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Forgetting, Part 3

December 21, 2013

When he was younger, before his dementia, my father was never one to be in the thick of things. He never sought any limelight, never loved to hear his own voice, never aimed to be either subject or object. My father was not someone to hold himself before others. Natively, my father was always the opposite of a salesman. No, my father was always a sideliner, a bench player, a number — never the headliner, the star, the name. Never the go-to guy, never the one to call when things came down to the wire. Never the first to mind when things got tight.

Much gets made of the wanderings and antisocial behaviors that emerge in those with dementia, the sundowning and outbursts, the unexpected cruelties and moods. The inappropriatenesses — the nastiness and spite. (And yes, it has been pointed out these are often not the result of the dementia itself, but simply justifiable responses to less-than-respectful treatment by those without dementia.)

Nevertheless — what do these actions make symptoms of? With forgetting (generally) and dementia (specifically) is what’s forgotten ever oneself? One’s native personality, one’s native soul? Or does that core remain in lizard-fashion, intact within one’s mind as a fundament that simply no longer has new memories to support? And if so, what then do these wanderings and outbursts represent? Do they stand as indicators of self-honesty? That is, is the primary thing forgotten by those with dementia simply inhibition? What do these behaviors say to and about these people who physically meander or strike out; are these the manifestations of a person’s true soul in action?

My father with dementia is easy. Essentially no wanderings, essentially no outbursts. He requires little in ways of attention, other than strictly physical: food and drink, hygiene and sleep. Taken on outings, he smiles and nods, says little beyond hellos and goodbyes, but appears to be happy (or happy enough, whatever that means) being an outlier, an observer, a nobody. Conversation and bustle can be going on around him but my father won’t complain — won’t interrupt. (Which is about how much he would have complained or interrupted in the past.) There he sits in his wheelchair, content, it would seem, with forgetting and being forgotten. In the throes of his dementia, my father seems to have come home.

Whence restraint? What gives lie to self-awareness, to self-control (in fact to self?) What is it in ourselves (our mind, our soul) that stays our words and actions? Why are we not chaos every day, desire run rampant? What is it in ourselves that makes us withhold?

It’s a good thing we’re weak as babies, or else with baby-intent we’d wrench the world asunder. Ever-inquisitive, we’d loot our surroundings with the same zeal that babies loot their surroundings to learn. Only later as we grow in strength of body and mind — as we learn — do we suppress, both from lessons from adults (one hopes) as well as hard knocks from experience (one also hopes). Both these ways of learning persist because of the persistence of memory, because (one hopes) our past is what informs our future.

But should this memory fade, should it never take, what then? Without the limits and borders of memory, what is left over to inform our actions? In the throes of amnesia or senility or birth, what are our naked motives? Want? Play? Curiosity? Lust? Greed? Who do we become in the absence of our memories, or is it only in that absence that we become ourselves?

Landing on the shores of this wilderness of lack-of-memory, what does one think, what does one do, how does one decide, why does one act? Does one shy from the unknown or step forward to engage it? What informs our choices when no one else is there to counter ourselves (even ourselves). And so then who do we become? Is this us, at our most honest? Erecting a stockade, plowing the land, laying railroads, building cities, damming rivers, shooting for the moon? And is this unbounded honesty always the best policy? (Consider art, for example, which lies not in the accomplishments of its freedoms, but in the wonders achieved despite its cage.)

And can we ever truly be free? Are we not always constrained by our temperament and personality, our shouldered whispers, our better angels and worse devils? And so when unaccompanied by our shackles of memory (of past consequences, past losses, past failures, past disapprovals) what of us then? Freed from all of that, what histories will we tell in our selfish tongue?

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