ongaku is music in Japanese.

So Gabe is off for another year of adventure, and duct-taping bananas to trees, on the sylvan grounds of Guilford College, and I sustained another 13 hour round-trip driving marathon. In addition to his regular tutor, he is under agreement with me that we will Skype twice a week for the purpose of studying semester 3 Japanese.

Gabe packed simply. I came downstairs the morning we were to depart to discover, in the front hall, one duffel full of clothing, one large throw pillow, and one laundry basket full of odds and ends. Gabe had agreed to organize his things there for easy car-loading in the morning, and that, evidently, was the extent of any needs he perceived. With some prodding from me, we filled one more basket before departing. But he’s been doing this for two years now. I guess he knows how simply he subsists.

Among the additions I suggested was his Nakama 1 Japanese textbook. Based on a study of the college bookstore website I had ascertained that Nakama 2 was the needed text for third semester, but I proposed to Gabe that he might want to refer back to concepts found in his first textbook, and he agreed. Un-kudos to me that I didn’t also throw in his matching workbook, because it turns out (now that I have downloaded the course syllabus,) that they will be beginning the semester with the final two chapters of Nakama 1. This necessitated two moves: One--I quickly bought THAT way overpriced set of texts from Amazon so I’ll know what to study, and two--I shipped him his workbook today, along with one jacket and one winter coat.

Gabe is living in a small wing in the walk-out basement level of what is otherwise an all-freshman dorm. Also in that wing will be residing 8 or so other sophomores who, presumably, also have the inclination to submit their housing applications late. Perhaps they will be a compatible and cohesive group.

Meanwhile, I am giving myself pep-talks. I CAN remember some Japanese and be useful as a study partner, right? I’m not always feeling sure about this. Between refreshing the Japanese, and studying some basic music theory this year, I feel at risk of brain implosion.

UkeFesting

It’s amazing what you can find on the internet, but you probably knew that. What I found is a four day ukulele camp for adults at the Strathmore Music Center, and I signed up.

I don’t love commuting to Washington, DC for anything, but I’m kind of used to it by now after clinical studies at Georgetown University and NIH. On the best of days, you’d better allot an hour’s driving time, but there aren’t many best of days in the vicinity of the DC beltway, so this morning--the last day of the Ukefest--was closer to an hour and a half.

Cathy Fink, who led most of the sessions I signed up for, is a ridiculously accomplished musician, but also an entertaining group leader with patience for the fumblings of those such as I, who squandered our childhoods and didn’t hone our musical wiring when the honing was good.

While I could not impress anyone with my musical prowess, collectors did notice and admire my 1927 Gibson uke. I am not worthy of a venerable instrument, but there--it’s got me.

Cathy Fink may start to think I’m stalking her, as I’ve just signed up for an 8 week songwriting class she’s teaching, starting in September. (More commuting to DC, and--in a note of exceptional coolness, there will be a guest lecture by Tom Paxton, writer of The Marvelous Toy...zip when it moves, and bop when it stops...) She’s also appearing at the 2 day Virginia UkeFest in Richmond, at the beginning of November, and I’ve got my sights set on that one as well. I’m not stalking her though--I just see a path that interests me and she happens to be standing smack in the middle of it. No worries though. I am eminently ignorable, and I’m sure she’ll manage just fine.

I won't hesitate no more...

I have a ukulele. It’s not really my uke...it’s more sort of a family thing, coming from a small collection passed down on my dad’s side of the family, and it’s spent about 40 of its roughly 85 years living beside my Mom’s piano. (Beside the bowlback mandolin and the tinny, plunky banjo, both of which, along with the piano, have a similar history.)

For a short while, during the era when I was comfortable teaching church school to wee bairns, I used it to plunk out the chords to a few easy sing-along ditties. But then it went back to its spot beside the old upright piano while I got interested in (respectively) my own 1926 mini-upright with its ivorine keys, an assortment of Irish whistles, and my sister’s old fiddle (from Holzapfel’s violin shop in Baltimore which no longer exists.)

For simplicity we’re going to refer to it as mine. Anyone who wishes to contest that usage, please inquire within, and we’ll discuss the fact that my brother Jim has custody of the Gibson dark mahogany guitar with the painfully high frets. My uke is a Gibson too. Or should we say, it’s a “The Gibson.” Also dark mahogany, and a near match for a circa ’27 Gibson U3 model, currently offered for sale at McKenzie River Music in Eugene, Oregon (snap it up Beth and Martin) for $2000. Mine has fewer scratches. But I wouldn’t sell it even if it were indisputably mine.

Soprano ukuleles are really small. Truly, a baby guitar in appearance, but with only 4 strings in the classic “my dog has fleas” tuning. So, I could blame my clumsiness with fingering on the miniatureness of the instrument, or I could blame it on my personal wiring. In any event, blame will get us nowhere, and I was recently seized with the notion that I would write a song. On ukulele.

