Wonders In Dementialand: Dementialand

by Suzka Collins

  Picasso, Giacometti and Gulley were not there. They were not invited or just busy.

  My mother accepted death's dance. She had no pulse or will. She had committed herself. Her young legs moved around the dance floor to the music played. She waved at the guests who watched her. She was light on her feet and spun around the room. Death tightly held her in his arms like any loving groom would. Violet danced breathlessly with her distinguished partner. The the Christophers – all the consecrated nourished my family's restlessness for moon and the stars circled and swayed back and forth to Stephan's lover's dream music playing in the boombox faraway. For blocks away the noise and music could not be heard, neighbors would not complain.

  Once death took Violet's hand, she left the party. The shyness of it, the almost frightened way she followed was daunting. They walked together into a small adjoining room. There she sat on the pillowed bed of her commitment. She took off her veil, placed it in on her lap and crossed her hands laying them delicately on the white netting. On the wall was a picture of her three children, a family portrait. Her eyes remembered.

  She kicked off her shoes. Death removed his jacket and loosened his shirt. His face was summered in moonlight blue. He laughed loudly taking her life into his belly. Her tiny body moved in and out of life. Death then shut its door. Their bond was consummated.

  Life had packed its time readying itself to move on.

  * The shuffling noise of the crowd's feet left the room. The balloons barely moved. They wanted to wave goodbye but couldn't. The cold air blew the white curtains gently away from the window. The music ceased. There was a voice talking in my head that never finished its thought. The moon was dimming in its light from the sun pushing it aside.

  My mother's body jerked hard – after-death spasms. The Miss America tiara fell from the corner head-frame of the bed. The sky held tightly on to its moon so it wouldn't fall.

  I stared at my mother for a long time. I thought I saw her look up once. Death was playing tricks on me. My eyes kept fixed until I could not recognize her face.

  Someone shook my world upside down and shook my family out. I felt genocide's emptiness. I had nowhere to go. California, my warehouse, all my colors moved to another planet outside this galaxy. I wondered if my life would remember who I was. It’s been close to three years. That’s a long time to leave a life on its own. And my ghostly mentors, we haven’t spoken for such a very long time. Maybe they all moved away without telling me. The air was cold. Everything had changed so fast. I was empty.

  Sovina went into the kitchen to prepare the foods for the expected guests. She looked into the cabinets for altar wine and wedding champagne. Stephan and Tony and for sure Rosetta would be arriving soon.

  [ Rosetta was the family's personal mortician.]

  37.

  AFTER ROSETTA I raised every bottle to the light, checking the fluid levels looking for old champagne stayed the night. The boombox or altar wine that

  was still playing Stephan's music. Stephan left hours earlier, just after the mortician took my mother away. Everyone had left. Sovina went to her room.

  It was late. Yesterday was hanging around a bit longer. The windows finished creating reflections of the tired guests and reversing them on its glass; mirrored images that magically showed the other side of things.

  Kitty, Dora, Belle and a few others kept to themselves comforting each other. Yawns could have separated their conversations. I was disinterested in kibitzing. It was over. My imagination had lost all its social graces.

  I leaned over the small round table in the far corner of the room. One bottle with a visible promising liquid line caught my attention. It was sitting between a few broken cabbage horns and warped salami slices. Chunks of hardened baguettes lumped around the hardened treats. A few crusts fell into a bowl where two bruised strawberries sat on the bottom, looking bloody and defeated. Nothing was put away or fridg'ed.

  My reach for the bottle hung the edge of my blouse over the table, licking the puffed cream off of the food gummed plates in its way. I collected just enough champagne from a few opened bottles to fill one glass to its half. The bubbles were gone and the liquid was flat. Champagne bubbles are always the first to leave a party.

  Ripped apart from the day, I pulled a chair out, away from the small table and slumped down. I felt a kick in my stomach that would paralyze an elephant. Where did everything go? What had happened to me?

