The Long Slow Goodbye
My mother wouldn’t let go of my hand. Six years ago, at Delhi airport, I put her on a flight to Heathrow, to my sister, a doctor, who would get her properly diagnosed. I was returning to New York, and although she was in the care of a nephew on the same flight, mother seemed lost and terrified, and I felt the first piercing pang of guilt and sorrow. Since then, her dementia has spiraled into full-blown Alzheimer’s. And the momentary lapses of memory are now hallucinations; surreal episodes of a child being separated from the family in the carnival of life, the terror and uncertainty of drifting into the unknown a daily occurrence.
Nearly 44 million patients are suffering from Alzheimer’s in the world. And each is drifting slow-motion into the lonely abyss, some more tormented than others. Still, all of them losing their cognitive function bit by bit, the past, present, and future scrambled like an omelet, faces, and events drifting in and out like in a surreal film. Sometimes, the memory of a loss returns again and again, so you mourn a death multiple times and don’t remember your life, children, home, and family. Other times, you live in some halcyon visage of the past, friends and enemies, joys, and sorrows all part of the same bizarre pastiche.
My mother is a hero, a rebel warrior, a feminist before the word was invented, a saint before saints were tainted, a selfless matriarch with limitless generosity and infinite love. She was there when you crashed your car to save you from bleeding to death, she appeared without fuss when you were one meal away from starvation. Mother was the one who staved off the vultures of bankruptcy, the one who salvaged you from the indignity of dying alone, incontinent, and forsaken- a woman so strong and self-reliant she was the only constant in an ocean of uncertainty.
To see her fade into the swirling mist of Alzheimer’s leaves me utterly sorrowed. Seeing all those she served and stood beside disappear when she most needs them is a sad commentary on the world we live in. Or maybe it’s my naiveté. Society favors only the healthy and usable. Once you are fallen to disrepute or disease or misfortune, you are forsaken, gone in a flash, your miracles and service and generosity an inconvenient truth that will soon disappear like you.
