alzheimer's:
a mother daughter act

elinor fuchs
from the new york times
may 8, 2005

MOTHER wakes up at 8 a.m. and heads for the door dressed in a robe and pearls with a purse in her hand. "I'm going for the mail," she announces.

Among the things it is hard to explain to someone with Alzheimer's disease are that it is Sunday, there is no mail, and you don't go to the lobby in your robe. But after studying theatrical improvisation, I know this scene doesn't have to end in a confrontation over some reality principle: it can be guided to a playful change of subject.

My mother, Lil, an international businesswoman who sold American machine tools and automotive parts to foreign governments in the Middle East and Asia, lived the last 10 years of her life with Alzheimer's. I organized her care and did much of it myself. By the time I awoke to the reality of her illness, I had completed graduate training in theater studies. I would never have guessed that the degree I earned would prepare me for a decade of dementia.

There are four and a half million people with Alzheimer's in the United States. Twenty-nine million Americans have a family member with the disease. I wonder, could theatrical imagination ease the burden?

"How are you, Mother?" I'd ask. "Oh, panasonic," she might chirp. Or if in a dark mood: "It's such bad athols here. They've been girding a lot. That, plus the infinity." She had just phoned Parliament and they were on their way! Pure Dada.

Actors are taught: Stay in the moment. No point in going behind Mother with a little cognitive vacuum cleaner to straighten up meanings, or running ahead with plans for the day. "On the stage it is always now," Thornton Wilder famously wrote.

Mother had once been a junior high school history teacher, but past and future dropped away. The last five minutes were as remote as an archeological dig at Persepolis. The trick was to move through the day in a continuous Now: Now the bath, now the walk, now the trip to the grocery. Every "now" was itself a series of little nows, requiring moment to moment alertness and adjustment. That was what we learned in theater games.

I began to see Mother's disintegrating language as a kind of fantastical poetry. "Dim -- , dim -- , dimished -- ," she would stammer, flycasting for a word. "Do you mean 'dimINished,' Mother?" I would ask. "Gorgeous!" she'd reply, "But it depends on what kind of dimming they do."

Mother exclaimed, "We can do it!" 30 times in 10 minutes on her 84th birthday, radiating a zany good cheer. By this time I was assigning the plays of Gertrude Stein to my students. If Stein could raise repetition to an art form, if Beckett and Philip Glass could do it, why not relax and enjoy it when it came from Mother?

One day in the seventh year of this protracted emergency, Mother gave me a sudden glimpse into the experience of Alzheimer's. We were walking down the corridor of her apartment building to the elevator.

"Is this a game, a play or reality?" she asked, in the bright, objective tone of one engaged in market research.

"You mean right here, right now?" I asked, floored. Mother had just posed a question that had engaged the pre-Socratics, the medieval church homilists, and playwrights from Pirandello to the great Spanish Golden Age dramatist Calderon de la Barca.

Is life a dream? Is the world a theater? But Mother was not toying with metaphor. Her question revealed the gaping seams of life as she was living it. I failed her with my banal response: "Reality, Mother."

Two years before she died, Mother was taken to the hospital with a high fever and serious infection. She was incoherent when the doctors examined her; by chance they hit on the right medication. "Do you really want to keep your mother alive in this condition?" the doctor in charge asked me next day on the phone. If I had a medical directive in place ordering the withholding of antibiotics, he scolded, this irreversible suffering would be over.

The doctor didn't know Ibsen.

"Ibsen never gives up on human growth," my graduate-school professor taught me, discussing the non-classical plays in which new things improbably happen in the final scene. Ellida of "The Lady From the Sea" suddenly affirms her marriage, and Nora of "A Doll House" walks out of hers and slams the door.

Never give up on human growth. Along with decline and loss came changes in my mother that were unmistakably real. A woman not given to sentimentality, disappointed in love and suspicious of it, she now increasingly found her way to that very word: "love."

"Are you the one l-l-love?" she stammered on my last visit to her, her face lighting up with a little whoop of recognition. Of course she could not summon the complex linkage among the woman before her, that woman's name, and the idea of "daughter." I didn't dwell on her failure to "know" me through names or roles. In the last act, we had found a new life together.