  I was already missing some sense of my self. I lived in Dementialand for so long that I was getting quite comfortable in the vast openness of its own reality - the craziness and confusion, the gibberish, the anger and the final surrender of it all - surrendering to the place where I was able to see for miles without the yesterdays and tomorrows obstructing my view. It was difficult and so simple all at the same time.

  The mirrors of dementia showed me the reverse-ness of its doings. Mirrors and the night's glass windows understood. They reflected the other side of everything the other side of myself.

  I saw my mother with eyes opened and not curtained by her motherhood or my ego. And when I finally listened, really listened, I found my ‘self’. My mother and I became part owners of each other, engaged in growing away from who we thought we were suppose to be.

  But where was I to go from here? The pervasiveness of dementia's cock-eyed reality was closing its opening. I was unplugged from the outside world. The thought of going back to a world I outgrew was scary.

  Oh shut up already! All this thinking, all these thoughts running in and out of my head – all this worry is gonna give me a bigger headache than the one I already have. Maybe I should eat something - put something solid in my stomach to soak up the liquid remains of this night.

  I started looking for breakfast possibilities. As a rule, I never ate breakfast. The egg-toast-fruit combination was a delicacy I only savored after a long night of drinking and dancing. For me breakfast was a chaser.

  But I was feeling emptied. My mouth was pasted with the remains of yesterday; my stomach felt like a rabid mad dog - a crust of bread, a chip, a pretzel, would help.

  Leaning back in the chair and pushing my feet out, I stretched my neck back as far as it would go. Maybe bending my bones would improve the circulation in my head and in the room. As I looked up I noticed there was a broken glass from a fixture hanging above the table. It wasn't hard to miss. I vaguely remembered a cork going off at sometime, shattering the light’s glass shade. The bulb inside was miraculously unharmed. It appeared to be a clean cork shot.

  I looked around the room. There must have been ten or twelve large balloons scattered around - balloons with those stupid painted faces. Cinderella, Snow White and the Cookie Monster, Tweety-Bird and Sponge Bob, they all seemed to be looking directly at me with such benevolence.

  “Now what?” I asked. I turned my words to the group, Kitty, Betty and Dora. They were clustered close together as if they were in a gossipy conversation. Their ballooned heads stood around lazy-like and turned softly toward the broken fixture. I picked up my slump from the chair and quasiquestioned the group. "What are you looking at? Did anyone of you see what happened here? Any witnesses who have something to say?" The balloons, almost in unison, spoke to my exhausted imagination.

  "I didn't see anything'."

  "No, not me, I saw nothing."

  "I wasn't here, I was with Kitty."

  "Anyone else got something not-to-say?"

  Looking up at the fixture, I thought of how pissed my

  mother would have been. Mom loved that light fixture. "Suzka, I told you to go out on the porch and point that loaded bottle outside when you're popping it. You're gonna break a window in here or shoot the head off of Jesus, God help us."

  I looked over to the other side of the room where the life size Jesus stood. Thank God, He was looking good no battle wounds.

  I found a big chunk of glass lying on the cabbage horns' platter. Rosetta earlier took a full plate of the pastries home for her father. Hopefully, th
ere weren’t any glass shavings in her sugared selections. You don't want to get on the bad side of Rosetta.

  Rosetta was the family's personal mortician - a lady in her forties with a go-get-um personality and a stack of calendars; business calendars, showing twelve different religious scenes on the top half of each open page and boxed days of the month on the bottom half. In big bold letters, 'Hudak Funeral Services' was visible on each page. Punched holes were centered on the top for nail hanging. Everyone in the family had a Hudak calendar displayed somewhere in their home.

  Rosetta does everyone in the family, sooner or later. It's been that way for decades. Her father was a mortician; his father was a mortician; his father's father... and so on. Now his daughter, Rosetta, handles all the family business. It would be unheard-of, somewhat sacrilegious, grossly irreverent and simply too risky to have any other mortician drain and dress a loved one, other than Rosetta.

