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| Dare Not Speak its Name |
My sixty-something neighbor rang my bell the other day. When
I answered, he started asking me gibberish questions – “Where are my car keys?”
“Are they at the Elks Club?” When I offered to drive him there to get his keys he
seemed even more confused … pointing in the wrong direction and demurring to my
offer of help. I had known that he was losing contact with reality … spending
hour upon hour chopping ice around his driveway … but this was the first clear
manifestation of what appeared to me as early-onset Alzheimer’s … and it has
unnerved me.
My mother in her later years also developed dementia … first
as a sundown syndrome … then later as fully impaired cognition. Her last three
or four years were not pretty as I watched her, in her late eighties, sink into
a world of enfeebled disorientation. (Yet
remarkably, toward the end, she received a call from her old college roommate
and spent 15 minutes in a perfectly normal conversation with her.) My mother’s
mother too had experienced much the same downward spiral … spending her last few
years in a fetal position. And what does
this presage for me? Possibly not good stuff.
At seventy-five I am now extremely sensitive to my own cognitive
capabilities and suffer mild panic attacks at what may be the slightest
slippage of same. Not remembering the right word to express a thought or
falling asleep in my easy chair in the late afternoon … each casts a pall on my
outlook for my golden years. Unfortunately, today there is not a lot that can
be done to reverse this mental degeneration, so I guess I might have to travel
this gloomy path so encumbered. But the
real downer is the fear of what such a syndrome, if it does befall me, might do
to those loved ones around me.
Sorry dear readers for all this doom and gloom, but I need to try
to disperse this cloud. Perhaps, this
blog may be my own palliative way of keeping my synapses firing?