I will warn you that my being seized with any notion is not necessarily a fine idea. The last time I was seized with a comparable notion was in about 2000, and what resulted was The Legend of Logjam, 1st edition. If you do your research (and I don’t recommend that you do,) you will know that that is the first book I wrote, which was followed over the next 10+ years by 3 other works of suitably mediocre fiction. So take any notions that go around seizing me with a large grain of salt. Oh, I’m sure it will happen--I’ll write a song alright--but it will be a fitting member of my literary and musical canon, and well...that’s just how it’s going to be.

Meanwhile, I am doing some of the things I should have done when I was 12 years old, and actually performing the fingerboard stretching exercises, and strumming practice, and chord acquisition that would enable a not-so-old dog to learn a new trick. Yeah, I blew it. But I was a kid. I can’t really help that I was a lazy kid with little insight or foresight, so forgiveness is essential. As is picking up where I left off (which is almost at the beginning.)

For now, I’m doing the terribly cliche thing of trying to play “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz, and finding that sustaining the proper reggae strum pattern while singing lyrics which are beyond syncopated in their randomness is a little like patting your head and rubbing your belly. Only worse. I bet that both Jean Carper and Doctor Oz (those mercenary sillies,) would approve of this as brain exercise. But who cares about them? I approve of it as a suitable distraction in this interim between caregiving and...whatever. So, off we go.

Literally? no.

Caution: the next paragraph could be offensive to some.

This morning I stumbled upon what I think is a clear and somewhat obvious thought--it is that I can stop worrying about the fact that I can’t reconcile myself with Christian theology in any normal way (only a problem in that I am fond of the particular faith community with which I grew up.) The thought is this: For a theological theory premised heavily on the stories of a guy whose whole shtick was parables, is it not odd that they went on to insist on a literal understanding of some of the things he said about himself? The problem with Christianity is not the worldview described by Jesus in parabolic form--the problem is the next several centuries of unnecessary to harmful add-ons, and the stick-up-the-arse determination of countless ensuing “teachers” to insist on a literal adherence to their particular choice of interpretation. Christianity and the myths that grew out of the death of a political rebel are and should be parables for concepts that are more sublime than what can be captured in the rigid framework of any religion. There. I was actually going to talk about that more, but I don’t want to.

Instead I’m going to talk about the ukulele.

What-now? You think you're scary, but you're not.

Nine years ago I left nursing school, in the throes of an anxiety attack brought on by (what I now understand to be) the dog-brained realization that my time with Jeff was limited, and that my energies (never prodigious) were now to be at the disposal of a different set of priorities.

Since then, we’ve been in a slow orbit around the black hole of Alzheimer’s. In 2012, Jeff crossed the event horizon. A definition of event horizon from Wiki: “In general relativity, an event horizon is a boundary in spacetime beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer.” More accurately for me, it means a boundary beyond which the outside observer cannot affect events. It’s where the pull toward oblivion turns inexorable, (as if it ever wasn’t.)

In the true spirit of spacetime inscrutability, I have no idea how long the remainder of the spiral will take, in realtime, to swirl to the singularity. But the path is set, and my influence on Jeff’s breathing moments is small. What this means for me is that, while I haven’t quite shaken hands with What-now, What-now is standing on the nearing shore waving at me with the cocky assurance of inevitability.

So, I’m not a nurse. So, they’d have little use for me now on the USNS Comfort, sailing into Haiti and such, delivering medical expertise where it’s desperately needed. Truth is, (and I say this not in a self-disparaging way, but in a practical, realistic way,) I have no clear-cut skills or training that make me an easy fit for any obvious next step. The only thing I know how to do is observe something and write sentences about it. Hardly an obvious market niche.

The upshot is that What-now has seemed like a bit of a threatening presence. I never have an answer to the sort of questions that What-now poses. Even though there were 700 and a few kids in my high-school graduating class, each of the 700 of us had to, at some point or other, have at least one talk with Mr. Johnson, guidance counselor for the class of ’79. My chat with him went like this: Mr. J: So, what are your plans? Me: Um...I’m going to go to college. Mr. J: Why? It’s hard to reproduce the tone of that “Why.” It was delivered in a way that was meant to convey--Look kid...know why the hell you’re doing something before you do it. I muttered something vague about possible majors, and he let it drop. He had 700 other kids to say “Why?” to, after all.

Mr. Johnson? I still don’t know why. That’s just the pathetic way I am. I settled the issue for 25 years by the grace of two things: One--I knew I wanted to team up with Jeff. On that count I had no reservations. And two--My biological impetus to reproduce was strong enough to let it be the guide, for lack of any other overriding ambition. Once you have kids, there’s no room for “why.” “Why” becomes irrelevant. There’s just stuff you have to do, and your hobbies and interests become things you squeeze in around the edges. You never have to make a significant career out of them, so if they’re not particularly lucrative or impressive it’s no big deal.