  Loyalties to Rosetta were well earned. She was good. She had a way of putting the tiniest little smile on her body's faces. They all had that look - the look a body has when they're telling you, without a word spoken, I know exactly what you've done, what you said and where you hid the bodies. She was a master.

  My mother's voice hung on my ear like a clip-on earring, irritatingly pinching the skin. "Did you give Rosetta any candy? Remember to give her an extra bag of the sugarless for her father. He's diabetic. Don't fill the bag. I don't want to cause any more bad luck now that his wife died."

  I drifted around in my thoughts and eventually fell asleep. Hours later, the back porch door slammed shut and woke me up. My mother hadn’t followed all the rules of death. She had walked out into the new morning to feed the birds for the last time.

  [ I made peace with dementia and thanked its gods for their gift. I learned to talk to mermaids,

  dance with the gypsies and smell the flowering jasmines in front of me.

  As for my mother, who remained untouched in details, her dementia nourished life's perplexing quandary and returned her to her 'self'. ] 38.

  MOVING JESUS

  "Over here. It's pretty heavy... I'm not sure how you're going to do this... You'll have to wrap him up good with some thick bubble-wrap and padded blankets... use everything you got."

  They followed me, two men, two big men in blue muscled uniforms. “There He is.”

  "That's a... Jesus. Holy crap."

  "I know. I told your moving company about it... about Him. He's big." "I never moved a Jesus before. Is He for real? I mean..." The mover man tapped hard with one finger on the side of Jesus's shoulder. "Oh my God, He is the real thing. This is solid plaster. He must weigh a ton."

  The mover man squeezed his face, wiped his hands on his pant leg and yelled over his shoulder. "Hey Frank, you better bring in the refrigerator dolly." Frank was outside by the truck and heard him clearly.

  "Just be careful and wrap him tightly. Don't want him to lose his head or any of his fingers...God forbid."

  "Where's he goin'? In a church or somethin'?"

  "No. He's moving in with me... in California... in my studio."

  It took three solid thick men to move Jesus. They wrapped Him tightly in heavy padding. Then two men tilted the weight forward. The other man slid the dolly's lip under Jesus. Thick rubber straps tightened everything in place. Jesus's head stuck out of the padding. The wheels made it around the corner. At first all you heard was the dolly crack and heave on its wooden joints. The men stumbled carefully down each step holding onto the plastered weight of everything deemed blessed. They went into the street to the back of the truck and slowly rolled the dolly with Jesus up a ten-foot metal plank that rested on the truck's edge.

  The men's faces turned rose colored and then pale. Wet beads of sweat water crossed their foreheads and necks. Jesus's painted face never changed. The men finished wrapping Him tightly and secured His position in the truck for the long trip.

  I walked to the curbstone and watched. My eyes moved about the street. The leaves ran around me confused. An old woman looking out her window caught my attention. Maybe she was worried about Jesus’s fate. She crossed herself three times and then took a puff from her cigarette. The white smoke curled around her face.

  The house was empty. Everything was sold or given away or taken to the Salvation Army. The Got-Junk people picked up the unacceptable items.

  Everyone was gone except for Kitty, Betty, Dora and Belle and two Elmo's - the last residents standing in Dementialand. They kept to themselves huddled in one corner their round skins were buffed by the afternoon sun. My airhead friends with no arms and legs quivered a bit. They all seemed to be looking at me. Kitty was in front and barely moved.

  I gathered the group, clutched their ribboned strings in my hand and walked outside. Their metal weighted hearts dragged behind. They softly rustled against each other in excitement. The sun sparkled down on them hard like crushed pearls. I leaned over the porch's ledge and raised my ribboned hand over the rail, looking up to where I was cutting the strings of the balloons. Then in one swift cut the balloons left me like white birds. I watched them leave me. They ran to a small hole in the sky and disappeared. My eyes got brittle from staring into the brightness.

  *

  "Jaidee?"

  "Yes dis iz Jaidee."

  "This is Suzka..”

  "Miz Suzka. It has been so long since..." "Can you please come and get me?"

