After internalizing the “fall” of the circumstances of her arrival on Earth, Susanna is no longer called Susanna in the manuscript. She becomes Nonsanna, or Nun-sanna, represented by a slight female figure—a nun—kneeling in the center of the sketch. She fears that she cannot hold to the rigid strictures of Afrikaner farming society: children should be seen and not heard; idleness is the devil’s ear pillow; white girls don’t climb trees, go barefoot, read novels on Sundays, wash their hair when they’re having their period. They don’t go to university.
After high school, Nonsanna works as a lawyer’s assistant in Upington, a town seventy miles from the farm. After a year of saving money for university, she sees that she will never reach her goal with her meager income. She obtains a loan at the bank, which her father has to cosign. She gets a ride home with a farmer, who takes her as far as Abeam, a family settlement that was still about twenty miles from home. There she waits for someone—anyone—traveling deeper into the Kalahari. She spends the night and the next day helping the farm woman with her family’s laundry and washing and ironing, all the while scanning the horizon for signs of the dust plume that would signal the approach of a vehicle.
When at last the dust cloud rises, it comes from the wrong direction, the direction where from her father’s farm lay. It is slow-moving, too slow to be someone on horseback. A donkey cart? She saunters toward it, slowing her pace to counteract the feathery hope still fluttering in her rib cage. The closer the cart comes, the greater grows her disbelief. But—yes—it is true: the people on the seat are her teenage brothers, Pieter and Kerneels.
Since there had been no rain that year, they had to fetch water for the animals from more and more distant sources every week. Early that morning they had set out, not yet sure which of two alternate sources they would tap. When they got to the fork in the road that led in the two different directions, they let the donkeys decide where to go. The animals chose the road to Abeam.
Back home, Nonsanna does not have to point out the resonances between her rescue and the Bible story of Balaam and the talking ass—it is on everyone’s lips. Surely that is a good omen. Their family lives by the Bible. When she broaches the loan with her father, however, his focus is on the verse in the Bible that warns against usury, or the taking of interest. He refuses to sign.
During the bone-shaking ride back to town with a fortuitously passing neighbor, Nonsanna realizes she is no longer Nonsanna. Her name now is Sanna Capital I, or “Sanna must out!” Back in Upington, she approaches her employer who, though an observant Jew, has no truck with the Bible’s interference in educational progress. He cosigns the loan. At the start of the academic year, Sanna I travels to the University of Stellenbosch wearing a pair of homemade leather shoes.
As Sanna I studies to become a social worker, she is transformed into Hosanna, represented in the pencil sketch by the head of a woman who emerges beyond a bird burdened by a stone on its head. Loosed by a wind from behind, strands of hair escape from her combs and stream out in front of her face. Underneath the woman’s chin is an identical second chin, beside her neck an identical second neck, suggesting a second person moving forward in synchrony next to the first.
“Angels and people sing songs of praise,” Susanna wrote in her legal pad. “Who are angels and who are people? Hosanna! Hosanna! After that comes the open end. An open end, because history continues after we arrive at an anticipated end point.”
We celebrated my mother’s seventy-first birthday just before she left Salt Lake City when the leaves started to turn in August. The end point to which she was heading was her final five months of relative independence: in February 1996, she would be struck with the catastrophic breakdown of her mental faculties that signaled the obvious onset of her dementia.
Doña Quixote: Eternal, and eternal I endure. / All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
Located in front of the brain just behind the forehead, the brain’s frontal lobe is above all associated with sending output related to the planning, initiating, and controlling of purposeful actions to other brain areas as well as the body. It is through connections to the brain stem and spinal cord that it controls voluntary movement. Through complex connections to all parts within the brain, the frontal lobes are also involved in controlling attention and concentration, abstract and complex thinking, decision making, mental flexibility, higher judgment and reasoning, and emotional responses. The frontal lobe is where my lesions are the most apparent.
When the frontal lobe fails to do its job, weakness and even total paralysis can result on the side of the body opposite to the injured lobe. Injury often results in distractibility, difficulty concentrating, inflexible thinking, simplistic or “concrete” thinking, the inability to plan or think ahead, poor judgment, and inappropriate emotional behavior.
I am afraid many of these symptoms are evident in my lack of concentration and bumbling behavior. I used to be known as a very focused person. For example, when I was working on my PhD, I did not have a spare room at home to set aside for my research. Instead, I studied at the largest surface we had, namely the kitchen table. During those years, Newton was in elementary school and, later, junior high. Being highly sociable, he had friends over almost every day, and I managed to concentrate despite the roughhousing and noise that frequently enveloped the kitchen space. Now, though, I seem to have an intense form of attention deficit that prevents me from being able to make a cup of coffee, go to the bathroom to brush my teeth, or get dressed without many memory blanks, detours due to distractions along the way, and lapses in focus during conversations.
I fare similarly badly when it comes to “do[ing] arithmetic calculations,” and “knowing the meaning of words.” In my 2010 neuropsychological evaluation, my first, my neuropsychologist, Dr. Janiece Pompa, wrote that though “Dr. Saunders… had a degree in math,… [she] could not remember the elements of problems long enough to solve them.” In my 2012 evaluation, Dr. Pompa reported that “Dr. Saunders’s generally good test performance is very discrepant from the serious memory and speech difficulties she describes in her life, some of which were observed during the interview and testing.”