Anyway, today I came up with my answer for What-now. It’s not an especially good answer, but it’s my answer. Within the parameters defined by the remaining stuff I MUST do, I’m going to have adventures and write about them. Pick somewhere to go, pick something to do, do it, write about it. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This is a form of making it up as you go along. This is how I wrote four books. I had no real sense of inspiration...no compelling topic for fiction. Simply the compulsion to try it. So, I pulled it, like teeth, out of my own head. Like squeezing toothpaste out of a near-empty tube. The product speaks for itself. Here’s what it says: "That’s a really stupid way to write fiction! No wonder we’re works of wondrous mediocrity!”

Oops. Yeah, well, that’s really still what I’m going to do if something doesn’t roll in out of the mist to fill in the blanks. It is entirely possible that it’s lame that I haven’t come up with a more compelling, meaningful, or at least useful idea than that. But...hang on, let me check my pockets (pat pat,)...let me hold up a blade of grass and gauge the direction of the wind. (___that’s the sound of no wind.) Nope. That’s all I’ve got. I’m going to go places, do stuff, and write about it. Why? Because I want to.

Ok with nonsense these days.

I was determined to get an enormous quantity of Concert Association membership checks processed today, so I took my box of work with me to Sunrise, so I could do it while keeping Jeff company. I’m happy to report I accomplished my bare minimum (opening envelopes, sorting checks from paperwork,) but I’ve got more than plenty of databasing left to complete.

Meanwhile we paused for Jeff’s lunch (he was doing better than usual with scooping chili into his own mouth,) then Dot the visiting piano player, a brief stroll in the sunshine, a couple of bathroom excursions, and an occasional other resident wandering in. In which case, I’d have a conversation like this: Linda (the other resident:) “diddo yubba really so?” Me: “Yes, I think you’re right!” Linda: (with a bit more conviction) “do na na giddum is it.” Me: “Yeah, me too.” Then one of the caregivers called her.

Meanwhile, I put the iPod nano tunes on shuffle, sat Jeff in the bouncy IKEA chair, and spread my stuff out on the new comforter I had just bought and put on his bed.

I don’t really have a good idea what makes a difference to him and what does not. Mostly he sits and dozes or half-dozes. He doesn’t look at me much of the time, because he is frequently functionally blind and doesn’t process visual information in a very useful way. I remember once reading about a woman in the later stages of Posterior Cortical Atrophy, and she was for all practical purposes blind, but these are things you don’t really expect until they come to you. Now they’ve come to us.

When I went to Sunrise at lunchtime, Jeff was just finished getting a haircut from Valerie at the small salon upstairs. All the caregivers in his “neighborhood” said they loved his haircut but missed his curls. Exactly how I always feel.

I’m happy we’re, for now, done with the hospital and back to easy access. Does he miss me when I’m not there? I don’t know. I know he asks. I bought a wipe-off board which I leave on the counter in his room. Usually I write something like “Emily will be back soon!” if I don’t have something more specific such as “Emily is driving Gabe to North Carolina” to write. At this point, Jeff can’t read it, but I figure the caregivers can read it to him.

There and back again.

Olivia and I, on a marathon drive, escorted Gabe back to North Carolina for his make-or-break 5 week summer term, then headed home, to the soundtrack of The Muppets.

Summer digs are nice at Guilford College. We’ve stocked Gabe’s personal closet full of dry goods, and his freezer full of frozen pizzas.

One item I had failed to add to the list of things we needed from Target was a key lanyard. Gabe’s apartment takes two keys--one for the front door, and one for his bedroom. Dropping two keys in the pocket of worn-out pants seemed a bad bet, so when we got back from shopping, still lacking a lanyard, we made do with car supplies. A zip tie is now serving as a keyring, and it’s hanging from the drawstring cord we dissected out of an old Whole Foods Market shopping bag. Good enough for Gaberment work. However, we did acquire a shower curtain and rings, full-size bed sheets, a trash can, toilet paper, a plate, bowl, and cup, plus a batch of perishable groceries (we already had the non-perishables) at Target. Plus a very small battery-operated alarm clock since, for inexplicable reasons, the outlets in Gabe’s room refused to accept a plug with the standard two prongs where one prong is wider.

On another note, if you find yourself in Greensboro, NC, and you like Indian cuisine, Saffron Restaurant is worthwhile.

And now, Gaberment work or not, it better be up to GPA snuff, or we’ll be putting him on Craigslist as an available ship’s swabby. Stay tuned.

It's a different kind of liberty I guess...

