Then Again - Diane Keaton [86]
Frank Mancuso Jr. and Mount Rushmore
When did Suzy Dionicio, Mom’s new caregiver, start dripping food into the right side of Mom’s mouth three times a day every day? Breakfast takes an hour and a half. Lunch and dinner two. Suzy is patient, knowing Mom has a hard time remembering to swallow. After the meds have been mashed into a thickened tea for Mom to sip, Suzy turns on the new flat-screen TV to PBS so Mom can look at the primary colors on Sesame Street. After she pulls all 130 pounds of Dorothy Deanne’s five-feet-seven-inch frame onto the Hoyer lift, she watches her mamacita rise like a phoenix. It’s as if a giant baby with a long white pigtail is gliding across the room in a computer-driven stork. Suzy’s navigational skills plop Dorothy into the wheelchair, where her head lands with a thud on her chest. How will Mom see all the colors if her view is limited to the discounted tile floor she and Dad fought over?
In between the joy of the kids and the heartbreak of Mom’s decline, there was the day I couldn’t remember the name of Mount Rushmore. A few weeks before, Frank Mancuso Jr.’s name went missing too. On the one hand, who cares? Is Frank Mancuso storage-worthy? When you consider all the things that need to be addressed, why flog myself for forgetting someone I don’t really know or care about?
When does “Where did I put my keys?” become a diagnosis? Will I be joining Mom in the fog of forgetting? Will our family’s genetic profile snatch my memory away too? Do I have it already? I’ve stopped telling people my mother has Alzheimer’s disease. It turns an otherwise simple encounter into the beginning of what feels like, that’s right, a test. Will I pass?
Does the effect of accumulated self-doubt create a form of depression that leads to Alzheimer’s disease? I know I keep asking, but does it? That’s the only answer I can come up with. I know I’m grabbing at straws, but really!!! I know, I know, learn to live with the questions. But, seriously, does one’s psychological profile play a part? And if it does, would this knowledge have changed things for Mom? God knows taking vitamin E and ginkgo and Aricept and two glasses of wine a day didn’t do one bit of good. Just as advanced language skills, education, and even genius didn’t stop Ralph Waldo Emerson, Iris Murdoch, E. B. White, or Somerset Maugham from the “insidious onset.” Consider this: Speaking is present tense. Writing exists in thought. They wrote. Adding voice to ideas gives words vitality. Of course, speaking is not a cure for Alzheimer’s, but it is a vital component in the battle against depression and anxiety, both of which dogged Mother. I’ve always had trouble putting words together. In a way, I became famous for being an inarticulate woman. The disparity between Mom and me is that I got my feelings out. I memorized other people’s words and made them feel like my own. Writing is abstract. I’m sure I’m wrong, but to think of my mother, a person who loved words, got A’s, went back to college in her forties, and came home with a diploma, as another victim of Alzheimer’s disease without a clear-cut reason is something I can’t accept.
I hate the fact that Mom’s middle years under the auspices of Alzheimer’s have ended. What does she get in return? The famous blank stare, that’s what she gets; another face of forgetting. Give me back the years of agitation, anything over the soothing shield of apathy and silence. Fuck it. What’s the point of my questions and potential answers to something that can’t be explained? It’s a fruitless enterprise. All of it. I just want Mom’s brain back.
Get this: As Duke and I were waiting in line at Jamba Juice this afternoon, my cellphone rang. It was Stephanie, the captain of Team Keaton. Did