On Pluto (11 page)

He paused for a second to catch his breath. “It's bullshit,
Dad. It's just fucking BULLSHIT!” He stopped again, sobbed, and then said in a lowered voice, “It's bullshit because I know it's true!”

He then fell into my arms and cried like a baby. We hugged, talked some more, and then went to bed.

I didn't sleep well that night. I awoke at first light to the realization, the horror, that my medical records—documentation that I was losing my mind, as Conor had pointed out days earlier—were strewn among paradise, all throughout the tropical plants, near the pool.

I grabbed a plastic trash bag, and picked up as many pieces of the clinical reports, test results, and medical comments as I could. My past and my future were now in the trash.

6

T
HE
W
AYBACK
M
ACHINE

M
ISTER PEABODY WAS THE SMARTEST BEAGLE EVER
to walk the Earth. Everyone over 55 knows this. In cartoon terms, he was an inventor, entrepreneur, scientist, Nobel Laureate, and a two-time Olympic medalist. Impressive for a member of the humble hound group.

Appearing in the late 1950s and early '60s, as the savant canine of
Rocky and His Friends
and
The Bullwinkle Show
, Mister Peabody, in benevolence, adopted a dorky, orange-haired orphan named Sherman, and in a moment of dog genius, invented the “WABAC” machine as a birthday gift for his surrogate “son,” a rejiggered “should-have-been-machine,” in modern culture often referred to as the Wayback Machine, a convenient way to reintroduce issues or events of the past, as we would like to view them.

I suspect Mister Peabody in his self-referential humor might have had early-onset Alzheimer's; yet, he was a virtuoso in his day. I find that Mr. Peabody's WABAC Machine, a time tunnel, has greater relevance in some ways than reality
du jour
.

My life today has become a cartoon in so many ways, a Wayback Machine, but the early years give me ballast.

****

Way back, my late maternal grandmother, Brooklyn-born Loretta Sinnott Brown, called me “snippy snooper” as a young boy because I was always “snooping around,” asking too many questions, forever wanting to know the minutia of life. She and my maternal grandfather, George Walter Brown—born in Manhattan, an earnest man who had owned several Upper East Side brownstones and munificently forgave missed rents during the Depression with a heart of the size of SoHo—lived on Rye Beach Avenue in Rye, N.Y. in a classic red brick two-story home, a short walk from Rye Beach on Long Island Sound at the mouth of New York Harbor. My grandparents had grown up in the city, worked there, then made their way north, as with all my relatives, maternal and paternal, since kin began arriving generations ago from the old sod, from places like Dublin, Wexford, County Clare, and Belfast.

My grandfather, whom we affectionately called “Daddy George,” had close ties to Magherafelt, Ireland in the Northern Ireland County of Derry where family members were baptized and married in the Little Chapel of Woods, which still stands today, framed by a family burial marker.

Once or twice a week, my mother used to take me and two of my sisters, Maureen and Lauren, to see my grandmother and Daddy George. Grandma was petite, short, and thin, a woman of incalculable resolve—perseverance that she clearly passed down to my mother. Daddy George was handsome, gentle, and erudite, an intellectual in his day—small in stature, large in
bounty. He didn't talk much, as we observed as kids; Grandma did all the chatting, distracting us with sandwiches and desserts, piping hot chocolate in winter in a tall steaming glass, and in summer, fresh lemonade and blackberries from the back yard. I spent much time with her in the kitchen, snooping around and playing with her dog, a Mexican Chihuahua named Poncho, appropriate in dimension for the household. Mom, meanwhile, sat on the couch visiting with her dad, trying to make conversation. The moment seemed awkward.

In time, I began to realize that something was terribly wrong with my grandfather. His sentences were becoming shorter as his voice trailed off. He didn't recognize us on occasion, and he stared a lot in withdrawal. Often, he just shook his head, in an acknowledgment when asked a question. I thought he was hard of hearing.

