When the festivities ended around noon, Peter and I left for our honeymoon, the destination of which he had kept a secret until just a few days before I had to start my packing: a beach hotel in Durban. I changed from my wedding dress into a going-away outfit before we said our goodbyes. Lana had sewn the tight-fitting, calf-length cranberry-red suit as a wedding gift. Flitting among the guests so that the flared bottom of my skirt revealed about as much leg as a minidress, I felt fashionably louche and ready to be ensconced like a Proustian mistress in our hotel, the Oyster Box, an establishment whose name I would only properly appreciate once I left behind the world of science for the unblushing frontiers of feminist literary criticism and historicize the double entendres of our honeymoon lodgings. At that moment, though, my libido was not intent upon deciphering any intellectual tidbits whatsoever. Feeling as decidedly unfeminist as the never-married biblical observer of two millennia earlier, Mrs. Saunders, six hours married, fit the 1 Corinthians 7:34 bill: “she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband.”
Dementia Field Notes
2-16-2013
My second neuropsychological test results came in the mail while we were in Chicago, gone to help Marissa and Adam stock the freezer and wash the baby clothes in time for their first baby’s birth—my third grandchild! Back home, I found the neuropsychological report in the huge box of mail our neighbor Diane had collected for us. I read it, but could not bring myself to write anything about it until now—over two weeks later.
Right after the test, while debriefing with my neuropsychologist—I’ll call her DeeDee—I had great confidence in the outcome of the working memory test, the one where I had to remember the four sets of words. During my test two years ago, I had demonstrated only “average learning ability.” Since I had learned during that test cycle that the sixteen words came in semantic clusters—giraffe zebra squirrel cow, cabbage celery onion spinach—it felt as if I were doing better the second time round. To my disappointment, though, the results show that my overall score this time was worse than at age sixty-one.
The report’s fine print explains my lower overall score. Even though I knew the words came in four categories, after most repeats I could remember only three categories. I remember saying, “I know there is one I haven’t said yet,” but could not come up with what it was. Together with the missing category all four of its words were lost. And this had been the section for which I’d had the highest hopes.
In the other sections my score had not gone downhill as much as I had expected based on how challenging they felt during the test. In the connect-the-numbers and build-the-diagram sections I had not made many mistakes, but my slowness lowered the scores. After I struggled through those sections, DeeDee must have seen how demoralized I was because she hinted that I might not want to do the math test this time. I was happy to leave it out. The report of two years ago already attested to the sorry state of my math skills.
What unnerves me most in both sets of test results, though, is the drop in my IQ since my last high school test. In my day, South African schools used the Wechsler scale, which is the same as the one DeeDee used. The results are therefore comparable, and the drop in my number precipitous.
Even though I know that IQ is nowadays regarded as too simplistic a measure of anyone’s achievement potential and only tangentially related to life success, mine had always mattered to me. It stood for the academic prowess for which I was recognized as long as I can remember. When I was first tested in elementary school, it seemed that my score contributed to my parents’ headtrip in regarding me as ouderwets, or fetchingly precocious. When I was older, it was something I knew was good about myself like my height and good skin and ability to stay calm. Now my IQ has become one of those things that I don’t like: my sagging jowls, my slight limp from an old foot surgery, my wandering attention.
Until I have made peace with myself about this, I cannot talk about it with anyone. Not even Peter.
Settling into the daily rhythms of life in a new city is challenging itself, but when the new city is also in a new country, finding those rhythms can take a while longer. Should our move have entailed a job or university course or some other anchoring environment for me as it did for Peter and our children, I might have found my niche with the same comparative ease that they did. However, without the appropriate visa I lacked the legal identity to participate in the kind of intellectual environments I had found exciting and challenging during my pre-parental years. For a while, I continued to embrace my identity as a “full-time mother,” volunteering at my children’s school, staging art and science events at our house, and facilitating my children’s and our family’s building of a social network. However, one can push one facet of her identity only so far and for so long: a year or two into our new life, I felt frustrated, unchallenged, and depressed. I did not love the self to which I had dwindled.
