Three or four hours later, around 1:30 a.m., I woke up feeling weak. Floating lights were brushing the walls of the bedroom with broken yellow patterns, an explosion of energy danced into doom.
My stomach was upset and I was disoriented. I made emotional barking sounds, dry sobs that catch in the throat, a peculiar sound I had never uttered until Alzheimer's came into my life. It is a raw language of fear, the spoken sounds of the hidden animal in the hearts of human beings. It was the only language I had in that dark room, the only way to communicate the unsettling events occuring in my fitful stomach and mind.
A vocabulary of signs and signals presented itself, vapors spi-raling up through the cracks in my brain. Flying saucers in my head that no one can see, my private movies flapping in the breeze, stuck to a fence post on an open field of possibilities.
Joyce loves the night and I am an early riser, and we sometimes meet in the wee hours of the morning, but never like this. She came running when she heard my calls for help and hugged me, to give me life and comfort. When she spoke, there was fear and confusion in her voice. She was as bewildered as was 1.1 threw up.
I asked her where I was. I was lost and had begun to regress to another time. I called her "Mommy" and I asked where "Daddy" was in mantra-like singsong. I saw my mother where Joyce had been. I sat up in the bed and reached out to touch her in the dark air of the room but my tingling fingertips met nothing. My mother had been dead for decades, but time melted away and let me fall into a room of saints who were puffing surreal stogies.
Mommies and Daddies are familiar people to children, magical bits of flesh who work miracles. What Joyce heard in that dark
THOMAS DeBAGGIO
night was her husband calling to his dead mother and father to give him comfort. Calling to tell them he was coming to join them.
I was well on my way to total disorientation. I threw up again.
Eventually, I thought I was in another house, a place that was completely unfamiliar. The bedroom became the place where past, present, and future met. I was in the grip of cryptic isolation.
My bowels were in torment and about to explode. Joyce helped me into the bathroom. When the cleaning of my insides ended, I was limp, unable to move. I sat on the toilet and felt my fingers and feet tingle. I looked to see if my fingertips were lit up like electrodes. I was gasping for breath.
I was too sick to stand and too uncomfortable to sit. I dropped from the toilet to the floor where I lay curled-up until the vomiting began again, dry heaves and bile. Fortunately, I had eaten so long ago hardly anything was left in my stomach. I couldn't keep myself out of the slick of bile on the floor, pumped out when I vomited, but it didn't matter; I lay in it, hardly knowing what was happening.
Gradually the disorientation subsided and my head began to clear. The radio was on in the bathroom, turned to BBC world news. I was coming back into the real world.
I was still too weak to stand, and I knew Joyce alone could not lift my 130 pounds and drag me back to the bedroom. I rolled over onto a bathmat slowly, and decided I could move myself on it by pushing off gingerly with my legs. I maneuvered the bathmat head first out of the narrow door and made a slow right turn. I rested. There was just enough strength in my legs to push my body with the bathmat under me the sixteen feet back into the bedroom, where I lifted myself up onto the bed. It was 5 a.m., three and a half hours since the ordeal began. I was exhausted. It did not take long to fall asleep.
The next day Dr. Blanchfield called it an overdose. I called it a visit to Hell.
Joyce, Francesco, and I came back to Virginia from Delaware and I got a job in journalism, several in fact, before I was tired of it and the
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compromises it entailed. I drove a truck for a short time for the Washington Evening Star. It was the most money I ever earned, over $200 a week, but I was fed up with working for other people by then and the job did not last long. I began selling plants in the fall and it produced some money. So I decided to start a nursery, selling mostly vegetable and herb plants, crops requiring little space and quick production.
In many ways, the move from Delaware signaled an end to the more reckless part of our lives, a time when we began a new life, but there was not a clear demarcation. The new life in Virginia was snuggled up to the edge of Washington, DC. It was the place both Joyce and I called home. There was no adjustment required physically, but emotionally we lost something important. It may have been slow to show itself, but we loved the people we knew in Delaware and were enchanted by the idea that human lives were worthwhile and ideas were important objects in which to believe. We recognized these things shortly after leaving, but Delaware had a way of following us and it was hard to shake the memories and the people we had loved there.
Upon returning to Virginia we were nearly penniless. We put Francesco into second grade and went to work. Joyce found a job in a department store as a shop-at-home decorator. Before the first week was history, the manager approached her. He said he had had a visit from an official who told him things to make him think she was a communist. Joyce wondered why being against an ugly, unnecessary war was subversive and why standing up for the downtrodden was wrong.
