The Human Mind is a Fragile Thing

Last Saturday I went to visit my ninety-three-year-old grandmother.

Early last week, she took a turn in the health department, and the memo went out that “If you want to see her, you should do it soon, because this might be it, folks.” It turned out that by Saturday she was much improved, but since I had already made the commitment to go see her, I went anyway.

My grandmother has been positively loopy for years now, and it’s been a steady decline. She has moments of startling lucidity and then will turn on a dime and not know who you are even though she addressed you by your name three minutes before. No joke; she knew me when I got there and for the first hour, and then I went to the kitchen to wash my hands after petting the dogs and when I came back, BOOM, no recollection. I sometimes feel I ought to be more upset by this, but I’m just not. The whole situation borders on the comedic, and if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry, so I’ll laugh, thanks very much.

I don’t know about you, but it makes me wonder at the idiosyncrasies of the brain as an organ. I mean, here’s a lump of gray tissue full of things that make connections and control your movement and allow you to feel. It’s a fucking marvel. But it’s a marvel that can be derailed by the oddest things. A little bit of fluid in the wrong place, a bump to the noggin of any strength, a set of synapses that synapse the wrong way, or simply time — sometimes it’s a tiny thing, sometimes it’s massive, and sometimes it’s in between, but, on the whole, it’s all weird.

I did a five-month stint working in an assisted living facility and I cannot begin to make a dent in the list of the seriously odd things I learned about the aging human brain simply through observation and experience. The residents ran the gamut from just a little forgetful to full-blown Alzheimer's and dementia, and with the latter set you never knew just what you were going to be dealing with at any given moment. I don’t mean to make it sound like the memory care unit was on par with Arkham Asylum — it wasn’t. It was just… a very, very odd place. You had to adjust your own mind to their wavelength. You had to think differently.

It was exhausting.

With most of the residents ‘out front’, the ones who still maintained a degree of independence, it was usually just a matter of reminders.

“I’m really glad your cat didn’t swallow that button you were worried about, Mrs. Whosit. Can you please take your pills?”

“No, Mr. Thing, it’s nine o’clock in the evening. You must have fallen asleep. Breakfast isn’t until tomorrow morning.”

In the memory care unit, I could sometimes be three different people before lunchtime. There was one dear old thing who thought I was her granddaughter, another one who thought we went to grade school together and that’s where we were going every time I showed up, and another one who was just very, very angry all the time and would only do what I needed her to do if I was insufferably obsequious. (Hey, it worked, and that was all that mattered.)

The worst part was taking a step back and remembering that these people were once independent human beings with families and jobs and hobbies. We had a retired ballet dancer, a retired professor, a retired high-level civil servant, and yet here they were, unable to decipher their own medicine routines. How they got there was different in each case — a disease or episode that affected a part of the brain or simply the toll of time — but it certainly gives you perspective to see once-great minds reduced to not remembering they had oatmeal half an hour ago.

I only lasted five months at that job because it was by far the most stressful work I had ever done in the whole of my life up to that point. I was literally responsible for people’s lives, and that was just too much for me in the end. It was incredibly valuable, though, because the following year I started to lose grandparents, and I knew in Technicolor detail what was going to happen. I knew about mottling. I knew what the ‘death rattle’ sounded like. I knew all the comfort measures to take with someone on their way out. Dead bodies weren’t an issue.

But it wasn’t ever really the physical act of dying that got to me, it was the road to get there, and the toll it could take on a person’s loved ones. You don’t want to remember people like that. You want to remember them when they were active and joyful and cognizant.

I can’t help feeling that it would be easier for everyone involved if we just hit our ‘sell-by’ date and poofed into oblivion without all this faffing about with brain deterioration.

Right?