The first solution I attempted was to write. First, I wrote essay-style letters about our new life to update our family and friends in South Africa, then stories and a novel for children under the auspices of a mentor I found through a correspondence course in writing for children. After a year or two of this—and still no work visa in sight—I petitioned Utah senator Orrin Hatch for support in enabling me to enroll at the University of Utah as an in-state rather than a foreign student, thereby enabling me to afford the fees. I am unaware of the mechanism of my eventual acceptance at the U of U, but accepted I was. My initial goal of obtaining a Utah teacher certificate was soon eclipsed by the serendipitous publication of a story I had written in one of my classes, “Intro to Creative Writing,” in a local magazine, Utah Holiday. I never did obtain that teaching certificate. Instead, particularly with the encouragement of one of my professors, I applied for a teaching fellowship in the master’s program in creative writing and was accepted. After a year in the program, it seemed evident to me (and fortunately also to my professors) that I should have applied for the direct track PhD program in creative writing. I obtained a transfer to that program, a move that represents the major identity-forging experience of my adult life. In addition to being an apartheid-shaped Afrikaner, scientifically minded scholar and teacher, wife, mother, feminist, and atheist immigrant, I now cloaked that self in a Gogolian overcoat of philosopher/intellectual, an identity overlay that swelled my being—like Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin in his new coat—into something “fuller, as if [I] were married.”
In another vocabulary, I was again finding my voice.
On other ego fronts—in Freudian parlance—I was diversifying my libidinal portfolio: In 1992, our whole family finally became American citizens. With my PhD and citizenship in hand, I was eligible to get a “real” job. Nevertheless, I stayed on for a year or two at the U’s English Department as an adjunct instructor. Eventually I felt the pull of my duty to contribute a more equitable share to our family’s income. While still teaching part time, I tried a stint as a technical writer at the U’s Computer Science Department. Needing a bigger challenge, I ventured into the business world, where, in my seven-year career at three different companies, I was fortunate enough to end up as one of two managers of a team of about forty writers, programmers, and graphic artists that created training materials for clients ranging from Rockwell Collins to Miller Beer to Duke University’s law school. The commercial world of business, however, was not for me. There, in the words of Luce Irigaray, “the soul spends and is spent in the margins of capital.”
In an odd throw of God’s dice, an opportunity for me to return to academics came during the screening of the 2002 film Derrida, a biographical documentary of the eponymous French philosopher who developed a mode of literary analysis known as deconstruction, which demonstrates the contradictions hidden in the founding texts of Western philosophy. Also in the documentary’s audience of the who’s who of literary critical aficionados in Salt Lake City was Kathryn Stockton, now a distinguished professor in the English Department of the U of
U, who at the time served as the director of the Gender Studies Program. She invited me to apply for the about-to-be-vacant position of the program’s associate director.
Doña Quixote: The rest, as we threadbare feminist literary connoisseurs like to say, is “herstory.”
In April 2015, newspapers reported that former Iowa legislator Henry Rayhons was found not guilty of sexually abusing his wife. He had testified that “Donna and I would ‘play.’ She would reach in my pants and fondle me sometimes.” He told the prosecutor, “I always assumed that if somebody asks for something, they have the capacity’ to consent.”
During his three and a half hours of testimony, Mr. Rayhons broke into tears ten times. “We just loved to be together,” he said. “I treated her like a queen. She treated me like a king. I loved her very much. I miss her every day.”
Reflection on Dementia Field Notes of 11-7-2011
Retired University of Utah faculty still have library privileges. Tracking down your wish list along the library’s boustrophedon of call numbers, you also cherry-pick their next-door, upstairs, and downstairs neighbors: Michael Paterniti’s Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip across America with Einstein’s Brain; Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist; Barbara G. Walker’s Feminist Fairy Tales; Edith Grossman’s new translation of Don Quixote, with an introduction by Harold Bloom; René Daumal’s A Night of Serious Drinking.
