June 25, 2009
Choosing to live in the palace of your memories
Gerard Vanderleun has written a remarkably moving piece about his 100-year-old uncle, a man who has lived a long and full life but now sits quietly in a rest home, eyes closed, seemingly lost in the depths of dementia.
But what if dementia was a choice? And what if choosing dementia made sense?
If you knew that everyday for the rest of your life, you'd be dressed in diapers and confined to a wheelchair with blurred eyesight in a small brick walled room what would you do? If you knew that at every meal for the rest of your life a woman who talked to you as if you were a baby would spoon three flavors of baby food into your mouth, what would you do? If, opening your eyes, you knew that all you would see would be a bright fluorescent glare and the blurred shapes of dozens of others, mostly women, lolling about in wheelchairs, what would you do?
If you knew to a dead, solid certainty that you were never going to be released from your room until you were released, at long last, from your body, what would you do? If you were a sane man, just what would you, at long last, do?
I don't know about you, but I would figure a way out and if that way out was only deeper in, that's where I'd go. I'd go deep into my palace of memories and I'd use all my energy to construct a world inside that was made of the most vivid moments of all the years I'd lived.
I'd be building the world's worst sandcastle on the beach in Balboa as my father and uncle tossed a football back and forth on the hot sand. I'd be waking up in the back seat of our 1951 Chevy and seeing my grandparents' faces pressed against the glass as the first snow I'd ever seen fell softly behind them in the twilight. I'd be with my first wife on my wedding night at the Pierre. I'd be at my job on the better days. I'd be in a taxi in New York going downtown at three in the morning making all the lights. I'd go back to a warm field in a California twilight and listen to the breath and laughter of a young girl heard once and never again. I'd sit in the sun in front of a rose-covered cottage in Big Sur. I'd be laughing on the Spanish Stairs or weaving drunk along a cliff road on Hydra under a bronze moon and above a wine-dark sea. I'd be high up in a hotel in Paris looking down at the Seine in the rain. I'd hold my one-year-old daughter over my head while lying on the grass in the Boston Public gardens in the spring and see her face framed with cherry blossoms. Those and a million other rooms in my Palace of Memory I'd visit over and over again until they all ran together in a blur as the train, accelerating, finally left the station and leapt towards the stars and beyond and, finally forgetting all of that, I saw for a fleeting moment the mystery complete.
More than anything else, I would not be in that room any more than I absolutely had to.
Read the whole thing.
Posted by Mike Lief at June 25, 2009 08:08 PM
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Comments
Sometimes I think I am already there.
Posted by: The Little Coach at June 26, 2009 10:54 AM