Alzheimer's in the Atomic Age

Alzheimer's. There, I said it. Some people actually pronounce it, "Old-timer's," perhaps because many seniors are afflicted with this awful disease. Old Timer's makes me think of whiskey and old, surly men sitting on porches and spitting over their sleeping coon hounds. Old Timer's, like bony-faced, sallow-eyed Okies wearing suspenders and carrying castiron skillets; these are survivors in my mind. Survivors who listen to scratchy Hank Williams LPs on the phonograph and write letters on 5"x8" paper to their moved-away offspring. These are Old Timer's. These are the survivors of the times.



Those afflicted by or diagnosed with Alzheimer's are not survivors. They don't survive. They die from it. This is a disease that is literally an alien in the brain: it corrodes the brain, eats away at all the good parts, the memories, the speech, the joy, the springy step and the ability to smile.



Alzheimer's leaves no surivors. Rather, it is the A-Bomb of the soul, mind, and body of those whom we love and adore. A vacuum of life is sucked into the arsenal of this disease leaving only the dregs of a person behind. A shell, if you will, of the person we always knew and who always knew us. Not unlike The Bomb, which rips at the junctions in a victim's body, Alzheimer's tears away at the connections and synapses in the brain, damaging the tissue around it and, like the lingering radiation, continuing on its destructive path towards other healthy brain cells.



It doesn't care who it attacks. Esteemed teachers, mechanics, and physicians all fall prey to the Alzheimer's seeping annihilation. The stricken die, their bodies give up since there brain can no longer fire off the impulses to do the basic functions like breathe or swallow.



The scars that remain are left upon those of us who stood by. The caretakers. The children. The friends, neighbors, and colleagues. We witnessed the demise, we denied it, grew frustrated with this neuro scorching, then -- ideally -- dealt with it. We are left with the memory of once was the wholeness, a life, a mother, father, brother, sister who we adored.



My mother, Mary died from Alzheimer's. It was awful. It was painful to see and feel. As the disease cored out the impulses in her brain leaving vacant plaque, it also cored out me, leaving a hole where so much of who she was once thrived.



Initially, Alzheimer's, unlike, say, Cancer or Liver Disease in which we can SEE the physical destruction of the patient -- weight loss, skin discoloration, fatigue, hair loss -- does its damage internally without us SEEING a physical change. Mom Appeared the same: her stature remained constant, her laughter, her zippy step, her outward affection. Internally, though, the disease was laying claim to parts of her brain, beginning with the area the controls vocabulary. Fortunately for Mom, she had a veritable Oxford Dictionary going on in there --proof in our incomprehensible Easter Bunny notes that used Shakespearean quotations and polysyllabic words that even my oldest brother, John, then 12 didn't understand. The disease chewed away that area, but it was a slow process, not unlike how radiation crept and poisoned the lymphatic systems of Hiroshima & Nagasaki victims.



The disease moved on to other areas. Trust, wherever that's stored in the brain was immediately pummeled by the A-Bomb arsenal. What remained were thoughts of deception, lies, and thievery. Mom hid her purse in various parts of the house. We discovered newly-mailed credit cards not in drawers or in zipped up pockets in her book bags, but in soap boxes under a fresh bar of Yardley, or in a tennis ball can tucked alongside a Wilson #2. Given that Alzheimer's also chips away at the short term memory, the fact that she hid her purse -- from her husband, aka, the philandering thief -- in a different location each day made it nearly impossible to locate if she was going to leave the house.

Whenever new credit cards arrived in the mail, she'd nab them - I've no idea if she did that call-in activation we all must do from our "home phone." They would show up in sock drawers, tucked inside the folds of bar soap boxes, edged into tennis ball cans. I found one behind four cans of dog food in their pantry once when I was searching for a flavor to feed Mabel, their waggy Basset hound. She hid them because she was certain "Bud was out spending money on some woman."

One day, when she was still rather functional, she drove home and simply parked her car a few blocks away from the house. She got out, keys in hand, and walked home. There was no friend in the vicinity of her car, no construction zone that obscurred her drive, she didn't run out of gas. In her mind, it was time to park the car, and she did. When she walked in the front door - an unusual event given that always parked in the rear of the house and used the back door - Bud, her husband asked where the car was. "The car?" she inquired not knowing what he was talking about. She looked at the keys in her hand, "Don't you have your own car?"

He looked out the front window, saw only grass and an empty street, then strolled out to the curb to find a vacant road. He spent the better part of two hours walking around the neighborhood searching for her car. She didn't know why he was out there let alone why he seemed so angry. "He's probably out on a picnic with that woman."

"What woman, Mom?" I asked.

"Oh that Melissa woman. He writes her name all over the place."

"Mom, he's tutoring Melissa for math. She's in high school."

"Are you sure? Melissa? Didn't I work with a Melissa?"

"Yes. The very same. Is her name all over the calendar and on pieces of notebook paper?"

"How'd you know? I thought he had lunch dates with her."
Mom continued to hide the credit cards, her purse, bills, cash, and even some pieces of flatware silver despite this explanation. It's just the disease. It eats away at Trust, at Rational Thinking, at all Complex Problem Solving, at Communication capacities, at basic mental processes, including the simplest to help one survive, such as the ability to clean and feed oneself. Strangely, it forces the rest of us to release our years-held frustrations, disappointments, and hoped-for acknowledgments because they just aren't going to resolve themselves or happen once this disease strikes. It eats away at all those pent-up everythings that have been festering and simmering since childhood. It forces an unravelling and cooling off. Relinquish, let them go, and close that wound. This corrosive disease won't help the healing of any wound still gaping and dripping with unsettled emotion.

Alzheimer's, like the A-Bomb, it leaves behind a blistered trail of nothingness, hardly a shadow of who the person once was. And, for those of us who remain, our hands, our minds, our hearts are left with shredded images of who the person eroded to and became in this recessive process all messed into the fond memories of who she once was before the acidic explosion seeped into her mind. It's a catastrophe that even a thousand paper cranes cannot thwart, nor can a child's heartfelt love stave off the destruction.