The Yellow Wallpaper

I called my mother from work at the usual time this morning, and she was having the speech difficulties she often has when she’s upset by something. But she managed to say to me, “I have company today.”

Using my best powers of interpretation, I guessed that she meant Eva, the homemaker.

“No,” she said. “It’s a man. Dustin.”

“Mom, that’s Lily.”

“No, Lily’s over here,” she said. “But there’s a man over there. Dustin’s over there.”

This seemed to be more than the usual doggie-name-confusion, and I had to restrain myself from interrogating her sharply. Her tone of voice was somewhat wary and distracted, and all I could think of were her pre-diagnostic hallucinations.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“I’m in the kitchen. He’s lying on the couch in the living room,” she said, and in the background I could hear my sister’s voice: “Mom, who are you talking to?”

I realized then that the “man” she was referring to was my sister, and my mother had given her the name of the last “man” to live in the house, my dog. My sister will often lie down on the loveseat in the living room when she’s visiting my mother–sometimes she dozes off there. This habit of Liz’s has lately been agitating my mother–when I had come home from work the day before, my mother had been extremely confused and agitated, and we managed to boil it down to the fact that “they” had been sleeping on the couch.

(I was able to calm her down the previous day through a creative interpretation of her anxious words. “We” usually means “I” and “they” means “he” or “she.” Talk of “going out” (which she does only with me) usually means that something out of the ordinary happened, something she didn’t expect which might have rattled her. So instead of asking, “Now who do you mean by ‘we’?” I know enough to let that detail go and home in on whether she thinks she’s left the house or not.)

But back to today: it wasn’t until much later in the day that I had my “Aha!” moment. I remembered her hallucination of November, 2004, where she was going down to the basement one night and saw the man sleeping on the couch. And my sister was re-enacting that memory.

I suppose–if my suspicion is true–this is a small insight into the type of connection that is still being made in my mother’s mind. Although increasingly less able to discern details, she is still able to see the gesture, the shadow, and hold it up to what still resides in her memory. In this case, the result was anxiety (and I will probably have to talk to Liz about sleeping on the couch). But there is still the possibility of reassurance, I think. I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat myself–it’s like trying to interpret an especially difficult poem, where the sounds and the rhythm are just as significant as the meaning.

This is going to be a bizarre post, but it has to do with a memory of mine and its connection to my mother’s situation. I think I was channel-surfing one night and remarking to myself on the over-excess of television programming that’s now available. Of course this lead me to remember what TV programs I cut my teeth on, many years ago. There was Lassie (I now am owned by two collies), Captain Kangaroo, Miss Frances’ Ding-dong School (unfortunate connotation there), Kukla, Fran and Ollie, and, last but so not least–the Three Stooges. I loved the Three Stooges so much that I gave them up for Lent one year–I am not making this up. My theory is that the Stooges provided a much-needed relief from my daily Catholic school regimen of martyred saints’ stories (the more gruesome, the better)–at least when Moe crushed Curly’s head in a vise Curly always lived to moan about it.

And there was another program that was an important part of my life: Howdy Doody. I now look back at it and can understand why a little marionette amid the life-sized Buffalo Bob, Clarabelle the Clown, and Princess Summerspring (or whatever) would appeal to a child who probably felt dwarfed and controlled by the adults around him. Plus, there is something fascinating about a puppet or a doll–any creation that mimics a human being. Especially to a child, who hasn’t figured out yet that it isn’t really alive. I remember that Buffalo Bob used to tell the kids watching that not only could they see him and Howdy, but he and Howdy could see them, too.

This made me apprehensive because I suspected it was true. I couldn’t do anything weird because Buffalo Bob and Howdy Doody (who may or may not have been alive) could see what I was doing, right in my own home. On top of that, Howdy bore a striking resemblance to a boy in my class named Tommy Cassidy (I’ve changed the name because I don’t know whether he ever knew he looked like HD, and he probably wouldn’t want to know now). In my very young mind, Tommy Cassidy and Howdy Doody were almost the same being (of course I knew that Tommy was’t suspended by strings but he had red hair and lots of freckles) and this fuzzy amalgamation of the two could peek into my living room every week.

I didn’t stay awake thinking about this–it didn’t bother me that much.  It was one of those childhood beliefs that is the result of both naivete and vulnerability, and when I recall such beliefs I find myself amazed at how resourceful children must be to get along without all the psychological armor of adulthood.  I don’t think I told anyone that a puppet who looked remarkably like a boy in my class could see me through my TV set–it was one of those burdens of life that children must carry in silence.

So what on earth does this have to do with my mother?  In David Shenk’s book The Forgetting he mentions a concept called “retrogenesis”–whereby in some, but not all, ways the Alzheimer’s sufferer loses abilities in an order inverse to the order babies and children acquire them.  A human being can’t be neatly undone, but certain pivotal capabilities–speech, toilet-training, walking–that are turning points in a child’s development are also turning points–in reverse order–in the progression of Alzheimer’s Disease.  Shenk theorizes that there is an accompanying emotional trajectory that roughly corresponds inversely to a child’s developing a sense of her self as separate from her surroundings, as an independent and distinct being.

So in remembering my inability at age five or six to understand perfectly that the puppet on my TV was NOT Tommy Cassidy, and, moreover, could NOT look out from the set and see me sitting in my living room, I wondered: could episodes of my mother’s confusion have their roots in a similar immature intellectual viewpoint?  Could this be what it feels like to her?  Of course, a six-year-old is only six years old and has never experienced an adult perspective.  My mother, at one time, was an independent, mature adult–so of course the experience won’t be exactly like a child’s.  But the dreamy “logic” of childhood–where you have to invent what you are not able to know, and where all the rules are not yet known–might be the closest I can come to understanding what she’s going through.

I’ve been having a discussion with my friend Gail about spiritual life and whether or not it affects or is affected by dementia. I’m now reading David Shenk’s The Forgetting and in his discussion of the middle stages of AD he describes how the disease progresses systematically through the different parts of the brain. The hippocampus is affected first, eroding the ability to form memories. The amygdala is next to be attacked, releasing control over the most primitive emotions and desires. Most of our brain comprises what Shenk calls “higher-order processing” and damage to these lobes results in some of the more sublime neurological losses. The first of these lobes to be affected, according to Shenk, is the temporal lobes, which “are responsible for primary organization of sensory input, for processing language, and for ecstatic feelings of spiritual transcendance” (119). When a healthy lobe is stimulated with an electrical probe it produces “powerful religious images.”

On the one hand, this might be something that I don’t really want to know: that my salvation depends upon a clump of neurons in my temporal lobe. On the other hand, those of us who are persistently romantic can look at the brain as the conduit rather than the originator of what we call the “self” or the “soul.” I’d be interested in learning more about the particular “religious images” that are produced by the temporal lobe. My guess is that they would vary from age to age, like the predominant cultural symbols that populate alien abduction tales of the present day. (Here’s a kind of dense but interesting essay.) The fact that the temporal lobe also regulates “the organization of sensory input” and “language processing” would suggest that it is something like the formal entryway to the mind (as opposed to the servants’ entrance–the brain stem).

The Gospel of John begins with the verse: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” which suggests the spiritual power of utterance to the Christian world.  “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us”–if we lose language, what does this mean?  For me, living with someone with Alzheimer’s means reinventing “the Word.”  Just because you can’t sense (hear or speak) it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.  In the best case scenario it is “made flesh” (heard or spoken).  But it all boils down to faith.  I’m not suggesting that we all be born again, but that this particular Christian symbol can guide us just a bit when the silence sets in.