There were times, my mother told me later, when Daddy George in great confusion would walk to the Rye train station without telling anyone, taking an express to Grand Central so he could stroll the streets of the Upper East Side—a place that made him feel whole. He was trying to go home to his office on 28
^th
Street. The local New York cops knew him and would phone my grandmother, then make sure he returned safely. No one seemed to grasp what was happening.

Daddy George, doctors said, had “hardening of the arteries,” the cipher in those days for dementia. “Your grandfather is very sick,” Mom would tell us.

I'll never forget the day we came for a visit, and all the dining room furniture, including the mahogany table on which I had done my grammar school homework, was gone—replaced with a stark hospital bed. Daddy George could no longer walk up the steep oak stairs and was confined to the bed.

The deterioration had a solemn impact on me. My grandfather, who had been slowly waning before us, was now in a deep slide—in the rear-view mirror of Grandma, who cared for him
like a trained nurse; my mother, who adored him for all he was; and my siblings and me, who felt the pull of a family tree. We loved him. A photograph of Daddy George, sepia in tone, in a suit and tie in his professional Manhattan days, hangs in my office today; it's the same photograph that I hung on a wall at the foot of my mom's bed at EPOCH Senior Living in Brewster, months before she succumbed to Alzheimer's. The night before she passed away, I pointed at the photo, and my mother recognized him. With his wire-rimmed glasses and the shape of his face, I look a bit like him.

Weeks before my grandfather died, Grandma on her loving rounds, was stunned one day to see Daddy George sitting up in bed. He spoke for the first time in months, and said in muted tones that he was aware of all she had done for him; he thanked her, and told her that he loved her. It was a last expression of love—testimony that those suffering from dementia and other mental handicaps, still observe and can retain far more than one might imagine. My mom rushed over to the house to speak with her dad. Doctors counseled that the enlightenment was fleeting, a last flow of blood to the brain or a remnant brain cell flashing a final distress signal. Daddy George quickly fell back into the abyss.

I will never forget the day he died. Still haunts me. When I returned to the red brick house, the hospital bed was gone and the dining room furniture was back in place, as if nothing had happened, yet I knew that nothing would ever be the same.

****

Nothing ever is the same, beyond history that repeats itself. “No man ever steps in the same river twice,” the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus wrote in 500 BC, “for it's not the same river, and he's not the same man … Other waters are forever flowing on to you.”

In Alzheimer's, the currents of the disease rise slowly. Those
with early-onset, with an acuity of what's to come, hold a collective breath, awaiting progressions of the loss. “Oh waste of loss,” Thomas Wolfe, one of my favorite writers, observed in his 1929 novel,
Look Homeward Angel
, “Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane into Heaven, a stone, a leaf, a door. Where? When?”

The where and when is always front of mind with me. When my grandfather chased the forgotten language in Alzheimer's, he was lost cerebrally in a back alley; he never found it. Grandfather was never the same again, yet my mother rarely spoke of his illness, other than to say that he had suffered greatly, but with inspiring dignity. That's the way one should suffer, she told me. Always suffer with great dignity. Later, when my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, family members were equally voiceless about the illness, in sync with denial, reacting to a stigma—a common antiphon to Alzheimer's and other life-changing diseases. Myself included.

“It's not denial,” once observed cartoonist Bill Watterson, creator of the precocious, at times sardonic, comic strip
Calvin and Hobbes
. “I'm just selective about the reality I accept.”

Aren't we all…

****

More than one in three today (far more in years to come) are touched in some way by the disease—either fighting it, or knowing a family member, colleague, or friend with Alzheimer's—and yet, the disease rarely gets attention in an obituary or in a death certificate. Family members often decline even to acknowledge Alzheimer's, or call it by name. This collective denial has been the subject of scores of newspaper, magazine, and medical journal commentaries. “Scientists say that when they try to trace the inheritance of Alzheimer's disease in family members, or to learn the age of onset, they come up against family members who will not admit that a parent or close relative had anything
seriously wrong with them,” noted
The New York Times
years ago in a report. “Adult children frequently try to protect their parents by not telling them that they have Alzheimer's disease, a situation reminiscent of the days when no one would tell cancer patients that they had cancer … The stigma, experts say, is because of the disturbing symptoms and the fears of family members that they could inherit a gene that will give them the disease.”

