Finding the Right Words by Cindy Weinstein

Author:Cindy Weinstein [Weinstein, Cindy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781421441269
Publisher: JohnsHopkinsUP
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

• 4 •

Behavior

Turning Right

Bruce has asked me to write a chapter about behavior. My dad’s. I don’t want to. There is the difficulty of remembering this aspect of his disease (me Berkeley; him Florida), the pain of doing so, and the sinking feeling that I won’t be able to find the right words. I believe that I have managed to come up with a vocabulary to explain my father’s loss of his, but I am not confident that my words can fully capture how his early-onset Alzheimer’s manifested itself in particular behaviors. Although I don’t know if my father did any of the kinds of behaviors Bruce sees in frontotemporal dementia, like crawling on the floor, touching strangers in inappropriate ways, eating packages of sugar because of a sweet tooth, he may have. But I never witnessed anything like that. Those behaviors are more compulsive and brutally physical than the comparatively gentle, but nonetheless traumatic, ones I’ve already described. Behaviors are embodied in that you see them; language is abstracted in that you hear it. You don’t have to be present to hear the logopenic variant of Alzheimer’s disease. Its full effects are direct and evident in phone calls.

Of course, you can hear about behaviors that occur as the tau and the amyloid proteins migrate from one part of the brain to another, and that is how I learned about my father aiming the golf club in the wrong direction. One of my father’s golf companions saw my dad do this strange thing and then told my mother, who later told me. Hearing about behavior implies, by definition, at least one degree of separation between you and the person telling you about the behavior. However, the behavior being described is often profoundly visual. I don’t see very well to begin with, even when I’m looking at something directly. This statement is both literally and metaphorically true. Even with an extremely strong prescription that tries to correct for nearsightedness and astigmatism, glasses no longer make my vision 20/20. And I have already talked about not seeing my father’s tears at the San Francisco Airport for what they were.

The most jaw-dropping blindness on my part was the forgetting that my father was dying. He was in a nursing home, actually a series of homes, because my mother was quite rightly and empathically never satisfied with the ones he was in. She moved him from a hellhole in Lake Worth to a fancy-pants hellhole in Jupiter, with beautiful chandeliers at the entrance and the rooms with the straitjackets in the back, to another place in Plantation (whose job is it to come up with the names of these cities?), to the last place in Delray Beach. There was always a better one over the horizon, but of course that hope was a mirage given the caregiver protocols of the ’90s: patient acts up, patient gets drugged, drugs wear off, patient gets restrained. Repeat until zombified.

But back to the part where I forgot my

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.