Gabe and I drove north from Greensboro, North Carolina, making a pitstop for lunch in Lynchburg, Virginia. In ferrying Gabe to and from Guilford College, or visiting for parents’ weekend, I’ve had a few opportunities to scan the hilly vistas that line route 29, as it bypasses Lynchburg, and I’ve seen Liberty University’s enormous dome-like structure which houses sports and campus mega-church gatherings. The residence buildings at Liberty cling to the hillsides like terraced tree-fungi made of red brick, but our lunch stop on Wednesday was the closest I’ve gotten to a Liberty U. edifice, and it took me a little by surprise.

Right behind the strip mall where we ate at Panera Bread, and where I’d stopped for a Starbucks coffee (on my southbound trip the day before,) stood the fortress-like entryway to LU that you see here. I knew this was not the main campus entrance, but it was an odd one, seeming to lead you into a subterranean lair under the train track running above on the embankment.

I might struggle to explain what intrigues me about the whole concept of Liberty University. Founded by the late evangelist Jerry Falwell, it serves to educate several thousand young people of fundamentalist Christian ilk. I read a book once, by Kevin Roose, a Brown University student who attended Liberty for one semester in order to research a milieu that departed from his usual experience. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/22/kevin-roose-infiltrates-l_n_190124.html So, while I know that LU holds no appeal for me, nor is it a place I’d ever recommend to my children, I looked around at the Panera full of well-groomed students in LU sweatshirts, and couldn’t help wondering whether any of them were cramming for the final in one of the first classes a student would take there--one that establishes agreement with a worldview in which the Earth is 6000 years old, homosexuality is a no-no, and you’d better vote against “socialism.” (In other words kids, vote Republican.)

I guess that in what we bill as a “free country,” it shouldn’t be particularly novel that such a place (and others much more rigid in view,) would be thriving, but it’s still a strange notion that I find myself flipping around in my head with a touch of bewilderment, much as I would a Rubik’s cube--that real live ornery, skeptical, learning-focused college students would tackle their studies while accepting that Genesis is a literal depiction of what followed the Big Bang.

Anyway, I had to go and examine this immense passageway close up, so Gabe and I walked over and had a look. Just inside the opening is a black metal gate of rather prison-like bars, next to which sits a card reader. So qualified students or staff may pass through, but no gawkers such as we. I stuck my iPhone through the bars and snapped a pic of the tunnel.

It looks like a good choice during an air raid. I hope that, in such an event, shelter would be proffered even to those of us who do not plan on being raptured. Meanwhile, it made for an interesting image.

I noted with interest that the name tag of the order taker in Panera identified him as “Jesus.” I’m pretty sure though, that he pronounces it “Hay-SOOS.” Gabe and I hit the road, fortified by a cream cheese bagel and a tuna salad sandwich respectively.

for now

This is the Bayview Campus of Johns Hopkins U. Hospital. The second floor of the Burton Pavilion here is designated the Lakeside unit, and seems to be all about geriatric (or pre-geriatric) patients with pharmaceutical adjustment needs in the psychiatric category. (It took me a few looks to find the lake in the hospital’s urban setting–I guess it’s the small rainwater overflow pond with a little spraying fountain in it that you can spy out the window of rooms on Jeff’s side of the hall.)

You stop at the front desk on your way in, sign the book, and get a paper wristband from the on-duty person before taking the elevator to the second floor. Once off the elevator, you are in a small foyer where you must push a button which elicits an electronic doorbell noise. Then someone from the nurses station inspects you by means of the built-in camera and pushes a button to unlock the door.

You enter a busy unit where, generally, several older people are nearby in wheelchairs or recumbent rolling chaises. Usually they are fussing about something or other. There are two lovely parakeets–one green, one yellow and orange–in a large glass terrarium by the window. They seem very happy and chirpy even though a little old lady told me “no,” they were not happy, “they want to be free.” Maybe they do, but I suspect there was some projection going on.

Then you go down the corridor to the right and press another electronic chime. This one plays the opening strains of “Für Elise,” then nothing happens. Nothing connected to the chime anyway. Instead, you catch a staff member on her way in or out and enter on her coattails. Jeff shares room 248 with Mr. R. Mr. R isn’t independently mobile, and is often situated in the small day room, which is actually a regular hospital room which happens to have a couple chairs and couches instead of beds. Many days, I find Jeff in the day room dozing in a chair.

They are still trying to regulate Jeff’s medication so that he is at least semi-functional, but not apt to pull cords out of the wall on a paranoid tear, while blocking the access and egress of nurses and aides whom he may have mistaken for tranvestites and/or robots.

As of today, we’re a little bit on the side of too-medicated. Today was better than yesterday in that he did not topple like a tree trunk into my lap face first, but it still took some work to get his entire lunch into him. Then I snagged a chocolate ice cream cup and a tiny carton of orange juice from the fridge down the hall, and fed him those. Those things are favorites. He still muttered a fairly on-going stream of non-reality-based observations (we need new boots, that’s a nice forklift...things like that,) but he sat with me in reasonable contentment while I read a snippet of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, by Bill Bryson, aloud to myself.

