“Goodnight, sweet prince....”
- Shakespeare: Hamlet
"This is the fourth time," I said quietly, my heart aching, as I stared vacantly into space, the cup of coffee slowly releasing its heat, hunting room temperature.
"What was that? Were you talking to me?" She asked.
“Sort of…yes…not really…uh...no…just to myself.”
The fourth time.
It’s not that I haven’t had experience or known people on the moving transport belt of my life who have found themselves or rather been found by the dark thunderclouds of this horrible disease. It’s just that it’s easier to compartmentalize when relationships lack the intimacy of these four.
The metaphor
In the early days of my professional life, I spent a fair amount of time photographing spinal surgeries. In that place, patients were covered except where the surgeon opened the skin and did the work...a field where scalpels sliced and into which metal instruments dug, and cut, and prodded to remove bone or discs.
When the person on the table was someone I knew…knew in more than a “Hi, how are you?” I could not compartmentalize. They were too familiar…not ‘surgical cases,’ but my friends.
The present
Recently, I learned a friend from Belgium, one of the more brilliant people I have known, is in early-stage Alzheimer's. Yesterday morning, he, his wife, and I had a video call. It was a gentle and loving time.
He was enthusiastic to see me. With a bit of prompting and hesitation, he found the room, cutting through the growing web of amyloid, to the place holding memories of some experiences we had together…our meetings in Singapore, Dubai, and Los Angeles. The road trip from Belgium through France to Bern, Switzerland. A cable car up a Swiss mountain where we sat on a breathtaking sunny afternoon meditating…aware of how insignificant we were, yet how fearfully and wonderfully made, that as small pieces of assembled stardust, we could know and appreciate the moment with each other and the universe of which we were a part.
What began as a professional transactional relationship became a rich and deep friendship. I love this man...I cannot compartmentalize. He, too familiar.
The other three
There was Jim. A man to whom I owed so much in my life. A man who redirected a young, wayward, and untethered fellow to a pathway holding an unimaginable future. We weren’t really close in time, but more intimate than he ever knew in eternity. His gift for young men changed everything about my life.
There was my mother, the most influential person in my life. A woman who, over more than a decade, had the onion skin of consciousness peeled away little by little until she spent her waking hours sitting in a wheelchair rocking back and forth, humming from time to time the hymns she had learned as a little girl. Before then, talking about how she and her fraternal twin sister had been busy working on curtains for the room where she slept away her final years. Her daughter, niece, and I... lovely, but unknown people.
My sister Nancy knew more intimately about my life than anyone who had ever taken a breath of consciousness. Stolen by the inexorable angel of death until it wasn't that she lost our intimacy; she lost me. From a clinical standpoint, her early onset Alzheimer’s fit neatly into the clinical window of four years from diagnosis to death…so say the data. There was nothing remotely ‘neat fitting’ about the tortuous pathway that took that woman away.
Now it is my Belgium friend. He is still early in his journey. He, as the people just mentioned, is a fighter. As the incline becomes steeper and the ground more slippery, he will fight for memories…he will fight for the next breath…he will fight for the wife and children that will slowly slip away - from the people he loves and those who love him.
"This is the fourth time," I said quietly, my heart aching,..."
He WILL fight, grasp, and claw. He will lose.
The goodbye?
It will be long.
-ted