Setting out for home along the route you drove to school and work for twenty-some years, you float across the familiar suburb-scape, bobbing as leisurely as Einstein’s brain in a Tupperware bowl in the trunk of a Buick Skylark. As you stop for a pedestrian crossing, your mother tongue asserts itself: zebra oorgang. Why did the zebra cross the solar system? Because it was immortalized as an image on the gold-plated disc affixed to the 1970s Voyager spacecraft, launched along with greetings in sixty human languages and the calls of the humpback whales.
Observing an orange-flag-wielding pedestrian, you think, “Whether the zebra crosses the road or the road crosses the zebra depends upon your frame of reference.” For didn’t South African scientists clone quaggas from tissue preserved from that Amsterdam mare—the first DNA of an extinct organism to be cloned and sequenced—and then selectively breed the plains zebra to produce a foal, Khumba,* whose coat coloration resembles that of quaggas? Einstein’s topsy-turvy universe, like the one in which you suddenly find yourself. But yours is not comfortingly galactic. Uncanny, rather. You have stepped into a View-Master reel—“Hansel and Gretel”? Your cousin’s Don Quijote de la Mancha with its tauntingly inexplicable foreign subtitles? Trees arch overhead. Stage left, a cottage slouches behind the trunks. Are you going east-west or north-south? Are these the trees near the gas station where you turn west, or the foresty tunnel you enter after already having turned? There are no street signs. The birds have eaten your breadcrumbs.
In the rearview mirror you note cars backed up behind you. Dear Professor Einstein: I understand the world moves so fast, it in effect stands still. A honk from the vehicle on your heels sets the others off. You cede the road, sidle almost onto the sidewalk. Part of the time it seems a person is standing right side up; part of the time, on the lower side of the world, he stands on his head. And part of the time he sticks out at right angles and part of the time at left angles. The aggrieved drivers pass, bestowing dirty looks. You sit with the engine running, waiting for—what? Baba Yaga in her speeding mortar fixing to scoot you along with her pestle? The Moskva?
Something from a witch’s cauldron rises up your gullet. From your face, emotions sprout in warty patches. I’m going to devour you alive. Your brain has dried up. You’re a space cadet. The European Space Agency will soon launch two spacecraft, the Hidalgo and the Sancho, to divert asteroids hurtling toward Earth.
An approaching semitruck blasts its troll breath from its overhead exhaust pipes, reminding you that the windmill you face is neither the size of Manhattan nor celestial. You have a scientific bent. Continue along this street and you will recognize something sooner or later. You are Doña Quixote crossing the equator in the Enchanted Boat. You are big nanny goat Gruff confronting your inner troll. Up you jump. You take a gap in the traffic, speed up like someone who knows where she’s going. Soon the landscape will shift and you’ll say, “Ah, there are those two houses with xeriscaped gardens right next to each other.”
For a while Anytown, USA, keeps rolling by. But finally—a boxy two-story building differentiates itself from its look-alike neighbors: the dentist where Newton had his wisdom teeth out. Trip-trap, trip-trap. Just half a block to the Sizzler. Up goes the troll. He goes SPLASH in the water. Right angle, ten blocks to the light on 300 East. Big nanny goat Gruff is over the bridge. Left angle at the light, right angle at the blue house, right angle at Amit and Ruchika’s. The nanny goats Gruff have fun in the grass. They eat and eat. We like it here, they say.
You stack the library books next to your two-seater couch. You sink into your side, lever up the footrest, cover your knees with the blanket Peter’s mother had crocheted. Like Proust’s madeleine, this memory is but regret for a particular moment; your mom-in-law’s treasured handcrafts are as fugitive as, alas, the years. Your hand greedily clamps the top two books from your hard-won stash. You think of Albert Einstein’s mother when his teachers announced the boy was too stupid to learn. She had him begin violin lessons. Remembering her later in life, Einstein would say, A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit, and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy? Before you settle on which book to open, your eyes fall on Peter, who is working on his laptop at the table.
