Amy Tan - The Opposite of Fate

I did not know the term for Alzheimer’s disease in Chinese, nor did my sisters. They described it to my aunt and uncle in Beijing as “that malady in the head that affects old people,” in other words, benign forgetfulness. I could tell by my sisters’ attitude that they had no idea how serious this disease really was. To them, it was an illness of guilt, their guilt for having been inattentive, that had caused our mother to become inattentive to the world. My sisters blamed themselves for not visiting her more often. They prescribed favorite foods as a cure.

My auntie Su said her sister-in-law’s mind had slowed because she didn’t have enough people to speak to in Shanghainese, her native tongue. She promised she would take my mother out to lunch more often and talk to her.

My sister Jindo sent Wisconsin ginseng, the best kind, she said. “She will get better,” she assured me. None of my sisters felt the numb shock I did in recognizing that our mother’s brain was dying and thus she would disappear even before her death.

Yet as I discovered, her memory losses were not always a bad thing. For instance, she seemed to forget what had happened to my father and older brother. She no longer dwelled on their deaths as much. Instead, she began to talk about happier days, for instance the trips she and I had taken together. She counted them out on her hand: China, Japan, China again, New York, China again and again. She loved to tell people about the year we lived in Switzerland, when I was so bad and so was my boyfriend Franz. “So much headache you give me,” she would claim proudly. It was astonishing how much she remembered, details about my misadventures that I had forgotten.

She recalled the night she drove my younger brother and me through the mountains in Spain: “You remember? We afraid to stop, because so many stories about bandits. So I drive, drive, drive all night, but too sleepy to keep my eyes open. I told you, ‘Start fight about you boyfriend so I can argue, stay awake.’”

Oh yes, now I remember, I said. She could summon the past better than I. How could she have Alzheimer’s? I fantasized that she did not have that dreaded disease at all. Her earlier confusion and delusions were due to a stroke or a tumor, perhaps vitamin deficiencies or severe depression. Soon, with medicine, she could be restored to her old feisty self, but as happy as she was now.

One day, she talked about the first time she met my father. What a joyful day that was. “You remember?” she said. “You with me.”

“Tell me,” I said. “Your memory is better than mine.”

“We in elevator,” she reminisced. “All a sudden, door open. You push me out and there you daddy on a dance floor, waiting. You smiling whole time, tell me go see, go dance. Then you get back in elevator, go up. Very tricky, you.”

Instead of being saddened by her delusion, I was choked with happiness. She had placed me in her memory of one of the best days of her life.

In part, some of my mother’s newfound ease may have been due to a pink pill, an antidepressant. Ostensibly the new medications she had to take were for her hypertension. That was the lie, the pill that was easier to swallow. Paxil was rolled into the lot, as was Aricept, various benzodiazepines, a changing assortment of antipsychotics, all of which in time lost their effectiveness or yielded peculiar side effects like the lip-smacking and foot-twirling of tardive dyskinesia. Her neurological tics were more exhausting for us to watch than for her unconsciously to do. I kept a journal of what she took and why, what her symptoms were and how she was changing as she lost bits and pieces and chunks. I often wrote that my mother seemed happier than she had ever been. I marveled over that. Was happiness in dementia true happiness?

Yet I was saddened to think that with proper medication, my mother could have been a different person. Clearly, she had suffered from major depressive disorder most of her life. She must have gotten that from her mother. She had bequeathed that to me.

At moments, I mused over what life would have been like had I been raised by a happy, depression-free mother. Imagine having a mother who was nurturing instead of worrying, a mother who would have filled my head with enthusiastic suggestions on what to wear to the dance rather than issue warnings that a single kiss from a boy would render me both pregnant and insane. Then again, if my mother and I had had a wonderfully happy relationship, I would have been wonderfully content in childhood. I would have grown up to be bubbly, well balanced, mentally stable, and pregnant many, many times from many, many kisses. Instead of becoming a fiction writer, I would have become a neurosurgeon and a concert pianist on the side, much to the surprise of my doting mother, the happy one who never would have foisted her expectations on me.

A new stage of my mother’s illness began. More delusions took hold. Sometimes she became obsessed with conspiracies against her by my half sister; Lijun, she believed, was trying to steal the starring role from her in a documentary about her life. Another time she believed my husband was having an affair with a Chinese woman at Lake Tahoe. She had gone there and seen the whole sordid mess, she claimed.

This was particularly sad to me, since Lou had taken care of her as lovingly as any Chinese son. He had purchased her home, had seen to her financial needs, had served her first at every meal, and was always available to accompany her to the hospital or to search for solutions for her care. But now, at our twice-weekly dinners at her favorite restaurant, she glared at him the entire time. Day and night, she called me every twenty minutes to tell me I had to leave him. After two weeks, I figured out what I had to do to make her stop. I could not argue with delusions. I had to acquiesce to them.

When the phone rang next, I answered with a sad voice. I informed her that I had kicked Lou out of the house. (Lou, who was standing nearby, looked at me with a puzzled face.)

“So now you believe me,” she said.

“You’ve always been right,” I said. “Only you worry about me. Only you can protect me from everything bad.”

Yes, my mother said.

“Everyone else, they don’t care. But you do, because you are my mother. Only you are this good to me that you would worry this much. You know me better than I know myself. You know what can hurt me. You are the best mother.”

“Now you believe,” she whispered in a grateful voice. Then she said what every good mother would say. “Okay, go get something eat now.”

“I can’t,” I answered. “There’s nothing to eat in the house. Lou used to go to the store to get food. But now he’s not here. And I can’t go out at night by myself. Someone might rob me.”

“But you hungry?”

“Well, only a little, but really, it’s okay. I won’t starve between now and morning. It’s all right if I’m just hungry.”

A good mother cannot bear to think her child’s stomach is empty.

“You scared, all alone?” she asked.

“A little,” I replied. “The house is so big now that I’m by myself. But I’ll check the doors often to make sure no burglars can get in. Good thing I’ll be moving to a smaller place.”

“Moving? Why?”

“You know, with the divorce, Lou will get half of everything. We’ll have to sell the house and cut up the money. And if I marry someone else and divorce that man, he’ll get half of that half, so then I’ll be left with one-quarter of what I have now. That’s how it is when you divorce your husband.”

My mother began to recall Lou’s better qualities. He bought me groceries, he drove me around, he was strong. She advised me to forgive him. Of course, I should punish him for a short time, tonight, but then tomorrow I should take him back.