As far as “controlling all purposeful actions” goes, in my 2012 evaluation Dr. Pompa noted a complaint about which I had told her, the odd response of my body while I am making decisions: “While walking, she inadvertently wrapped her legs around each other and almost tripped herself.” Here is an example of how I perceive this kind of bumbling while walking toward the back door, considering whether I want to go out the garage (as I first intended) or, in a change of mind, fetch the hammer that belongs in the garage and is lying on the kitchen counter three yards away in order to put that in its proper place. My lower limbs seem to follow the vacillation of my thought, “wrapping… around each other” as they try to steer me in both directions at once. Whatever the actual pathways are in my brain when this kind of clumsiness happens, the malfunction causes me to lose my balance or, particularly when my arms are involved, knock items off tables or countertops as my hands shoot out without waiting for my conscious volition to direct them.
Injury to the left frontal lobe in Broca’s area—a region responsible for producing language output such as speaking and writing—can result in a language disorder known as Broca’s aphasia, where the individual has difficulty communicating with others. Such individuals may not be able to speak or communicate at all or may, even with a great deal of effort, be able to say only a few simple words. While I have been troubled by gaps in my speech when the topic about which I was holding forth just disappears from my head in mid-monologue, and I experience long moments during which I cannot find a word or a circumscription for what I want to say—as I note in multiple entries of my Dementia Field Notes—I oddly am still able to write, albeit much more slowly.
While my MRI does not show any damage to my temporal lobe, I do experience a disruption between the auditory input my temporal lobe presumably receives without too much trouble (my
hearing is good when I wear my hearing aid) and the output from my frontal lobe, where the auditory information is processed. On February 7, 2012, I recorded a Dementia Field Notes entry that serves as an example: “I just heard the term ‘clinical trial’ on the radio. I could not figure out what it meant. What came into my mind was a forensic trial, something like CSI investigators testifying in court. (I Googled CSI—it means Criminal Scene Investigation.) My head took far longer than is useful in conversation or writing to work itself around to the recollection that a clinical trial is ‘a blind study of medications.’”
In similar fashion, while my occipital lobe presumably has not suffered any damage, I sometimes have problems with seeing. I attribute this to the inability of my frontal lobe to process the information my eyes send it. In an apparent confirmation of this mechanism, Dr. Pompa reported in 2010 that my test scores “suggest excellent retrieval of information from visual memory, while [my] recognition of visual information was below average.” I guess, therefore, “mis-lookings” are the fault of my frontal lobe.
Dementia Field Notes
07-25-2013
When I put away my salad bowl after lunch, it appeared oval rather than round. I turned it the other way and it still looked oval. It made me feel disconnected from myself—as if it were not me looking at the bowl. I took a nap, then checked the bowl again. It was round.
What most puzzles me about my incipient dementia, though, is that even as the failings I describe above slow me down and stress me out in my daily tasks, my head still works well enough for me to write. A clue to this discrepancy may lie in Dr. Pompa’s explanation of a similar discrepancy between my performance on everyday tasks and achieving above average scores on neuropsychological tests. “It may be that her superior intellectual ability allows her to perform well on tasks in the office setting,” she wrote in 2012, “which are structured and controlled by the examiner, but that she has considerably more difficulty when required to attend to, remember, and organize the details of her everyday life.”
Dr. Pompa’s breakdown of my scores became more plausible to me during a 2013 vacation with my family in South Africa: while I was noticeably scattered in looking after myself and my possessions—on two occasions I left behind indispensable medication, left my purse in a mall bathroom (the lady who had used the stall after me found it and she and the attendant chased after me to return it), and regularly knocked over my wine or coffee—I was nevertheless able to communicate almost nonstop in mostly intelligible language. The reason? Because of my memory difficulties and clumsiness, my brothers and sisters, Peter, my children and their spouses, and even my grandchildren took over all responsibilities associated with keeping thirty people fed and happy when we—my siblings and their families—gathered at the seaside. At home, I have no choice but to spend a big chunk of mental energy doing my share in our household; in South Africa, I could devote this to keeping my head together.
Doña Quixote proposes a toast to the family:
The family—weavers, reachers, winders
and connivers, pumpers, runners, air
and bubble riders…
… soothers, flagellators—all
brothers, sisters, all there is.
Name something else.
Peter’s and my plans to emigrate had taken root long before my mother’s axe attack. We had considered the possibility from about the time Marissa was born in 1977. Was apartheid South Africa the best place to raise her? Or would it be wise, should we be able to succeed, to emigrate? When Newton was born two and a half years later, these questions intensified: as a boy, he was destined to serve in the interminable war between South Africa and the “communist” insurgents believed to threaten the country not only from its entire northern border, but also from within: the Oliver Tambos, Steve Bikos, Desmond Tutus, and Nelson Mandelas touting the absurd notion of a nonracial society.