I used the money left me when my mother died to buy property in Loudoun County, Virginia, where we thought berries might grow, but quickly lost interest in those fourteen acres. Joyce and I sold the Loudoun property to a farmer who courted us for several years with annual visits and gifts of raw beef.
Eventually we settled down in the house on Ivy Street where I became content to be an urban farmer. Joyce settled into a career as an artist with a studio at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in nearby
THOMAS DeBAGGIO
Alexandria. Francesco grew bigger and smarter and eventually left home and became a man.
Thoughts of mortality, aroused by my loss of memory, triggered the memory of a glorious time past when I hugged words and loved their feel. I resumed a life for which I once hungered and I no longer feel alone. My dream of imagination has blossomed once again.
Somewhere in the mist beyond time an immigrant baby boy from Iowa, like so many others, surprised his parents and became someone they no longer knew. The child changed in the reflected light of his time and place, and his parents were baffled by this. They remembered the boy on the sawhorse who pretended to be a cowboy, the child with arms weeping from poison ivy who needed comfort, the imaginative boy who at such an early age pretended to be a priest saying mass and used the couch as an altar. All these and other memories did not stop the child from being who he was.
They also remembered the lovely certainties of small-town life and the flat, black earth and their own childhoods, and those memories were so strong they were drawn back to the place where they started.
Memory is helpless to restore the world the way it was, and my parents died understanding who their son had been and unsure of who he would become, and they were afraid for him. They died soon, too soon everybody said—they were only sixty when they died, four years apart, a bad heart for my father and cancer for my mother. Death is always a surprise even as it is inevitable.
Just as it was too late for the parents, so too for me now so near to my own sixty years and blighted with disease, and it is my memories now that nourish me. Back in the days when I was afraid of the dark and World War II was a fresh memory, all it took was a light and a parent's hand on my bare back to calm my fear. Now it takes more than a back rub to assuage this mental discomfort.
My father would have been ninety-one this year. I wish I could tell him I am sorry, sorry he died before his time and before we could
LOSING MY MIND
know each other as adults. I wish I had not had to see my mother die slowly of cancer in the little hospital in Eldora, so ruined by life she could no longer suck water from a small ice cube. I am sorry it took so long to find myself and understand how much I loved them. All I have left are a few weak memories, and now it is too late for thei
r boy.
It is frightening to lose control of your body in any way. It is especially tragic when the body's central control system, the brain, is the target of an angry destructive process that science has been unable to tame or reclaim. Memories tell us who we are and where we have been and they warm us and provide direction. In later years, the old memories remain to offer familiar anecdotes and the safety of the past.
As the brain is slowly devoured and gradually succumbs, turning the body into an empty vessel, remembering and writing are more than difficult; they are cold receptacles emptied of content. My memories are slowly disappearing from places inhabited for so long. In themselves, my memories do not compare with the great sagas of this century, the births, deaths, tumult, madness, great art and music, and the intense suffering of so many human beings. Our immortality, such as it may be, is not contained in what we dreamed or the secrets we kept; it is how our friends and loved ones remember us.
The struggle to find the words, to express myself, has become insurmountable. I must now be done with writing and lick words instead. I will soon be stripped of language and memory, existing in a shy and unsteady forbearance of nature. I am on the cusp of a new world, a place I will be unable to describe. It is the last hidden place, and marked with a headstone.
I must now wait for the silence to engulf me and take me to the place where there is no memory left and there remains no reflexive will to live. It is lonely here waiting for memory to stop and I am afraid and tired. Hug me, Joyce, and then let me sleep.
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one s a M . mately, ' to mon . • I
/ ied from front flap)
iction, to think, and ulti-vs his Hfe becomes reduced _ > rity, the true power of thought :aa .io douity to connea to the world shine througli, and in DeBaggio's case, it is as much in the lack of functioning as it is in the ability to function that one finds love, hope and the relaxing golden years of peace.
At once an autobiography, a medical history and a testament to the beauty of memory. Losing My Mind is more than just a story of Alzheimer's, it is the captivating tale of one man's battle to stay connected with the world and his own life.
Thomas DeBaGGIO, recently a full-time commercial herb grower; worked in daily newspapers in the late 1960s and early '70s, in Washington, D.C., and Wilmington, Delaware. He is the author of Growing Herbs from Seed, Cutting and Root, of Basil: An Herb Lover's Guide with Susan Belsinger, and of The Big Book of Herbs with Arthur O. Tucker. He lives in Arlington, Virginia, with his wife.
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