When I called to make arrangements for Jeff to check in for a med adjustment (due to his disastrously escalating aggressive, delusional paranoid episodes,) they were very clear with me on one point—they are NOT a long-term care facility. He WILL be discharged. No argument on that point from me, but I suppose it must be an issue they deal with–families who do not wish to take their difficult elders home, med adjustment or not.

Yes, I expect Jeff to be discharged. I just do not know when, and in what cognitive condition.

this is long

I wonder if one of the greater attractions offered by religion comes from the fondness we human animals have for narrative. We sure like stories. Ambiguous endings (ever see Picnic at Hanging Rock?) may be fodder for philosophical discussion, but our blockbusters almost invariably offer roundly satisfying closure.

Religion may offer a means of thinking about our otherwise confusing lives as stories in which, somehow or other, the struggles must make sense. Personally, my nature requires me to reject arrant materialism (by which I mean the philosophical, not consumeristic sense of the word.) There is a bit too much synchronicity in the universe for me to utterly discount the experiences we tend to categorize as “spiritual.” Whether there are guides at work, or whether it’s a matter of the ineffable magic of quantum entanglement, there is interaction on a plane that has always prompted humans to imagine beyond the absolutely tangible. I’m just not going to try to tell you exactly what, and I don’t think that’s anyone else’s job either.

All this is just a way of saying that—whatever I proceed to write in the following paragraphs—I maintain a meta-view of the whole business as inexplicable and quite possibly nonsensical. Or, to put it another way, when I describe states of “mind,” or things which occur to my own brain, I am as aware as anyone of the weaknesses inherent in that particular organ. Caveat Cogitor.

About 13 years ago, when I was 37, I was struck—quite instantaneously—by a calling. I’m going to call it a calling, because I don’t know what a calling is if not that. A sense that you’ve been handed a destiny...please proceed. Because it is the only calling I’ve ever downloaded from the cosmic cloud, it is unique in my experience. It was to write. It didn’t come with any further instructions, which is kind of a nuisance.

Thomas Edison is reported to have said that genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration. When that ripe patch of my neurons lit up with my “calling,” they fished around a bit, but couldn’t find the missing 1%. Apparently (I had to assume) it was either invisible, or to be provided later. So I proceeded to do the 99% part. You can find that 99% at my website, www.emilygillespieclement.com. Don’t do that right now. There’s something missing there. (hint: 1%)

Meanwhile, Jeff got unwell. It may not be obvious, because I am of a fairly stoic persuasion and do not like to cry at movies and so forth, that Jeff was, for 20ish years, the ballast of my emotional schooner. People who know Jeff will understand this. It’s true.

Ok, so here’s where ballasts, missing percents, and narratives all fall into the same stewpot:

A few years after that light bulb moment I refer to as a calling, Jeff began to malfunction. Within a very few more years it was hard to dispute that his malfunction would be progressive and terminal. I won’t go into excessive detail here about what that realization meant to me, except to say that an essential and depended on nutrient had been yanked from my diet and I was going to have to learn to live without it.

And somewhere in that confusing fog of years which contained increasing failure and a hard road to diagnosis, I accepted a sort of plea bargain with the cosmos (or at least my sense of it) in an effort to recapture a whiff of purpose. (As someone recently said to me, purpose is largely imaginary, isn’t it? Probably so, but it does help feed that yearning for a narrative.) Anyway, it went something like this–While there was no parity whatsoever in the exchange, I reckoned that in losing Jeff I would at least not be left without a life objective. Because, see, of that calling. Obviously I was supposed to write, and obviously the cosmos would provide some sort of external validation for that, sooner or later.

Sooner or later. My function--because it was the only part over which I had any control--would be to keep applying the 99%. So I did. The results are there.

Okay, so as it turns out, those four books basically stink. I can accept that, and I can die whenever that becomes an appropriate move without being mad at myself, because I did my part. (And I don’t mean anything by making that past tense. I’ll almost undoubtedly keep trying.) I would be mad at myself if I got to the end of the road and could make no sense of the narrative because I’d failed to produce. So, if you ever wonder why I keep doing it, that’s why.

Inspiration, the elusive 1%, must come from somewhere. If it doesn’t, well...someone/something/some ethereal other didn’t uphold its end of the bargain.

I have used my Salieri (from the play Amadeus) analogy before, but that’s because it fits. Yo...cosmos...don’t go handing out callings then fail to deliver inspiration. Not to worry. I will not try to poison Mozart, or Philip Pullman, or Louis Sachar, or any of the local writers you wish to point out to me who are being featured in the Annapolis paper. But I will be reminded of the 1% that isn’t there, and I will need to find a quiet way to quell the anger it stirs up.

