Photos of the garden. I take Robert on FaceTime “trips.”

 

I’ve been lax and lazy. I took no notes on several interactions with Robert. I don’t recall all the things he said. Maybe just the affiliated mood. I am contacted more regularly for a Facetime call and I am finding it very helpful: I can walk around the house and pull out props to stimulate his memory. I “take” him to the garden, have him greet the tomatoes, let him silently marvel at the flowers and at how tall the Krauter Vesuvius Plum Tree has gotten.

I go out. I come in. He is in the palm of my hand.

One day I was having a late lunch with my friend when the phone rang. There he was, in bed, but looking, shall I say, more alert? My friend took the phone and greeted him. He remembered her, knew her. She thought he “looked good.” The phone was handed back and I propped it up while I dug into my food and at some point, after I had told him that my friend had brought over a Panera lunch, and he observed me chewing, he said, “What are you eating?”

That’s the kind of comment that excites me because it seems more like “him,” the him I used to know.

Yesterday, another friend was over for lunch and I turned the phone in her direction as I said, “do you know who this is?”

“Marilyn,” he answered.

It was.

Robert used to make excuses for his poor ability to remember faces. Poor ability to recall names. He told people he suffered from “face blindness,” after he saw a segment about it on television. That was his “M.O.,”  an excuse. In fact, in general his memory was very poor, highly selective. He always had a lot of weird stuff going on: he seemed unable to concentrate, to finish tasks. I was convinced that he had Attention Deficit Disorder. If you told him to rest, he would say he didn’t know how. He was constantly spinning like a top and as his energy unwound with his illness so did his personality.  Even when he was younger he seemed to have repressed most of his childhood memories, but whatever he could access seemed to be fraught with pain. His childhood was almost always viewed through a lens of discomfort.

As he cedes to the world of dementia, he can only remain within himself and the outside world has difficulty tapping into his inside world. For all the pain that he may have lived through, he now is the painful catalyst for those trying to engage.

The last month has been another strange one. He is in the same room I asked to remove him from, and, perhaps in the long run that is good, it is stable though the residents therein are odd. But so is he. The man diagonally across has to pass his bed to get to the bathroom in his wheelchair and while doing so he carries on with vocal sound effects. I can see Robert’s eyes tracking him. Covid comes and goes in the building and rather than move Robert again and again as residents may take ill, maybe it is better this way, living in this new normal.

He has had two procedures this month for occluded arteries. Stents have been placed to go with the flow. And in doing so, I wonder if it is possible that more blood is going to the brain.

He often answers in seemingly “patterned” responses: he is very polite. He’s lost the hundreds of layers of ego that once enveloped him. Slowly they peel away and leave a kind of pink newborn who has to relearn how to  be in the world.

Well, the last two times we interacted and I plowed through my monologues or just watched him stare at me as I would stare back, I recalled some silly moments. And, in my recitation of those moments, perhaps for the first time, I had a good laugh. Something struck me funny, so funny that I got hysterical and couldn’t contain myself, a far cry from my usual depressed dourness. I essentially broke free from the situation that was drowning me, and enveloping me in such sadness that I lost sense of any humor or joy. I mean, this was a man with a fabulous sense of humor, he saw the humor in everything, but it seemed to have been lost somewhere in what was left of him.

So as I sat in front of my screen and tapped into an unrestrained guffaw, I roared; I covered my mouth, calmed down and went to that unhampered place of letting go again. And, as I looked at Robert, the new Robert who I am trying to understand, I saw something I hadn’t seen in a good year and a half.

A smile.

 

Clear as day. Both times that we spoke recently.

I am on the Facetime call now, they reached me while Robert was half asleep. I asked him if he wanted to hear some music.
I pulled up some Mahler and said, “what number Mahler symphony?”

After some thought he said, “Two or three.”

I thought it was remarkable that he could respond. I put the FaceTime call near the speakers of my computer.

I pulled up Mahler’s Symphony Number Two.

The Resurrection Symphony.

And hoped for a resurrection.

 

 

📌The series starts here:
Part 1: And The Band Played On … a mother’s life, a daughter’s journey

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