The Disease That Takes Your Breath Away

By Roger Rosenblatt

My mother died last week, 17 years too late, of Alzheimer's disease--though not technically, of course. Technically, Alzheimer's victims die of heart failure, pneumonia or perhaps a stroke, since the symptoms of the disease and a series of strokes are indistinguishable. My mother died of some respiratory thing, technically. It might be said that she died because she stopped breathing. Now, I would like to start breathing again myself, having held my breath for 17 years.

Yet, oddly, I am wondering what to do with spring this year--oddly, because I had been thinking about my mother less and less as her condition deteriorated, and as she grew less and less herself. A mighty impressive disease, Alzheimer's. It takes your breath away: first as it inflicts progressive shocks on the victim's system, and then, in the victim's relatives and loved ones, as it deadens feeling altogether.

Such fascinating stages. Initially there is a kind of troubled yet sweet awareness that the clock of the patient's mind is a few seconds off. Then an encroaching recognition of loss of function becomes less recognition and greater loss. Soon words and phrases are looped, like mad lines from a postmodern play; then Tourette's-like bursts, frags, some incomprehensible, some vile; then less of that, less of everything, until the mind is concentrated down to a curious stare. Even in death, my mother's face looked worried.

Dead now, dead for years. I ought not to think about her. I should be thinking of China and the returned air crew of the spy plane. I should be thinking about the Cincinnati riots. There is Tiger Woods to think about, and the start of the baseball season; Pedro vs. Clemens up in Boston the weekend of my mother's death; I watched, half watched.

I should be thinking of spring and April: T.S. Eliot, Columbine, Hitler, Shakespeare, Waco, taxes, Oklahoma City, Jesus, Moses, Al Jolson singing April Showers. My mother used to sing that. She was born on April l, no fooling.

But I am not really thinking about her either. I am thinking about not thinking about her, and feeling neither guilt nor responsibility. Now, here's a feat for Alzheimer's: it takes guilt away from a Jew! If I converted to Catholicism, would I get some back?

I do not feel guilty about my mother. I did my filial duties, lovingly, for the most part. I do not feel responsible. Alzheimer's drops in from nowhere, like a mistimed curtain. You don't catch it because you went outside in winter without a hat.

The trouble is, I don't feel anything, save the shadows of memories, and even they have to be reconstructed willfully.

One day, when the disease was new, I took my mother to lunch, and remarked over coffee that we should do this again very soon. "Yes," said my mother. "But the next time we have lunch, we should invite Joseph Cotten." She spoke with great earnestness. "Why, Mom?" I asked, since neither of us knew the actor personally. "Because Joseph Cotten is remarkable," she said. "He can listen to your dialect and know exactly what part of the country you come from."

Getting into the spirit of things, I realized that she was thinking of Leslie Howard or Rex Harrison, both of whom played Shaw's Professor Higgins, and I suggested as much to her. She considered for a moment, then smiled in a kind of gentle acknowledgment of the correction and of the craziness of the thought in the first place. "Yes, that's right," she said. "I was thinking of Rex Harrison. But as long as we've already invited Joseph Cotten, I don't think we should renege." The story used to amuse me.

The thing about Alzheimer's is that if it lasts long enough, it takes away everything, not only by erasing the person you once knew but by erasing the you you knew too, leaving two carcasses. When the disease started getting bad, I used to tell myself that while I could make neither head nor tail of my mother's ravings, still she might have been clear as daylight to herself. When she caved in to silence, I told myself she might be harboring pleasant, unexpressed thoughts. Eventually I stopped kidding myself. What I saw of her was what I got: a blank stone in a wall eaten away by rain.

Which is very much the way I am now. The people around Alzheimer's victims suffer from secondhand smoke, and the worst of their secondary disease is that, after the long years, the one thought, the one plea that overtakes all others--all the resurrected laughter, the walks along the beach in Chatham on Cape Cod, the brassy imitation of Mae West's strut, the home-sewn Dracula costume at Halloween, the bewildered attendance at basketball games, the singing of April Showers--is: die.

And so she did. And it is spring. And because hope breathes eternal, even if nothing else does, I am wondering if my mother is somewhere up and about, breathing again, where life is restored and the air and mind are clear.