Nonsense, of course. This is all a misunderstanding of life, flowing from my very human preference for a narrative. Meanwhile, I have fine things to enjoy, in the form of some of the loveliest people to have ever borrowed some of my DNA. Not to mention plenty of other folks. No argument.

But maybe this explains, a little bit, why I think it’s more therapeutic for me to think about spiritual practices that are more about relinquishing attachment to outcome. I guess you might say I pray sort of...but never as a petition, or adoration, or expiation, or any of the ways by which prayer is classically defined. I’m looking more for a sense of openness to whatever is, and also I don’t like going to bed alone. As for the tradition in which I grew up, it seems to like to place too much emphasis on narrative. And narrative, as far as I can discern, is a booby-trap. Let’s leave that to fiction. Preferably, fiction forged in a mind where the 1% actually made a pitstop.

Ok Fontaine, you're goin' down.

Tomorrow I will probably kill Frank Fontaine and thereby complete the PS3 game BioShock. Can you believe someone who is presumably a standard-issue half-centenarian would play BioShock? I mean, especially BioShock. Epic Mickey was one thing because there are plenty of people who have never outgrown a taste for Mickey Mouse, but BioShock is, frankly, kind of gross. It is (in the parlance) a first-person shooter in which you are constantly beset by murderous crazy people in an underwater Objectivist utopia gone to dystopian seed. It took me about half the game to adapt to that. The violent part, that is. So, based on a case study of one, I conclude that video games do not make humans more inclined toward actual violence, but rather they simply make humans less sensitive to video games. Don’t base a sociology paper on this study please.

It is a distraction, is the thing. These days I am spending about 2 hours each mid-day visiting with Jeff and overseeing his lunch at Bayview Medical Center where he is an inpatient in the geriatric psychiatry unit. Well, no...64 is not exactly geriatric, but his condition is, so that’s why it’s a fit. It may take up to 3 weeks for them to conclude that his medication regimen is sufficiently adjusted so that he can be a newly functioning assisted living resident who will pose no danger to himself, the residents, the staff or his wife. Or it may take 3 weeks for them to conclude that he is pharmaceutically intractable, and then I don’t know what. He says he wants a job. Where can one send a severely brain-damaged person and say...”Voila--there’s your job. Enjoy.”? A submarine? No, feeling trapped will make him throw people around. Seattle, his dream city? No, being impaired in visual processing, he will walk into traffic and cause accidents. I’m out of ideas.

So tomorrow I’ll be back on the second floor at Bayview helping Jeff not miss the ice cream when he goes for it with his spoon. Either before or after I kill Frank Fontaine.

I do some other things too. Such as walk the dog, do basic housekeeping, and walk in slightly hyperactive circles. This chapter of life has taken me from slightly out of focus to lost in inscrutable static. I think my head will clear up during some future year and I will do at least something. Although I think, for now, it will be best to accept lack of purpose. I hope purpose is highly overrated. Pulling one out of thin air has never been my strong suit.

The Wonder Games.

It is on my schedule to meet some folks at the mall early tonight to see The Hunger Games. At this moment, I intend to go. Since Jeff went crazy on Friday morning, he’s been at Baltimore Washington Medical Center for...a medication adjustment, I guess you’d call it. It just is not a stint that feels like it’s being overseen by any medically authoritative practitioner, so I might characterize it more as: Time away from Sunrise in the hopes that a quadrupling of Seroquel will make Jeff into someone who can live there without episodic eruptions of his wanting to put furniture through the windows or use wrestling moves on people trying to calm him down.

Ok. He had a hospital-provided sitter here in room 599, 5th floor West until 2 hours ago. Apparently, no facility, including Sunrise, will take him back until he’s been “sitter free” for 24 hours. Ostensibly, if nothing horrible happens, this could mean he will be discharged tomorrow.

I don’t know if I have an opinion about that. I do have plenty of confusion about that. Since arriving here at 9:30 on Friday morning he has remained tranquil, if delusional and completely disoriented. Thing is, nothing happens on Saturday and Sunday. I presume that tomorrow, Monday, I’ll be able to re-establish some form of contact with the neurologist and the nurse at Sunrise to discuss whether those parties have agreed on whether Jeff’s new medication regimen has the stamp of approval or not.

Personally, I don’t know how you can feel sure. I guess you can’t, in any 100% kind of way.

just for today

Becca is making lemon cupcakes. I had two reasonably satisfying visits with Jeff at Sunrise. The Daily Show is on in 12 minutes. So, based on an in-the-moment assessment, things are ok. At least in the moment.

Out of the moment, who knows? It is probably good for everyone, whatever her life situation, to just-be as much as possible, and not tap into the static of the surrounding craziness on your existential timeline. But Alzheimer’s likes to bring you that lesson in technicolor, so you might as well learn it. The sooner the better.

Check with me tomorrow and I’ll probably have forgotten it.

