It was not the first time. When I was twenty-seven the world had broken into particles: the shimmering leaves of the elm became lozenges of gold; the color red leaped out from everything I saw; corners, then curved edges seemed to seize my attention so that I had to lift my thinking above them. I was certain I was going crazy.
Twenty years later, I was reading a novel when I found myself wondering how I knew the meaning of the word “cedar”. Did I see a picture of a tree? Did I sense associations? How did I know what each letter was? For months, I surfed above the ruminations, forced myself to speak and to understand what was said to me. I knew I wasn’t crazy, but I was terrified it was the beginning of dementia.
Then it was late November 2008. I had stopped using everything I once used to take the edge off my feelings. I walked with my grown son across a Mojave desert playa. He talked about a friend of his. I had never met the man. Suddenly I wondered how I experienced the man. Did I imagine him visually? How, in fact, did I experience anything someone said to me? I forced myself above the loop delay in my mind and pretended I was listening as I always had.
My son left for Singapore the next day. It was a loss and it was a relief. I didn’t have to struggle to comprehend what was being said to me. Then I drove down off the mesa into town and realized there were multiple lacunae everywhere. I saw people and understood I knew nothing about them. They were simply a pattern of visual stimuli. I looked down at my hand. It was the same. It occurred to me that all I had ever had was my relentless conversations with myself about everything. I knew nothing. All the while that watching and thinking part of my mind talked me through the terror that I had begun the descent into dementia.
I called my sponsor. We agreed I would take 45 days of something we invented, called In-cabin Treatment. I’d go to lots of 12-step meetings. I’d not try to figure my way out of the financial abyss that the brutal California job market had plunged me into. I’d call her whenever I felt desperate. I’d walk out to the Joshua Tree that looks like a Buddha. And, when all else failed, I would not use.
I devoted myself to the excavation. I had no choice. The OCD – at this point, I understood that I was experiencing raw Obsessive Compulsive Disorder – worsened. I woke at 3 a.m., my mind rattling in circles. I knew that without a fix for my obsessive brain, I had descended to the pure thing. There was no past. There was no future. As the nattering grew louder, there was no playing Scrabble on the computer, reading or using busy-ness for comfort.
There were the nightly walks in the desert, the brief respite of being able to fully see the beauty of the low dark mountains; the gratitude for a delicate breeze on my face and sunsets that went on for hours. There was finding a dead loggerhead shrike at the side of the highway. The bird was unmarked, his flesh still warm. I carried him to the Joshua Buddha and set him in a hollow in the trunk. Two days later he was gone. I sat on the cool sand and remembered putting him there. I observed that I was remembering. I observed that I was observing remembering. I put my hands over my face and waited for tears to come. There were none.
There were no tears, no laughter, no pleasure or pain. I talked with friends, clung to scraps of the conversation. My friend Robin had just read an article that artists’ brains often hold more information that the brains of others. I told my sponsor, “Guess what? Artists’ brains are busier than normal peoples’. Now there’s a comfort.” My sponsor reminded me that people with dementia were incapable of sarcasm. My friend Mark told me he had gone through what I was experiencing and that he hated the early morning awakenings the most.
Still I hung suspended in cerebral isolation – until I picked up a pen. I’d tried writing on the computer. It felt too disconnected. When I held a pen in my hand and touched it to the paper, I could feel a tiny radiance in my blood. It seemed as though the pen moved by itself. I wrote. I expected to read what I had written and see gibberish:
11/23/08: Lapidary. The Joshua Buddha. The white quartz pebble shaped like a heart.
11/26/08: Last night, a scatter of ducks flying east into twilight.
11/28/08: I wake the sixth time. Missing cat lies curled at my side. I go back to sleep.
11/30/08: Powerless. I wake with migraine rainbow, look out western window. Orion drifts down to the mountains. He is not a man. There is no belt of stars, no rabbit at his feet, no nostalgia. There is only light racing toward my eyes.
12/01/08: Ribbon of matte satin across the horizon, a color close to lead or the breast feathers of a bird. Sun lies cool and chalky on the spine of the peaks of the Northern mountains.
12/02/08: spine. No longer than the first two joints of my little finger, no thicker than twine. It lies in a crack in the bark of the Joshua Buddha, each vertebra in exact connection with the next. And there is this earth under me, dipping into night.
12/03/08: Jacob Rodriquez of Room 27 in Parsons Elementary School has printed his message carefully on the postcard. There is a pineapple – which is the stamp – in one corner. The teacher showed Jacob Rodriguez how to punch a hole in the card. She inflated a purple balloon with helium. Then you push the end of the balloon through the hole, tie a knot and wait till the other kids have done theirs. You and the other kids go outside. You all let go of your card. Purple going up and green, Tamika’s, and red, Kimberley’s and Who Knows What Could Happen. Who will find them? You think of the message you have printed on the card: “If you find this, please tell me who you are and where you found it.”
12/05/08: I called Parsons Elementary School. There was no Jacob Rodriquez. The woman who had once been his teacher told me it was often the case with the low income children in her school. “Their parents have to move on. You know”.
I transcribe those entries now, my mind more settled, my heart a little eased. I offer those echoes of late Autumn 2008 to myself as medicine – and to you. They are the reason I teach my addict kin to write through their addiction. - to offer the hope that there is the possibility of beauty in the worst pain of withdrawal. There can be a lifeline. It might be yours.
