Posted 1/25/19
The opening line of L.P. Hartley’s 1953 book The Go-Between tells us, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”.
Holy guacamole did Hartley, writing historical fiction about Victorian England, strike a prim and proper bulls-eye on what my mom’s Alzheimer’s must be like! Mom day after day pulls the past out in a way that seems, amazingly, like it is foreign to her. She recalls names from the past, some real and some perhaps either fictional, made up, or unknown to family. This isn’t new, mind you. Mom was diagnosed with dementia nearly a decade ago, but it sat around slothfully, slowly but surely turning moms past into a different world. The red flags were there, mind you. Even nearly 10 years ago, Mom had a way of getting details of stories mixed up, then permanently canonizing them into the annals of her version of history. Good luck convincing her that her mom didn’t die from a mass in her stomach! Not gonna happen. Her stomach was messed up from meds and a hard life, but grandma died of congestive heart failure and related issues (Alzheimer’s was a possibility too) not related to her stomach symptoms. Many other chapters retold wrongly or with wrong details. Sometimes kind of hurtful. Sometimes funny (quietly). A different past.
But now, miles and miles downriver from the separation of real history and fancy, mom’s history tome is a recycle heap of paper shreds. Snippets here. Odd recollections there. As hard as it is to unshred an old newspaper, it is equally hard to pick truth/accuracy from delusion/Brain Bandit fodder. :(Mom, not long ago when I brought up her old homestead of her youth, said “There were lots of dead bodies there”. Gulp. What the heck?? This sentence was sandwiched between sweet word salad rants and other incorrect memories, but it got me thinking… She did live on a large farm. The Trail of Tears was very nearby. It was old enough to have had slaves’ semi-unmarked graves (as did our family cemetery near there). It may have a long lost cemetery? It may be absolutely nothing. She hasn’t lived there since Hartley’s book was freshly available at Woolworth’s… History died with those synapses, and now things are done differently in her brain. 🙁
I want to listen and search for truth/lucidity. I have an undergrad degree in history…it is who I am. My time left with her is a thin pamphlet, not a book. I am deeply curious: How do you work through oddball history with your loved one with this disease? With picking lucidity from the shreds of word salad. Should I further focus on the mom version 2.0 version and “ignore” this kind of thing? What say you?
#EndALZ