Would it be reasonable to assume that falling in love is one of the stupid things one does while sticking out upside down on the bottom of the earth?
Sincerely,
Frank Wall
Dear Mr. Wall,
Falling in love is not at all the most stupid thing people do, but gravitation cannot be held responsible.
Sincerely,
Albert Einstein
Glimmerings of the notion that mind and matter were very much connected had been flickering toward medical consciousness for centuries. Michael Gazzaniga regards eighteenth-century Austrian physician Franz Joseph Gall as the immediate forerunner of the modern “idea that different parts of the brain produce different mental functions” and its corollary that “injury to a specific part of the brain produce[d] deficits in a specific mental function.” Unfortunately, Gall was also the father of phrenology, or the theory that the surface and shape of the skull revealed a person’s abilities and character, resulting in the eventual tossing out of this crucial insight together with the pseudoscience he invented.
During the 1830s, French neurologist Marc Dax reported to the Academy of Sciences that three of his patients who had similar speech disturbances were found at autopsy to have similar left-hemisphere lesions. Since Dax was a provincial doctor, his findings did not impress the Parisian bigwigs. Thirty years later one of those bigwigs, Paul Broca, published an autopsy on a patient identified as Tan, since tan was the only word he was able to say. Having studied Tan’s aphasia while he was alive, Broca traced his patient’s communication deficits to a left-hemisphere lesion he found in his frontal lobe at autopsy. This brain region, named Broca’s area, stands as the first surviving marker of the concept of mind/brain correlatives, without which contemporary neuroscience cannot exist.
A decade later, German surgeon Carl Wernicke discovered a correspondence between a lesion in the left temporal lobe and a second kind of aphasia, one that robs patients of their understanding of language while leaving them with the ability to utter nonsensical strings of words that retain some aspects of grammar. Wernicke’s language area together with Broca’s continue to serve as a key explanatory model for the variety and oddity of language losses incurred by stroke or other brain injuries.
Knowledge about the exact relationship between lesions and functional losses points to rehabilitation approaches most likely to succeed, foremost of which is “hit[ting]
the injured brain hard with what it has lost, [namely] contact with its familiar, social environment.” A 2005 brain imaging study proves what relatives and caretakers of people with dementia have long known: “the sound of a loved one’s voice activated widely distributed circuits” in the brains of seriously brain-injured patients, and the most stimulating social environment possible leads to the highest possible levels of lucidity in old age, even in people who “have brains that appear riddled with Alzheimer’s disease” or other dementia-type lesions. “Many of them remain social to the end, engaged in regular card games or debates with friends who make mental demands of them.”
The same connection to a social environment is, of course, also crucial for those among the brain-damaged still lucky enough to be making mental demands on ourselves.
Dementia Field Notes
10-11-2015
Ever since Bob had gone to the VA hospice, Diane was too sick to visit him. Because of having the flu on top of emphysema, she could barely breathe and had to use oxygen all the time. There was no question of Bobbie taking Diane to see Bob, since she did not have a portable oxygen tank, only the stationary one with a long pipe for use at home. One day she told me she was better and off oxygen for a few hours during the day, and ready for me to take her on the bus to see Bob. We weren’t even at the bus stop before she got heavier and heavier on my arm, and sank to the ground. I took her head on my lap and called her name while stroking her hair. She opened her eyes, but had no breath to speak. I called Peter; we took her to the emergency room. We stayed until Bobbie’s wife could pick her up about two hours later.
To my astonishment, she was back home that afternoon. Bobbie was going to bring food and groceries and stay the night. When I popped in the next morning, he had left for work, but she had soup she could warm and said she was fine. When I checked on her after we had dinner, she was eating an orange cupcake. “Ah, dessert,” I said.
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