I still don't have too much to say about it.

Jeff lives at Sunrise now. It is an assisted living site, and his specific “neighborhood” there is the Reminiscence wing, first floor, Cypress Creek entrance. It’s hard for me to know what to say about this, which is why I haven’t said much as this process got underway and moved to completion.

There is a hole here in the house where his presence is meant to be. Sometimes someone walks in a way that sounds like Jeff walking downstairs. Yesterday, the timbre of a voice gave me a similar sensation.

I’ve been going by twice a day. This is easy. Sunrise is a two minute drive from my house, and--with my credit card bonus points (which I’ve been essentially unaware of for a decade plus)--I’ve ordered a bike, so I can go the eco way.

Before he moved, I played multiple roles in the confabulated parallel universe Jeff slips in and out of. Sometimes I’m my mother, Gale. Sometimes I’m Julianne Crough, his tomboyish childhood nemesis. Sometimes I’m Dr. Miller. Sometimes his sister Helen. Now, maybe there are enough other people around that I am not required to embody so many players, because so far when I drop in I’m always Emily.

Jeff assumes he’s still at home. The rocking chairs in the fenced yard are our front porch. His room is his room, nevermind that there is now a bedbound Mr. Schaller around the corner at the window end of the room.

Jeff doesn’t spend much time in his room anyway. There are many alcoves to wander in and out of, many windows to look through, and many places to stop and take a seat. I am told he was a willing participant in “RU-Fit with Sheila,” the bringer of group exercise. Three days in, I am willing to say (with cautious optimism) that Jeff is as content at Sunrise as he was at home. Maybe more. It is possible that the planned activities, and greater availability of people to interact with, use up energy that might otherwise be spent fretting about law school or other perceived goals.

He crashed in a big way in 2012, cognitively speaking. I have all sorts of thoughts and second thoughts about the “rightness” of putting substantial family funds into his care. This is one of the two things I just can’t really think about too much. The other thing is what will I begin to fill my life with? I don’t know. Yes, I’ve had plenty of fun with existential angst in my life, but now I will just have to be a zen master. Best option.

Broadcasting live from Queasy Square...

I’m not doing much this week. Well, a few things...I’ve loaded a laundry basket full of Jeff’s clothes, gathered hangers, toiletries and picture hangers, prepared a small photo album, and designated a comfortable IKEA chair as the one which will initially occupy a little of the space in Jeff’s room at Sunrise.

Jeff just asked me if I’d like to go back into broadcasting. Thinking of how to answer...”I’m not sure I’d like broadcasting,” I say. “I guess I wouldn’t mind working behind the camera.” What I don’t say is “Who do you think I am today?”

Soon I will pause, mid-paragraph, and follow him down the street again. Today, he is identifying every house in our neighborhood as being either “the old WBAL weather-station,” or “the new WBAL weather-station.”

There was a lot of paperwork. I’m pretty good at paperwork and convening the necessary documents. My accountant always thanks me for being organized. My contact, Kim, at Sunrise also seemed surprised that I got everything together so efficiently. I rarely feel either efficient or organized. I think I’m just apt to latch onto tasks as distractions.

Sunrise is 2 minutes from my house. 10 minutes if I walk. I can be there often. I can provide context even if I’m a broadcaster. Everyone from my Alzheimer Spouse cohorts to the move-in staff at Sunrise tells me that this will be more difficult for me than it is for Jeff. I don’t care how difficult it is for me. I’m used to difficult. Mainly I don’t want to bring him any distress. But if he stays here and I completely lose my equanimity (and it has threatened to depart many times recently,) I will be of no use.

Otterbein

Most of my yesterday was spent on guard, trotting outside as necessary to walk with Jeff as he strode purposefully down the street, on a hunt for the “New Otterbein Street.” The house Jeff built from the ground up, and which we lived in for our first two years of marriage (as he completed it around us...a theme was to recur in our lives,) was on Otterbein St, in Baltimore. But I can’t tell you precisely what this “New Otterbein” was meant to be, and I’m sure that even in his head it was little more than a waking dream, believable to him, but connected to reality only by the most tangential of threads. I can tell you that there was, apparently, a sign in virtually every yard we passed telling him that this one was the “Old Otterbein.” A distracting dish of ice cream bought me a few minutes, but mostly, yesterday, I stood guard.

I could tell it was destined to be a tricky day when he first asked me about Otterbein Street, and I told him that Gordon still owned it. “Which Gordon?” he asked. Which Gordon? This would be his brother and business partner to whom we sold the house at Otterbein (which was serving as a rental at the time,) when Jeff’s powers began to fail.

2012, the year of change. Maybe that’s all the Mayans meant. That 2012 would be the year Jeff lost any grip on reality or the ability to be remotely re-oriented to the world as we know it. Fortunately, I am able to find life funny, ridiculous, and sad all at the same time as I remind myself how much, in 2011, I was wishing for an end to the “doldrums.” So, okay...thanks? I believe I will have to be buying my way back into life soon. I hope Jeff will adapt.

