Crazy Quilt: (memoir) stitching life's tales together any which way

Losing My Mind: My Descent Into Dementia

If my premonition proves true, this account may be of interest to researchers. However, considering my numerous delvings into fiction fantastic, this may all be nothing but a self-deluding, hypochondriac flight of fancy.

FAITH

Faith pointed to two framed portraits on the wall. "That's my Daddy there on the left," she told me. "Isn't he handsome? And my Mama on the right. They grew up in the South, but moved to Utah after they got married. That's where us kids grew up."

I murmured my interest as she told about brothers and sisters.

Her gaunt and careworn husband heaved a silent sigh and gazed out the window. He must have heard this tale a thousand times.

I'd heard it three times in this half-hour visit, and two or three times on each of the previous ones.

They had told me before my first knock on her door that Faith had Alzheimer's. I knew little about dementia at that time, but she gave me a classic demonstration of forgetfulness.

One day Faith fell and sprained her ankle. Quite overweight, she needed medical care beyond anything her husband could handle at home. She was admitted to a convalescence center, with Medicaid to pay only until she could get up and around again, and then she'd be discharged.

The injury and change of surroundings jolted her struggling brain. She regressed to childhood. She refused to do the painful physical therapy needed to strengthen her ankle, and never regained her ability to walk. The last few times I visited her (before moving away), she would point to a framed portrait on the wall and tell those same stories about her Daddy and Mama.

But it wasn't their portraits hanging there. It was a portrait of Faith herself and her own husband – who didn't came to visit anymore since she never recognized him anyway, and he had his own failing health to deal with.

At the end of each visit, Faith begged me to get her out of there and take her home. Gently I talked my way out of it.

"Then take me to the bus stop," she begged. "I'll ride the bus home!"

"Where is home?" I would ask.

She would give the name of the town in Utah where she grew up.

I would turn the topic of conversation. She would get distracted and forget her urge to leave. I would slip quietly out.

What is it that unties the knots of memory, setting a person's consciousness adrift? The field of view narrows until there's no past in sight except mirages of events far over the horizon of the long ago.

.

MARY

For more than twenty years I went to a weekly writing group in the home of our hostess and moderator, Mary B. She gave me confidence to enter literary contests, introduced me to the world of writers' conferences, and shepherded me through the terrifying steps of meeting and talking with agents and editors for the first time. We once even took a bed-and-breakfast together near an out-of-town conference, along with two other women from our writers group.

My writing mentor was three decades older than me but sharp as a tack (cliché! Oh, how Mary would have flagged that literary no-no!) clear into her nineties. Her hips gave her trouble, but not her mind.

Not, that is, until after a traumatic trial: the long lingering illness and death of her stalwart husband. Grueling emotion and devastation seemed to knock her off keel, though she never broke down in public. Just a few weeks later she started up our critique group again.

At our weekly sessions around Mary's dining room table, we would each read aloud a selection of our writing, then the others would take turns giving feedback. Mary always gave good, constructive advice.

In the last couple years, though, she would take her turn to talk -- not once during a round-robin but two or three times, giving the same nearly identical critiques each time. Always with great insight into improving the selections!

When she began having trouble with balance, taking tumbles that fortunately did not break a hip, her family decided to move 95-year-old Mary and her younger sister to a memory care center, since the sister had even more memory issues than Mary.

To leave the house where you've lived for seventy-five years, moving into a totally unfamiliar setting, adds its own trauma to a brain that remembers perfectly the details of many years past but has huge difficulty with anything recent. Just imagine waking up every morning and not recognizing your room or the hallway outside or any of the staff who come to check on you!

I haven't been able to visit Mary due to the pandemic. I haven't wanted to call, knowing that staff would have to fetch her from her room to the phone in the office, and after all that bustle, would she even remember me? How swiftly does dementia rob you of connection to friends of recent years?

(to be continued, including:)

3. My absent-minded father, whose rambling quirkiness serenely morphed into dementia...

4. (What was my fourth example? I knew a moment ago... Oh. Yes. My own memory lapses, growing more and more disturbing...)