This Long Disease

By Roger Rosenblatt

My mother stares at me with a bottomless fury. "It's not a laughing matter," she says, her voice as dry as cracked wood. I have just attempted, unsuccessfully, to kid her out of her adamancy, but she only repeats what she has been demanding for the past hour: "Put me in my bed!" Yet the nurses have told her over and over that she must sit up part of the day to prevent bedsores and worse.

"Put me in my bed!"

"In an hour, Mom. They'll put you back in an hour."

Her mood is so black I wonder if it goes beyond the bed issue, down to some remembered anger with me for bad-son behavior that occurred 30 or 40 years ago. I wonder if she is thinking, "I carried you to bed often enough!" I wonder if she still resents my putting her in this nursing home.

I can wonder my head off. Alzheimer's creates only indecipherable stares and shattered monologues. The patient broods like a dark road or spews smashed china; don't even bother to go for a broom.

In a way, the disease demonstrates the essential incomprehensibility of the human mind by reducing it to pure puzzle. It represents all that is impenetrable about who people are and what they think. Alexander Pope referred to "this long disease, my life." That's Alzheimer's, especially in my mother's case.

In the 15th year of her affliction, her 90th of living, she has become an exhibit in Ripley's Believe It or Not! Come see the former junior high school English teacher, wit, storyteller and singer to children transformed before your very eyes into a sphinx. Yet she is still a great beauty, ladies and gentlemen. The silver hair, the smooth pink skin. Go ahead and touch her. She won't bite. (Then again, she might.)

The little lady was electrocuted 14 years ago, yet her body goes on forever. This is how fate has treated her. It doesn't do much for one's opinion of fate.

Given no choice, I tell myself that within her rejiggered brain cells, in the reconstructed network of 10 trillion nerves inside the hippocampus, the temporal lobe and the parietal lobe, she may discover different kinds of happiness. Perhaps it is oddly fulfilling--the complete use of a brain--to know only that you want to be moved from a wheelchair to a bed. Life consists of small, discrete goals that become the entire universe. Why would she not be furious with me for thwarting her vast ambition?

Yet she is not always like this. Sometimes she does not recognize me and thinks I am a doctor. She complains of an ailment, which she expects me to treat. Sometimes she does not speak at all. Sometimes, when she manufactures a new narrative of our family history, she can be very funny.

"Did you know that Aunt Regina used to work as a prostitute?"

"No, Mom, I did not." The woman she names (long dead) was in her 80s when we knew her and looked as much like a prostitute as Margaret Thatcher.

"She charged her customers $10 an hour."

"Hard to believe, Mom."

"Did you bring ice cream?"

Against the nurses' orders I bring her vanilla ice cream from time to time in a small cardboard cup, and I feed her with a flat wooden spoon. She takes her regular food through a tube in her stomach, so the taste of the sweet, cold substance makes her salivate and smile. She will exclaim, "This is delicious!" after every taste, with exactly the same intonation, as if she feared that if she used any other formula to express her appreciation, I would not reward her with another spoonful.

Language, which used to be the source of her pleasure, is now mainly a tool, but it is impossible to know if she says what she intends or even if she hears what she says. I read that damaged minds lose the storytelling capability and leap over chasms of logical sequence. They lose words too, of course.

I wonder if my mother is losing all her words one by one, until she eventually will be down to her last word, the only word left her in the world. What word would that be?

I wonder if I ever understood her, and if she acquired Alzheimer's deliberately to make that point. I wonder if she thinks that I have Alzheimer's because she cannot understand me.

"Put me in my bed!"

People always used to say nice things about my mother's blue eyes, which I inherited. We use our blue eyes to stare at each other now. Hers are full of rage, and mine are searching for a way to relieve the pain, which I pray is mine alone.