  < UNITED AIRLINES > FLIGHT: #841 Fri Dec11 DEPART: Chicago at 9:55 AM ARRIVE: California at 3:57 PM

  ONE-WAY

  EPILOGUE I forgot to count the cars in my mother's funeral procession. She later came to me in a dream and told me she counted fifty-nine. D E M E N T I A L A N D C H A R A C T E R S

  Dementialand’s Main Characters:

  • Violet: mother, Slovakian matriarch of her family living in

  Chicago

  • Suzka: daughter, artist, moved to Chicago from California to

  care for Violet

  • Pavel: Violet's husband, died eight years prior to Violet's illness

  • Lil'Vi: Violet's younger daughter

  • Mira: Violet's older daughter

  • Jaidee: limo driver and friend of Suzka

  • Sovina: caregiver living with Violet and Suzka

  • Ellie: Violet's church friend

  • Billy: visiting nurse

  • Rosetta: family mortician

  Illusionary Characters - large faced balloons

  • Cookie: (male) the first balloon

  • Hello Kitty: likeness to a levelheaded, sophisticated woman

  about thirty, thirty five

  • Princess Belle: likeness to a cross dressing Mexican sweetheart

  • Dora: likeness to a black woman from Gary Indiana, smart, not

  afraid of nottin', an ebony temptress

  • Smilie: always happy, lives in the moment

  • Twins Elmos: likenesses to Bostonian jokesters. Blue Elmo is

  open, thinks outside the box; Red Elmo follows the rules, conservative

  additional balloons - no speaking roles: • Nemo, Sleeping Beauty, Little Mermaid, Sponge Bob, Betty Boop, Tweety Bird, Cinderella, Snow White and Big Bird, butterflies, stars, hearts

  Delusional Characters:

  • Skeeter is 'dementia', full name, Anopheles de’Mantia

  • Gypsy dancers

  • Statue’d Saints

  DEMENTIA IS NOT A DISEASE Dementia is not a specific disease. It's an overall term that describes a wide range of symptoms associated with a decline in memory or other thinking skills severe enough to reduce a person's ability to perform everyday activities.

  People with dementia may have problems with shortterm memory, keeping track of a purse or wallet, paying bills, planning and preparing meals, remembering appointments or traveling out of the neighborhood. While symptoms of dementia can vary greatly, at least two of the following core mental functions must be significantly impaired to be considered dementia: memory, communication and la
nguage, ability to focus and pay attention, reasoning and judgment and visual perception. Many dementias are progressive, meaning symptoms start out slowly and gradually get worse. Alzheimer’s disease accounts for 60 to 80 percent of cases. Vascular dementia, which occurs after a stroke, is the second most common dementia type. Lewy Bodies Dementia changes the way muscles work and mimics Parkinson’s disease.

  * CASE: Alzheimer's disease

  Alzheimer's disease accounts for up to 50% to 70% of cases of dementia.

  Alzheimer symptoms:

  In the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, patients may experience memory impairment, lapses of judgment, and subtle changes in personality. As the disorder progresses, memory and language problems worsen and patients begin to have difficulty performing activities of daily living, such as balancing a checkbook or remembering to take medications. They also may have visuospatial problems, such as difficulty navigating an unfamiliar route. They may become disoriented about places and times, may suffer delusions (such as the idea that someone is stealing from them or that their spouse is being unfaithful) and may become short-tempered and hostile. During the late stages of the disease, patients begin to lose the ability to control motor functions. They may have difficulty swallowing and lose bowel and bladder control. They eventually lose the ability to recognize family members and to speak. As Alzheimer's disease progresses, it begins to affect the person's emotions and behavior. Most people with Alzheimer's disease eventually develop symptoms such as aggression, agitation, depression, sleeplessness, or delusions.

  Alzheimer brain changes: Alzheimer's disease abnormalities in the neurofibrillary tangles. found in the tissue between the nerve cells, are unusual clumps of a protein called beta amyloid along with degenerating bits of neurons and other cells.