Dana Spiotta - Stone Arabia

“What were you thinking?” I said, mostly rhetorically. She waved her hand at me and scowled.

“I’ve done it many times at that store,” she said. “He always tries to bust me.” I looked at her. Lately she had been experiencing déjà vu a lot. But, as I had discovered when I looked it up on SymptomSolve.com, what she actually was experiencing was called déjà vécu. Things are falsely familiar. You read the new experience of the moment as if it were a memory you were reliving. And you have no awareness of the falseness of the feeling. Fake memory. When I entered the term in the search engine, it was indexed to several kinds of dementia, epilepsy, and other prefrontal cortex diseases. But this behavior wasn’t merely the déjà vécu. “What do you mean, he ‘busts’ you?”

“He shouldn’t always try and shame me.”

“No, he really shouldn’t, I’m sorry about that.”

“It doesn’t work, because I don’t care what people think. Certainly not some mick cop,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say. My whole life, I never heard my mother utter a single ethnic or racial epithet or even a stereotype. Mick? Wop? Where were these words coming from? You would think my mother spent her childhood as a Bowery Boy and not as the daughter of a Reseda shopgirl.

“They have been after me for a while. I know. You don’t know what they have been up to. You don’t know because you don’t pay attention.”

Where in her brain was this coming from? The doctor wasn’t sure of the nature of her dementia, or how fast it would progress. He just called it likely Alzheimer’s. He couldn’t tell me what I could expect. Anything was typical. Anything was possible. At first I didn’t think it really mattered — they were all equally untreatable. What difference did it make if it was this or that part of the frontal lobe? But I wasn’t quite prepared for this latest sign of deterioration. It wasn’t just forgetting the past or repeating the same thing over and over. It was actually remixing and changing the wiring. It was creating new things, it was changing her in real ways. She wasn’t just losing her social inhibitions, nothing as benign as that. She was starting to get paranoid, and it made her someone else, someone a little mean. It just didn’t seem fair.

That evening I spent hours on the internet reading about frontal temporal dementia. This led to cortical and subcortical dementias. And vascular dementias and the silent stroke events that can cause them, which also led me to TIDs, transient ischemic attacks or ministrokes. Then I read about cerebral infarctions. Infarct sounded like the perfect name for what I had just witnessed. And finding the perfect name seemed to mean I had accomplished something. But then I grew worried — had we missed a stroke event? Should I have taken her to the hospital? After twenty-four hours the neurological effects were irreversible. But then I read on and realized her symptoms didn’t really match a stroke or TID or cerebral infarct after all, despite the apt-sounding name. I ended up back where I started, at the symptoms for frontal temporal dementia. I was going in circles. Pages were highlighted on the search list with little numbers indicating what time I had looked at that page. 1:35. 1:58. Did my ending back where I started mean something? I clicked and printed, and none of it made me feel better or worse. It just made me feel tired.

In the coming weeks, my mother would seem almost her old self. Fatigue made her symptoms worse. But there was no doubt that things progressed in one direction. Her doctor suggested we move her to nearby (to me) assisted living (that also accepted Medi-Cal). I would have to fill out the paperwork and get her on the waiting list.

Sometimes I printed things out to read later and then never got around to reading them. Other times I would read what I had printed the night before, or a week before. This time I read as I drank my morning coffee and ate my breakfast whole-grain toast. Frontal temporal dementia, FTD, the one she had the symptoms for, was naturally the dementia most strongly linked to hereditary causes. One form of it — yet another subcategory to explore — causes aphasia. Aphasia, the gentle-sounding word has a Greek etymology that means moving away from speech toward muteness. A seemingly blissful silence, almost. But aphasia actually means the forgetting of language, the loss of using and understanding language altogether, either specific words or syntax or both — and can present in the patient as early as her forties. *

*erratam note

I have forgotten to include something, and this feels like a relevant place to correct the record. I am taking her meds. I TAKE MY MOTHER’S PILLS. No, I’m not taking them from her; I am also taking them. She has a giant six-month supply of glutamine, her quasi-effective anti-Alzheimer’s pills, endlessly refillable. So what is the harm? Why not take a prophylactic dose myself? I filled her plastic container that had a little compartment for each day of the week. She had a morning set and an evening set. One day, not so long ago, when I was filling it, it occurred to me: Why not take it myself? It can’t hurt. I doled out, every week, handfuls of supplements and filled the compartments to the brim. In addition to her doctor’s prescribed glutamine, I added piracetam, choline, alpha-lipoic acid, vinpocetine. I scoured the World Wide Web for possibilities. I bought them in bulk and they were still significant hits on my credit card. I hated the names that appeared on my statements: memextend, nusmart, braintonics, mindroids, movita. As if smooshing words together and eliminating any tongue-tripping syllables somehow hit just the right promissory key.

She often forgot to take them. Noncompliant. Well, of course she was noncompliant. How could she remember to take her memory pills? But I was totally compliant. I took the same memory-enhancing regimen I had cobbled together for her. I felt foolish doing it; what exactly was I so desperate to retain? Didn’t I see she could be released, stoic, alive only to the moment? I no longer had peaceful moments in my days, I just had these desperate backward grasps.

Writing it all down, and for what, exactly?

lowercase a:

daily musings of an unemployed but brilliant filmmaker

Okay, I am heading out to LA to start filming my documentary, Garageland. Garageland is about a life spent making music and art outside of the mainstream. Way outside. It is a celebration of a devoted unrepentant eccentric. It is about living out a secret fantasy life of your own making. Do you need an audience to create work, or does not having an audience liberate you and make you a truer artist? And ultimately, Garageland will question what makes a person produce in the face of resounding obscurity. We have enough money for our initial budget. We will shoot enough to put together twenty minutes and then use that to get more investors and, hopefully, a distributor. If you would like to be an investor (yes, you can produce films), join our DIY efforts. You can invest/ contribute through your Paypal account here.

a

He would be interviewed and he would open his archives to her. He was willing, it seemed, or at least indifferent enough, to go along with it. Nik hardly ever said no, he just slid out of things. Anyway, the chances were slim that she would raise enough money to make a full-length movie, so what could be the harm in letting her film him? I didn’t realize the uncertain alchemical potential of filmic attention. Or of any attention. But maybe part of me did.

Ada had gone to her father, Chris. He would at least give her some starting funds. I knew he would help her — that’s just who Chris is. Chris worked as an information systems manager and lived in a split-level ranch in Huntington Beach with his wife and two small children. Chris lived as normal a life as one could imagine. Who knows, of course, but he appeared content, and how could I want anything less for him? We were so long past as to almost never have been, save for Ada and her brilliant reordering of the best of our genetic attributes. And a person was not a small thing, as far as things between people go. So here we were, Chris and I, never seeing each other but deeply in each other’s life.