Dementia Diary: Closing a Gate

Our school gives us Yom Kippur off.  I'm not Jewish, but this commemoration of the gates closing on Jerusalem's ancient temple has become my favorite holiday, not just because it's a break mid-week. On Yom Kippur, I reflect on gates closing and opening around me.  This year, I thought of the key-coded door at the entry to Memory Care -- where Mom no
w has spent six weeks.

I punch the key pad to get in and out.  More than once, I've had to hurry out before a gentleman who rushes me and bangs on the door when it shuts behind me.  Beyond this door is a warren of small apartments, community rooms, and spacious well-lit hallways.

Mom's one of the few not in a wheelchair and still able to carry on a conversation. But she's settling in. She has a routine, waking around 10, making herself lovely for lunch.  She chats with the staff and with visitors, since most of the residents don't seem to speak much.  A companion stays with her through the afternoon and dinner.  She pours wine from one or two small bottles of watered-down Moscato, and goes to sleep after dark.

For the first few weeks, I was getting angry phone messages.  "Where's my stuff?" "Why did you put me here?" "When am I going home?" But I've not had a call like that in weeks. She seems not to remember having lived anywhere else.

Saturday mornings, I wake her early for breakfast at the French café [see photo]. She laughs out loud when I take her by the hands to pull her up to a sitting position on her bed. (Weight gain, side effect of a drug and of arthritic knees, has made sitting up difficult.)

Everything seems to be a laugh, now.  She laughs most at herself.  When, after a week-long search, her companion Laura found the room key in a flower pot on the shelf, Mom said, "Isn't that where everyone puts their keys?"  When I told her that my car, which she thought new, was the one I've driven for ten years, she quipped, "Well, I haven't seen you in ten years."  She laughs when I show her the grocery list she posted on the mirror:  "Apples, coffee, cigarettes."  She hasn't smoked in 50 years.  "Well, you don't want me to live to 100, do you?" she joked.  Incredulous that we elected this president, she asked, "Who did they run against him?  Hilary? Now, that was dumb."

Her favorite joke, the one that makes her laugh 'til she cries, is just for me to recount her escapades that caused the facility to put her in "maximum security" and to add new exit procedures building-wide. "I escaped four times?" she laughs.

So, that electronic gate makes us both secure.  For the first time in years, I'm not afraid that she's wandering outside, or falling down after over-imbibing, or just alone and lonely.

And we close the gate on dreading the day when she goes into Memory Care.  That day has, incredibly, come and gone without much drama. I expect this move to last, until the day she no longer will take my hands to lift her out of bed.

Related blogposts:
See related articles on my Dementia Diary page.
Here are two posts about earlier Yom Kippur holidays.  A 2015 bike ride among falling leaves reminded me of an overnight flight to visit to my grandmother fifty years earlier, for an essay I called "Memory and Ritual: Solice at the Solstice."  In 2016, I considered many gates closing as I approach 60, "Cycling on Yom Kippur."

My Spiritual Encounter with French Asparagus

Asked to refract my "spiritual autobiography" through the prism of "multi-cultural" encounters, I thought, first, of a plate of asparagus; then, of my last college roommate Andreas.

A child of midwestern parents in the late - 1950s, I had little experience of church.  My worldview was shaped, not by Bible stories, but by airtight, antiseptic packages. Food came frozen or canned.  On special occasions, the meat, veggies, and dessert were separated by aluminum dividers in a frozen TV dinner.

The world, too, was separated in packages: over here, the USA's good, hard-working people; over there, the relentlessly aggressive Communists; everywhere else, decadent Europe's socialistic freeloaders and the backwards continents where savage dictators oppressed starving people.

Time itself was parceled out by the half hour in TV Guide.  If dinner and the dishes took longer than 30 minutes, there was a risk of missing a portion of Batman or Bewitched.

When I did become involved with the church in my teens, Christianity was a package of just a few beliefs.  Life was a test of how closely I could adhere to those beliefs.  To be saved, I couldn't tolerate blurring of lines between fact and myth, right and wrong, clean and dirty.  I worried a lot about not being pure enough.  Rather than transgress, I would come to a full stop at an intersection, even late for a plane, even at 5 a.m., no car in sight.  I considered dropping out of a play that used the name of Jesus as an expletive in a punchline.  I scolded my friend Andreas for smoking pot in our dormitory at Duke.

Andreas was a baby-faced freshman from Philly, not religious, but open to anything.[IMAGE: My sketch of Andreas.] I took on the role of big brother to him, and also tried to convert him.  We argued, and he challenged me, but nodded and ceded the good points I made.  One night, I heard him talk Italian on the phone to his father and Swiss German to his mother.  I'd had no idea that he'd immigrated from Italy in fifth grade.  Starting then, he began to blur all my lines.  His father had fought for Mussolini; Andreas had experienced life under socialism; he knew the history of US interference with elections in countries where we helped install dictators.  He was a Roman Catholic, not because he believed the Gospel, but because that was part of his culture.

When he and I rented an apartment together, our cultural conversation opened up a new front, in the kitchen.  Andreas laughed at what I mixed with macaroni, something called "Velveeta Cheese Food".  He would make polenta from scratch, broil fish, and bake bread. He told me that "pasta" isn't just noodles, but the Italian word for the essential part of the meal, the part that assuaged appetite; meat wasn't for that, only for flavor.  He told me that Americans reverse priorities.  He said that Americans eat so that they can get back to work, but others only work so that they can get back to the table with family and friends.

