Dementia, Whipped Cream and the Importance of Laughter

I stepped away from the dinner table innocently enough – to do something simple, to clear a few plates after dessert.

When I returned my mother had a wonderful smile on her face, cheeks puffed full of laughter just waiting for the right moment to chuckle forth.  It took me a moment to understand her bemusement: it was mid-August—on the table we had a wonderful heaping bowl of fresh berries and another of whipped cream. 

My mother had taken a very large dollop of the cream and plopped it down in the open pages of an Architectural Digest magazine.  She was beside herself.

There’s no need for confusion.  My mother was in the vast middle ground of Alzheimer’s disease, with her world blended between a spectacular imagination and somewhat shaky grasp of what we would call reality. 

The consummate hostess, she had been taken by a photograph in the magazine, a regally set dining room table, and realized that it would be nothing short of rude not to share our own rich bounty. 

I knew my mother loved the magazine and others like it, for the picture-book relief and indulgent clarity they gave to her own fragmented sense of past, present and future.  But this was the first time I realized how interactive her truth had become.

I struggle now to explain the jumble of emotions I felt in this moment: stunned with anger and sadness, a sudden elation – yearning love – fear; confusion; an utter loss for words.

So I did the only thing that came to mind.  I started laughing, laughing with her, pointing and laughing.

I whisked another sizable helping onto those already slimy pages. 

It was the only thing I could do.

Never before or since have I understood so clearly how comedy and tragedy are opposite faces of the same dramatic coin.  However widely we both smiled, I couldn’t escape the awful fact that I had just lost one more piece of my mother.

I learned a great deal more in the two years between this magazine shortcake and my mother’s death, most of which I am still trying to figure out.  Amidst a complicated legal battle with her second husband and medical emergencies that ricocheted into anguishing decisions about how best to care for the body that housed her failing mind – between this and the simple struggle to remain present, to visit, to listen to her disjointed stories that became mumblings and screams and sometimes just the thrashings of her arms and legs, I realized that I knew very, very little. 

I knew almost nothing, but I felt more than I ever imagined possible, each day more than the next.  I felt my stomach in knots, my heart racing, my legs fatigued by thought and my brain numbed by hours of running, the only thing that could occasionally bring a shred of calm.  Anxiety came and went as a flash in the pan or an elaborate, consuming, seven course meal.  The same thing with happiness: an irreverent, geeky pun that offered a chuckle all my own, or moving conversations with friends over days of splendid vacation.

It didn’t matter how many hundreds of books I had read, nor would the thousands more in my scholarly queue.  Better put: knowledge does not displace emotions, and it’s as helpful for confusing what you feel as for providing any sense of order or reason. 

When I would spend time with my mother at her care facility, I saw with piercing effect how our inner lives are created and sustained by the complex minutiae that accrues as our emotional existence.  She and the other patients acted out the joy and sadness, the bliss and spite, the empathy and jealousy and forgiveness and hatred that had combined into their being and now emerged no less intensely for its profound randomness.

However pretty the softly wallpapered walls, the colorful posters, the medical equipment hid by gentle covers and an ever kinder staff, however peaceful and serene this home strove to be—

Imagine an elderly, toothless, disheveled and entirely helpless woman hunched over in her wheelchair whimpering with endless malice: “get him.  Get that bastard.  Get him.”

Or my mother, clutching her stuffed-animal cat and staring frantically off into space while insisting that you find her lost pet, weeping at the thought of having let him go.

There were inspiring moments, too.  Couples flirting like high school sweethearts, old men bickering over a baseball game on TV, for them played simultaneously in three or four different decades:  “That’s Mo Vaughn.”  “No, you fool.  Babe Ruth.”  Or was it Sammy Sosa.  Black, white, Latino, whatever—peanuts and cracker jack, I don’t care if I ever come back.

But this isn’t purgatory.  It’s you and me.  It’s all of us right now.

For some reason we’ve come to think that growing up means getting ourselves together, smoothing out the complexities of life.  Naïve and with little to be self-conscious about, we go into that awkward abyss called puberty, and hope and pray that at some point things will start to make sense again.

Maybe.

A little less high-pitched and squeaky, perhaps.

But like it or not, it’s complexity and confusion from here on out.  Which is as wonderful as it is terrifying.

Now I can hear various pundits saying to hell with this wishy-washy, touchy-feely crap.  Toughen up.  Let men be men, earn a good living and enjoy a cold beer, and give women the teary-eyed space needed to be a caring mother.  Or any other line from the countless men are from mars, greatest generation fantasy books.

If you’ve ever looked into the eyes of a solider just returned from war, or a father holding his child for the first time, or simply those of a good friend on a hard day – if you’ve ever been honest with yourself – you know that we live our lives in constellations of feeling as vast, diverse, contradictory and nuanced as any in this universe.

To pretend otherwise, to let cynicism and petty cruelties callous your emotional being: this is an irreparable loss, a foreclosure on the liberty we have to exist as wholly human beings.  The snide remarks, the falsely righteous comfort of thinking yourself smarter, sexier, stronger, more stylish and successful than the next – even just the stolid pragmatism of adulthood: these needn’t be replaced by selflessness, humility and endless sacrifice.  Just a little bit of honest vulnerability.

Together we each possess an emotional genius that has nothing to do with our talents in calculus or our ability to master Presidential politics.

The goal isn’t to be forever childish, or to be irresponsible or to take foolish risks for the sake of thrill. 

All the same: we take ourselves way too seriously, but nowhere’s near seriously enough.

As I struggle to let myself cry, to be loved, to remain honest in pain and in pleasure, I remember that whipped cream.  And that laughter.  I hope you can hear it, too.