I will say though...

...as each day comes and goes, it feels less premature.

I don't know.

I am thinking about assisted living, and I don’t know if I should be.

Tomorrow I will visit one of two nearby places which have special units for the memory-impaired. A week later I will visit the other.

It is not uncommon for people in my gig to swear, at some early point in the process, that they will always keep their damaged-other at home, no matter what. I never swore that. I never thought that. If I had made a pronouncement, at any time, it would have been to simply say that I would take each day as it came, and make no decision prematurely.

Right now, frankly, feels premature. I have not, however, made a decision. I haven’t even done my visits yet.

February has bowled me over like a giant rolling snowball. Two months ago I would have told you that this in-betweenish time—these doldrums of a diminished spouse who appreciates me, but cannot be left alone, would continue for years. This month, the creeping damage of plaques and tangles has staked its claim on his last hold on reality. He is in a different world. It’s a world the real and present me has been left out of.

So, I don’t say this out of hurt feelings or personal regrets...but here—this house, this life, this place, this relationship—has left him, and I’m not sure it has any role left to play in his ability to live out his days contentedly.

So, what now? If knowing me no longer remains his anchor, is it time to let go a little and try to rebuild some version of a life for myself, or not? It’s a heavy question, made no lighter by the fact that—should I find Jeff alternative care—I would be committing substantial family financial resources to something which has, as its main goal, the release of my life from indenture, maybe only a few years early.

This worries me a lot because I do not, at this point, have the vaguest clue what my life would then go on to be about. I feel like I’d have to justify its release through meaningful living, and I don’t know if I can do that.

Well, as I said...no decision, premature or otherwise, has been made. It could be a good ways off. And if there’s a facet to that decision about which I’ve become very clear, it’s this: Wherever Jeff is cared for—whether here or near here—family and friends must have relatively unfettered accessed to him, and whoever I am...I will remain in primary charge of his care and comfort.

still me

I’m beyond wigged out. But I’m fine.

Here are the questions for the universe. (Unless you are Miss Universe, you probably don’t know the answers.)

This week, Jeff usually doesn’t know quite who I am. He knows my name is “Emily Gillespie,” if I ask him. (The “Clement” part has fallen into a roadside ditch somewhere.) He does not think I’m his wife, even though her name is “Emily Gillespie” too. If I point out that we are, therefore, the same person, he reacts with a bit of a start, as if that can’t be true. Today, we had lunch at Punk’s Backyard Grill where he asked me date-like questions such as whether I have brothers and sisters, and what do I like to do? He also regretted that he had no cash on him. When I said, “that’s fine, I can buy lunch,” he promised to reimburse me later. So I decided to go with the therapeutic approach as we drove home, and I asked him what his wife is like. He replied, in the faltering way of expressing himself which has become the norm, that “my wife is...my life.” Then he told me that she died.

There is a book entitled Learning to Speak Alzheimer’s which espouses the theory that the goal with AD people is not to correct their misconstrued notions of time and facts, but rather to go with their flow, and distract as necessary. In general, I agree with this approach. But what—as in our case—if someone wrongly has the notion that his wife and son have died?

The part about Gabe seemed an easy fix: “Oh no,” I said. “He’s fine. I just texted with him today.” Jeff was glad to hear this and expressed mild relief. But is it not a bit of a shocking confrontation to insist that you, the stranger, are in fact the missing wife? I tried a sideways approach later, and showed him pictures from our wedding. “Who is that?” I asked, pointing to 22 year old me. “Thats...Emily,” he said. “And that’s Jeff,” I said. “That’s you. That’s you, that’s me. We’re a lot older now.”

He did that slight back-jerk of the head as he looked at me, because this was a bit of an unexpected revelation. But he showed neither relief nor denial. Just sort of an “ok...let me think about this...” kind of look.

Not that it matters. It will all be gone tomorrow, and whoever I am, he seems to accept my presence and help.

weird

I will just say this:

I was just watching the next-to-last episode of The Bachelor. Not sure how I got sucked in to this season, but it happened. It’s such a surreal combination of appalling and intriguing that I can’t utterly write it off, even though I probably ought to. Unquestionably, the producers don’t care about the appalling, as long as they can ratchet up the intriguing.

But anyway, after tonight’s episode I walked away wondering why, at this juncture, any more humans would subject themselves to such an absurdo-tragedy. Too crazy, too awful, and glad it’s not me.

Then I remembered that my husband of 27 years doesn’t reliably know who I am. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t known who I am for 3 days, and may never again realize that I’m the person he’s been married to for a quarter-century plus. Speaking of surreal absurdo-tragedies. Pretty silly.