A couple years later, I chaperoned high school students in France, and I saw what Andreas meant.  At 8 o'clock, the meal at a little country restaurant had already gone on a couple of hours, with wine, and bread, and small servings of varied dishes.  Between courses, I took a walk outside through the neighborhood where families were combined at backyard tables, pouring wine, playing with kids, eating bread. They were still at it when our group broke up around 11.  Later on the same trip, we ate at a fancier in-town restaurant, where one course was asparagus with butter and lemon, just two or three spears side by side on a small plate.  I'd never liked asparagus; but the sauce and elegant presentation made this stand out for all time -- I wrote a page about it in my journal that night.
[IMAGE: In my journal that same week, I sketched the view from my room.]

This cultural experience helped me to understand what I was absorbing from the Book of Common Prayer and from novels by Roman Catholics like Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, and Graham Greene.  Their stories, like the stories in the Bible, are filled with flawed people who may even try to get away from God, and cannot do so.  For these authors, God speaks through events, through broken people, and through mixed feelings.

I guess what Andreas and my experience in France and those Roman Catholic writers taught me was to stop looking ahead to the next thing, and to be present in this moment; to trust stories in all their ambiguity, though they may not always "go" with the dogma; and to see this world as something good in itself, not just as a proving ground.

I was primed, then, to understand what Episcopalians mean when they claim to have a "sacramental" view of life.  Wanting to know more, I signed up for my first EfM class.

For a deeper dive...

• I wrote about the asparagus and Andreas in a reflection on 19th century Americans influenced by travel in France. See my post Ah, Paris: The Greater Journey.
  
• Flannery Would Love It! . I visit the author's home, see the film of her novel Wise Blood, and reflect on her work.
  
• Saints in Spite of Themselves. I reflect on Greene's full body of work. In Escape Clause I re-read Greene's novel The Heart of the Matter. In What's Funny About The Comedians?, I compare Greene's suspenseful and darkly comic novel about Haiti with the tedious movie made of it.
  
• Third Take on The Second Coming. Walker Percy writes novels and essays that I've appreciated without liking them much. I worked hard to appreciate this novel, and got good results.

Pottery and Poetry: Labor Day, 180 B.C.

A scribe named Joshua ben Sirach wrote a lovely tribute to workers, suitable for Labor Day, ca. 180 B.C..  It's chapter 38, verses 24-34, in an apocryphal book, Ecclesiasticus, or, The Wisdom of Sirach, included in the Oxford Study Bible.

We know a lot about Sirach, because he ran a school for scribes. He tells his disciples not to think themselves better than anyone else just because they work with words and information.  "The wisdom of the scribe," he writes, "depends on the opportunity of leisure."  Only those who have "little business" to do have the luxury of wisdom.

Sirach describes each worker with a sort of refrain, variations on the expression, "He sets his heart on" his craft.  The farmer "glories in the shaft of the a goad," and his talk is of bulls: "How can he become wise?"  Yet "he sets his heart on plowing furrows, and he is careful about fodder for the heifers."

The makers of signets are "diligent in making a great variety [and] painting a lifelike image."  The smith, "intent on his handiwork," even while "the breath of the fire melts his flesh," "inclines his ear to the sound of the hammer."  The potter "moulds the clay with his arm," "sets his heart to finish the glazing," and still "is careful to clean the furnace."

These artists are "not sought out" for advice, do not "attain eminence in the public assembly," and "cannot expound discipline or judgment," yet "without them a city cannot be established," and "they keep stable the fabric of the world" (v. 34)

Most lovely of all is Sirach's conclusion to the poem, "Their prayer is in the practice of their trade."

Across the millennia, I hear Sirach speaking to me and my friends.  We are all of the "scribe" class, the ones with the degrees, the ones who spend our days talking and writing, manipulating figures, ideas, and images, people for whom last week's breakdown of the sanctuary's air conditioner has already entered into church lore as the Sunday we had to suffer a full hour in summer heat.

I and my fellow scribes sit at the same table as politicians, college presidents, financial advisors, authors, and symphony conductors.  Every one of us has a pile of funds in front of us, and some services that we offer, and all our "work" is a matter of  swapping around what's there on the table:  real estate, financial products, opera subscriptions, books, classes, brand name consumer goods, $100 meals.  As a teacher, my little store isn't so much, but I've reasonable assurance of livelihood and protection against calamity, so my place at the table is secure. Sometimes, a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs brings some new wealth to our table, some new services -- and we make room.  

The men who put the roof on my house a couple summers ago, and the courteous man in his 30s who served me my breakfast yesterday are not seated at that table, though they work much harder than I ever have done pushing my papers. I know: I spent a day roofing, and a few years working in a restaurant, and a few more years working in my dad's chemical factory.

A living poet, Todd Boss, spoke to what I feel in his poem "Apple Slices." As his dad's "jobsite grunt" on building projects, he and his dad shared the contents of a lunch box, listed ingeniously to make someone reading the poem aloud chew and lip-smack the words.  Boss concludes about himself,

another well-paid

well - fed, college - 

bred paper pusher, I

wonder that I've never

labored harder, nor

eaten better.

        - from Todd Boss, Pitch, p. 22-23).    

From Sirach, I take the message to heart that the work of today's "scribe" class shouldn't be valued so highly, the services of the hourly wage-earners valued so little.  Let's pay them enough to put them at the table with those of us who can be confident in our food supply, housing, and health care. If that means a commensurate decrease in the profits that go to my quarter-million dollar investments, so be it.