 book, The Gospel According to Jesus, in which author Stephen Mitchell "attempted to weed out later revisions (of scripture) and try to come up with what might have actually happened."

While she has little to do with organized religion, she once told an interviewer: "I'm aware, in myself, anyway, of a tendency toward self-examination and examination of others - intention, meanings, scruples, ethics - that seems to connect directly" to her family's religious tradition. This "tendency," she said, "has served me well as a writer."

James Nichols, who served as a dean at Princeton for more than a decade, was a lifelong academic who never had a church of his own. He served as an interim pastor in Chicago once, she said, "and summers, he preached." But he was no orator.

"He was thoughtful, thought-provoking," she said. "Not rousing. He used to tell a story about once when he preached as a guest of a black congregation. He was going right along, feeling like he was doing all right, when a man in the congregation shouted, 'Push off from the shore, preacher!'"

Pushing off from shore, she said, "was not his style at all. He just didn't."

Miller said she was "independent and grouchy" as a youngster, and didn't really grow close to her father until after the death of her mother, a woman she describes as a diva, whose flamboyance was a perfect balance to her husband's reserve.

Judy Nichols died of a sudden, massive heart attack, in 1979. Miller said she died "just the way she would have wished to go, with a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other."

James Nichols' death was decidedly less tidy. It began, "sort of," when Miller got a late-night phone and was told that police had found her dad wandering aimlessly in western Massachusetts, unsure how he'd gotten there, having started in New Jersey. ("Now he was saying something about the way the stop signs had turned into people in the night. ... I stopped asking questions. I couldn't bear to hear the answers.")

From there it proceeded through a succession of losses - of memory, of bearings, of the ability to read, of his accustomed acuity of thought, of the ability to distinguish between reality and delusion, of nouns, of independence, and of his kind, mild demeanor. (This was a man so unworldly that he pronounced "boogie-woogie" with soft G's.)

In one sense the book is a primer on Alzheimer's, with sections on the physiology of the brain, the variety of symptoms, the treatment options. The latter, she said, are more numerous than when her father's struggles began a dozen years ago. "Now they have some really wonderful places," she said, "where (patients) can wander freely, go outside ... and be among people who aren't just offended by the presence of a demented person."

Most of the residents of her father's nursing home were "mentally intact," she said, and had little patience for his "floating around, in and out of their rooms."

The experience of caring for her father, Miller said, has made her feel a part of a community of sons and daughters pressed into such duty - a community held together by bonds of guilt.

"We always find ourselves deficient in devotion," she writes. "Did you visit once a week? You might have visited twice. Oh, you visited daily? But perhaps he would have done better if you'd kept him at home. In the end all those judgments, those self-judgments, are pointless. This disease is inexorable, cruel. It scoffs at everything."

In the years since her father's "merciful" death, she says, she let go of the guilt. "In every way I did what I could do," she said, "what I could do. Certainly not perfectly."

The Story of My Father is not devoted entirely to Alzheimer's and Miller's experience of it. It also includes sections about the man her father was when he was well. The book is partly a tribute to that man.

The book contains some gems of grim humor, as when Nichols observes of his personal-care home, "No one ever seems to graduate from here."

There is a hilarious section about a father-daughter collaboration on the renovation of a New Hampshire cottage Nichols bought from a man who had occupied it together with more than 80 cats. The two of them, with the help of Miller's 14-year-old son and a gang of his buddies, rehabilitated what Miller calls "an embrowned hell." ("Shit was the operative word here," she writes.)

It took Miller more than a decade to get this book written. "More was discarded, probably, than is in here," she said, tapping the slim volume. "The way I think is fictional. ... It was really a handicap for me to not invent things."

Describing the difficulties the project presented, she mentions wrestling with powerful emotions, struggling to find an authentic and effective first-person voice, worrying about how much to trust one's memories. She doesn't mention it, but, judging from the extent to which this is a book about faith and spirituality, the dominant challenge here may have to do with Christianity. Sort of.

The Story of My Father is published by Alfred A. Knopf, $22.50.

PCUSA News Service