And so, family members across the board often reach, explicably, for a shallow, “drive-by” diagnosis after a brief encounter or a hasty phone conversation. It's fully human to deny what we find unpleasant or chilling, but when the drive-by precludes one from the facts, from facing real-life implications, then it's wholly unproductive, a dead end.

Such observations are akin to saying to one who cannot hear: “But you don't look like you're deaf.”

****

You can't hear much on Pluto. It's a dark icy place, dense with denial, isolated to the point of impenetrable peace. What's in a name? Plenty, in this case. In 1930, Walt Disney introduced an obtuse canine companion for Mickey Mouse named Pluto, an apparent callout to a planet with a thin atmosphere of nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide gases, the kind of place in deep space of suspended animation where not much cohesive thought occurs. Beyond Pluto, three times farther from Earth and 900 times Earth's distance from the Sun, is Sedna, a surface composition of 60 percent of methane ice and 70 percent of water ice; it is capable of supporting a subsurface ocean of liquid water, scientists say. This dwarf planet will become closer and brighter over the next 72 years before it begins its 10,500-year trip to the far reaches of the solar system and back again, making it much easier for some to hop on a ride from Pluto, a sling shot. You can hear God from here.

The trip to Pluto, a metaphor of survival instinct for my
flight from reality, can be a comfort, a release from the angst, fear, sadness, and rage—a surrender to numbness, those unfathomable blank stares, to feel peaceful again, avoid the pain of losing control. Daily, I fight against the impulse to let go, a welcome release, even just for minutes. There are days I have to prompt myself to come back. Often, my wife, children, or friends summon me with a snap of a finger.

The drifting is similar to sailing in a slack wind. In Alzheimer's, one doesn't move fast, but the journey is soporific—respite from the interruptions of a brain gone awry, a flickering light whose plug is loose in the socket. On Pluto, the mind and body are at peace, no longer on high alert. The metaphoric gravitational pull of Pluto, for me and others with the disease, draws deep. It's soothing at this stage just to let go. At some point, the light goes dark forever.

Often, I look, with soulful flashlight in hand, for my mother on Pluto, but I know she's not there. She's with God. Many months ago, one evening when I couldn't sleep, typical of my journey, I was lying late at night on the couch in the family room, watching reruns of “Planet Earth.” I sensed a woman sitting next to me. I wasn't sure if I had drifted off, was in-between sleep, or was just dreaming. Still not sure. At first, I thought it was my wife, Mary Catherine; her back was to me. Then the woman turned and looked at me. It was my mother. She stared straight at me.

“Mom,” I said. “I can't sleep!”

“It's ok. I can't sleep either,” she replied in a calming tone.

From what I recall from the encounter, she then rubbed the back of my head, and within seconds, I fell into a deep slumber. It was the most restful, peaceful sleep of a lifetime.

My mother in time would make her presence known elsewhere, once in the form, I suspect, of a flowering hibiscus. My sister Lauren had received a hibiscus from a friend, but the plant would only flower on rare occasions, remarkably rare
occurrences and in yellow: on my mom's birthday and when family gathered at Lauren's outside Boston. As if to reinforce like the elementary teacher she was, my mother's presence was felt again. Driving down to the Cape on a summer day shortly after my mom's death, Lauren spotted a yellow jeep as she queued up for gas along Pilgrims Highway. Her attention was fixed on the license plate, surrounded by a sea of yellow. It read: “RIP Mom.”

Rest in peace, always.

These types of happenstance are daring to attest; one opens themselves up to all sorts of second-guessing. I get that. So analyze away.