Amnesia by G. H. Ephron

Author:G. H. Ephron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

19

AFTER SYLVIA Jackson returned to her room, I remained alone in the conference room writing up my notes. I put her figure drawings side by side and considered the contrast. The wellformed male figure, the attention to detail, spoke to her interest in men and their power over her. The void of the female figure, no more than an outline sandwiched between head and feet, echoed her own feeling of emptiness and loss. These same themes rippled through her responses to the Rorschach cards.

It had been painful to watch her struggle. I was glad the testing was over. It wasn’t my goal to be Syl’s tormentor, but that’s what I’d become. She reminded me of my father, when he still had enough of his mind intact to realize that he was losing it. I remembered one time I was in New York for a conference. I was going to my parents’ apartment for lunch and then catching the shuttle back to Boston. I called that morning to ask if there was anything I could bring. My mother said they were all set. Dad was going to walk to the market to get coffee and milk. He liked the exercise.

When I arrived, their apartment door was ajar and I could hear my mother inside, talking on the phone. An open apartment door in Brooklyn is about as common as a hippopotamus on the subway. I knew something was wrong. My mother’s voice was high and shrill. “But he’s been gone for two hours. The market is only fifteen minutes from here!” When she saw me, she hung up in disgust. “Your father hasn’t come back and the police are useless,” she said, her voice tight.

I sprinted to the store where my mother thought he’d gone. I found him there, wandering down an aisle carrying a box of Brillo and a package of chicken cutlets. He didn’t know where he was and he didn’t know how he’d gotten there.

During the walk home, he brooded silently. At the first street corner, he hesitated, anxious, starting and stopping, like a kid trying to dart into a rapidly turning jump rope. I took his arm and he let me lead him across.

“I didn’t want to worry you” was my mother’s explanation for why she hadn’t told me Dad was having problems. This came on top of a series of lesser incidents — forgetting phone numbers, burning pots on the stove, repeating things — that marked the boundary between benign everyday forgetfulness and a more pathological situation. He was still taking in information, still cataloguing every time he screwed up, comparing his screw-ups to how he used to function. He was becoming increasingly anxious and depressed, afraid he was losing his mind. And in fact, he was.

I remember his relief when I told him that I thought he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. At least it was an illness, something organic with a name other than crazy. And I remember my own distress. Here was a disease about which I knew everything there was to know.

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