Homemade Biography by Tom Zoellner

Author:Tom Zoellner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466858367
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

DON’T ASK TOO MANY QUESTIONS: One of the many cruel aspects of Alzheimer’s disease is that its victims can feel themselves slipping away piece by piece. And thus it becomes a matter of personal embarrassment when they are asked a basic question that they cannot answer. You may not intend your inquiries to come off this way, but people with Alzheimer’s will sometimes view questions as insults to their declining powers. This can quickly put them into shutdown mode. “They view it as a test and see it as demeaning,” says Gwyther. “They know that they once knew.” She suggests that you phrase your questions as neutral statements and hope that your subject takes the bait. When fishing for a name, for example, try to approach it indirectly.

Q: I remember hearing that your sister Edna was married before she met Bob.

A: Yes, I think so.

Q: I never learned his name.

A: Yes, I know.

Q: He must have been quite a guy. Edna’s first husband. A very short marriage.

A: He was the pharmacist. Man named Taylor.

Q: Taylor.

A: Yes, Taylor. He was a drug addict.

TALKING WITH VETERANS ABOUT THEIR WAR EXPERIENCES

The freedom you have to read this book, or just about any book, came at a high cost. Part of that price might well have been paid by the old man sitting across the table from you.

In this section, I am going to use masculine terms exclusively to describe your subject, not just because the vast majority of America’s combat veterans are men, but because of the unique role that warfare plays in the male psyche, particularly masculine tendency to repress inner horror. Few men who see combat can be unaffected by it, and nobody who hasn’t witnessed it can ever understand what it is like to steal the lives of total strangers, and to see close friends die horribly, in an instant, and know that it was only luck that kept it from being you. These thoughts have to be planked underneath. To dwell on them is to go crazy. But the price is high for the survivors. A comprehensive 2002 study from the Yale School of Medicine found that combat veterans suffer from clinical depression and alcoholism twice as often as men who never fought. It may be that women will one day be deployed onto battlefields in greater numbers than today, but for now, this remains a generally male experience.

If a war veteran in your family has been reluctant to speak about his experiences, it could be because combat is much more terrible than most civilians can grasp. It is confusing, terrifying, and brain-searing work. It is also full of shame and self-hatred, no matter what the propaganda says. No motion picture has ever depicted its fullness. The historian William Manchester was part of the invasion force on Okinawa during World War II and he wrote about what he saw in the memoir Goodbye, Darkness. A portion is worth quoting at length: Manchester’s first recorded kill. An experience like this may be only one of the horrors that your relative is unwilling to revisit.

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