While in college I was required to take some low-level English class, perhaps called "Essays" or "Non-Fiction," something like that, and there was one particular essay that especially affected me and always stuck in my memory even though, in the years that followed, I forgot both the title and author.
I remembered it was an essay about a grown man having to take care of his mother who was now suffering from dementia. I remembered it had a particularly poetic way of describing her behavior and I recalled that there was a strange irony that no matter how bad her memory got, she could still recite from memory the common rhyme about Guy Fawkes.
With these details, and with my textbooks all in a landfill, I recently tried to re-find this essay and found the task to be extremely difficult. A.I. was especially unhelpful as it would respond with 100% certainty that the essay was "X" by Y even when no such writing exists in the real world.
Nevertheless, through great frustration, I recently found the essay and found that it was not an essay, exactly; the piece I was looking for was an excerpt - it was the first chapter of the book "Growing Up" by Russell Baker.
I want to share with you a portion that so eloquently describes living with dementia:
At the age of eighty my mother had her last bad fall, and after that her mind wandered free through time. Some days she went to weddings and funerals that had taken place half a century earlier. On others she presided over family dinners cooked on Sunday afternoons for children who were now gray with age. Through all this she lay in bed but moved across time, traveling among the dead decades with a speed and ease beyond the gift of physical science.
And:
For ten years or more the ferocity with which she had once attacked life had been turning to a rage against the weakness, the boredom, and the absence of love that too much age had brought her. Now, after the last bad fall, she seemed to have broken the chains that imprisoned her in a life she had come to hate and to return to a time inhabited by people who loved her, a time in which she was needed. Gradually I understood. I was the first time in years I had seen her happy.
And the part about Guy Fawkes:
So it went until a doctor came by to give one of those oral quizzes that medical men apply in such cases. She failed catastrophically, giving wrong answers or none at all to "What day is this?" "Do you know where you are?" "How old are you?" and so on. Then, a surprise.
"When is your birthday?" he asked.
"November 5, 1897," she said. Correct. Absolutely correct.
"How do you remember that?" the doctor asked.
"Because I was born on Guy Fawkes Day," she said.
"Guy Fawkes?" asked the doctor. "Who is Guy Fawkes?"
She replied with a rhyme I had heard her recite time and again over the years when the subject of her birth date arose:
"Please to remember the Fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot."
Then she glared at this young doctor so ill informed about Guy Fawkes' failed scheme to blow King James off his throne with barrels of gunpowder in 1605. She had been a schoolteacher, after all, and knew how to glare at a dolt. "You may know a lot about medicine, but you obviously don't know any history," she said. Having told him exactly what was on her mind, she left us again.
So "Growing Up" is available on Amazon and the entire first chapter is offered as a free sample. I know absolutely nothing about or have any connection to Russell Baker but may add this book to my reading list. Happy Guy Fawkes Day.
