The Onset
When,
they always want to know, was the onset of her dementia?
Kathy,
Mom’s partner of more than forty years, was with Mom and a group of their
friends celebrating Kathy’s 60th birthday, when Mom turned to
someone she’d spent the weekend with and said, “Hi. I’m Nadine Martin. I don’t think we’ve been introduced.” When the friend realized that Mom wasn’t
joking, she spoke to Kathy.
My son Jonathan
tells of a Giants game he and my mother were watching, regretting that the
Giants were losing as the game came to a close.
Then, in the last ten minutes, the Giants scored and won the game. Mom and Jonathan both cheered. “They
won! They won! The Giants won in the last ten minutes of the
game!” Mom shouted to Kathy. A few
minutes later Mom asked Jonathan, “Do you think the Giants game is over yet?”
I also remember when my youngest sister Suzy called and
told me, tearfully, that she thought Mom was showing signs of dementia because
of Mom’s using the wrong words and the wrong word order. But as my sister tearfully shared her fears,
she was misspeaking and re-arranging her own words, saying things like, “I know
the myasthenia gravis has caused her earlobe to fall…” Earlobe for eyelid. “I know the myasthenia gravis she takes for
the medicine has side effects.” I don’t remember when I got that call, but I
was already celebrating being old enough to have an excuse for the
absent-mindedness and proneness to error that I’d been demonstrating since the
age of eight. So I didn’t take it very
seriously.
So
when was the first time I saw her dementia—or at least her loss of short-term
memory-- first-hand?
Maybe
it was after a Harry Potter movie. I
can’t remember which one. We took my
brother, who we knew was interested in Harry Potter because he’d drawn some
pictures of him at NIAD, the National Institute for Arts and Disabilities. But during the movie, David, who was sitting
between us, fell asleep, and Mom bent over and whispered (my apologies to fans
of the Harry Potter movies), “This movie is awful!”
I
too (sorry) found the movie tedious and whispered back, “I know, but we’re here
for David.”
“He’s
sleeping!” Mom pointed out.
I
asked Mom whether she’d like something from the concession stand. I’d go!
One of us would have to stay conscious in case David woke up with a
seizure.
The
movie seemed unbearably long. I asked
the girl at the concession stand, “How long does this movie last?”
I
don’t remember how many minutes she said--162 or 141 or 152. I just remember that it was much too long.
“I’ve
seen it three times!” she said with joy in her voice.
After
the movie, Mom said, “Next time we’re going to find a good movie. That was a form
of torture.”
A
week later she called and said, “Tina, I see that there’s a new Harry Potter
movie, and I thought we’d take David to it.”
After
that the lapses in her memory came more frequently.
I
remember her agonizing over Abu Ghraib—over and over again.
“I
saw these horrible scenes of torturing prisoners, and I asked, ‘What kind of
people could do that to our soldiers?’ and then I realized it was our soldiers
doing it to them, and then I was even more horrified.”
“I
know what you mean,” I told her. “When I
first saw those pictures, I couldn’t believe they were real. No one would pose like that, grinning as they
tortured people.”
Then
Mom said, “Torture! Yes, I saw these
horrible scenes of prisoners being tortured, and I asked, ‘What kind of people
could do that to our soldiers?’ and then I realized it was our soldiers doing
it to them, and that’s even more horrifying!”
When
did we learn of Abu Ghraib? I looked it
up online and see that it was on 60 Minutes on April 28, 2004, and Seymour
Hersh’s report on it came out in The New
Yorker Magazine two days later.
When
did Mom first start calling me to whisper that Kathy was trying to kill her?
When did she start running down the street in her nightgown in the middle of
the night, pounding on doors, seeking a neighbor to call the police for
her? When did she first start obsessing
about her “digestive problems”? When did
she become convinced that she couldn’t leave the bathroom?
When
there was so little we could do about the what, how, why—Why Mom? What should we do now? How can we help Mom
and maintain our own sanity—past whens were relatively easy to deal with. I could look through my diaries. But that part about maintaining our own
sanity…I, like two of my sisters, used to have little seizures when I shouted
out at myself. Our brother is in a
locked facility with the words “neurobehavioral” on the door. I made
discoveries doing detective work thirty years ago—an epileptic brother Mom
never met and a birth mother who died during an operation on her brain.
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