When we managed to keep our blinkers on, life in our new house in Parktown North, Johannesburg, was good. Peter had his own one-man computer consulting company that he ran from our repurposed entrance/dining room. Newton was a chubby toddler, Marissa a lanky preschooler, and they played out their days in the beautiful walled garden we had laid out. I was still a “professional” mother, who, by then, had gained Lilliputian fame among friends and acquaintances as a supposed expert on staging what my friends regarded as educational happenings, but were really just play that involved science and art at the same time. Since I played in this way with my own children in any case, it seemed to make sense to sometimes include children of a friend, a neighbor, or acquaintance. After once holding an extravaganza on the solar system and space travel for about six elementary school children, I submitted their work to an art contest then running at the planetarium. I’m proud to say “we” won most of the prizes.
Outside the cocoon of our home and wider circle of friends, things were not so idyllic. An apartheid-fed social turbulence seemed to spiral ever wider into our white lives. Three incidents in particular stand out as triggers that turned the notion of emigration from an abstract possibility into a necessity. The first arose out of the apartheid pass laws. Rose Mnisi, our twice-a-week housecleaner and resident sage, lived in the servants’ quarters in our backyard, which consisted of a small, cement-floor bedroom and a toilet/shower cubicle situated across the paved area outside our back door. Rose’s daughter Maria, who was nineteen, attended a teacher training college a day-long train ride away. When she visited her mother during vacations, she stayed with Rose, an illegal act: her pass, or government permission to live in a particular area, was not valid in white Johannesburg.
As was customary at the time among self-described enlightened white anti-apartheid suburbanites, Peter and I welcomed Maria and undertook to help Rose watch out for the police, so that Maria would have time to hide under Rose’s bed or in our house should they come sniffing around. The event that would disrupt our lives, however, came not in a house call by the authorities, but rather in Maria’s not unreasonable desire to experience life outside our walled yard and locked wrought-iron gates. Despite Rose’s strict fiat to the contrary, Maria one afternoon ventured outside the gates. Just a block or so from the house, she fell prey to an enterprising policeman who inspected her pass and, upon finding it wanting, promptly confiscated it. His act deprived Maria of her legal identity. She could not even return to the area where she legally lived. The price for getting the pass back, the young man said, was to sleep with him.
When Maria returned home passless, terrified, and crying, Rose’s only plan of action was a threat to beat her. When Maria begged me to take her in the car and help her get her pass, Rose agreed that this might possibly be more fruitful. With Rose next to me in the passenger seat and Maria and the children in the back, we drove around the neighborhood looking for the officer. Within minutes Maria spotted him. He appeared young enough to have barely completed high school. Emboldened by my decade-plus age advantage, I got out of the car, searching my mind for an argument suitable to the absurdity of the occasion. Rose, too, got out. Before I could use any of my supposed “White Madam” power, Rose accosted the young man, drenching him in a torrent of Sotho, the vituperative nature of which was unmistakable even to me, who knew only a sprinkling of words.
Rose’s verbal abuse and hand gestures apparently invoked me, since after looking at me with what looked like fear, the young man wilted. He produced a handful of passes from an inner pocket and handed them to Rose. After making sure Maria’s pass was among them, she confiscated the remaining documents. She would announce them at her church, together with the officer’s name so that someone would be sure to tell his mother, a shame that caused the young man to slink away before Rose had worked off all her anger. What remained, she spent on Maria: she was not ever to leave Rose’s side and, should Rose have to do an errand outside the gate, she would be locked in their room.
The second disturbing event also involved the police, but the representatives of the law were much le
ss amenable to threats than the pass confiscator had been: they were two white men. I would encounter them one day while I shopped with Marissa and Newton in the strip mall where I shopped for groceries. Since parking was always an issue, I felt lucky to find a spot in the same parking lot but some distance away from my destination beside a restaurant in the same complex. As I scrambled out with the children in tow, I did not take particular note of the vehicle next to which I had parked—that is, until five-year-old Marissa, pointing to the police van, asked, “Why does that man have blood on his face?”
As I took in the situation, my heart went cold. The van was stuffed with black prisoners, apparently on their way to jail. What Marissa had picked out as unusual was that the man at the open but barred window had a streak of not quite dried blood across his face. His injury did not seem too serious, the blood apparently emanating from a small wound over his brow. I registered, however, that he was gasping for breath. A gap the size of a Bible was left open on either side of the van. While on a cool day it might have been adequate for one person, the temperature was unusually high that day, and—even worse—more than a dozen other prisoners had been piled into the van like circus clowns into a Volkswagen. Those whose faces I could see were straining toward the meager source of air, all the while squeezing the man by the gap ever tighter.
I did not know what to do. Water? I grabbed my children by their hands and set out for Pick-and-Pay. As I was about to cross the parking lot, I spotted two officers finishing their meal in the shade of the restaurant’s overhang. Without considering what confronting two policemen could bring—we were already then feeling that we lived in a police state—I marched the kids toward the officers and accused them of leaving the prisoners in a hot, airless van while they sat down for a meal.
Memory's Last Breath Page 11