I watched him leave.
It was all so subtle.
Think of the mind as a corporation, with divisions and departments,
staffed by atomic characteristics of a person. A creative division that is
in charge of all creative pursuits, run by the creative portion of the mind;
it is home to fantastic ideas and concepts of art and magic and color.
An accounting department that tracks that person's financial affairs.
The entire enterprise of the person is controlled in the mind. Like economics,
the enterprise is influenced by circumstances, people, life.
His corporation was suffering from attrition. The staff in the various
divisions and departments weren't being responsive to the needs of the
enterprise.
It started within the Communications Division. The workers responsible for
researching nouns stopped doing their research. So he had a harder time to
find the nouns he needs to effectively communicate those wonderful ideas.
The database staff in his IT department started leaving, so his ability
to record and retreive information wasn't keeping pace. Soon, he wasn't
remembering those wonderful ideas.
We saw it. We saw it all. It started with a few, memory-driven words.
Eventually vocabulary became decoupled from concepts. He knew a chair was the
thing you sit on; the word "chair" came to escape him, but he still understood
the concept of "the thing you sit on," and would seek a replacement word for
"chair" which would communicate the same idea. Then, the secondary words
became out of reach. At times, he can manage words with similar pronunciations
("hair" instead of "chair")... at times, all he has is partial pronunciation,
which may or may not make sense — the end result might be unintelligible.
And so, "chair" and "the thing you sit on" may not appear to have any
connection at times.
At a higher level, vocabulary is becoming reduced to sounds. Or idioms.
Or fragments of these. He's called his daughter "Gravy." The other, "Ohio."
("Ohio" might have been a replacement for "Hi"?) When his doctor asked him
how he was feeling, he replied, "Fi fi fo fum dogs." No association.
What we have left are clues to intention. Some days, he can communicate
effectively, but what he's saying seem to be products of delusion. In other
words, he's using actual words to convey ideas, but whether they're the ideas
he truly intends to convey is anyone's guess. Sleuthing comes into play.
In the disarray between communication and memory, all of those atomic elements
that made him are fading. Fading until all that will remain is the
machinery of a being; a body that functions. A man no longer greater than
the sum of his parts.
His daughter has abandoned hope that her dad is still there someplace. She
tells me that her dad would be mortified if he knew what he's become. I believe
she's right about her dad's reaction. And I feel that she's perhaps making this
projection to protect herself; she feels such tremendous sorrow for his state.
For my part, I attend. I visit him with her. He seems to recognize me; not
by anything he says, but by his expression. It's like he doesn't know who I am,
but he can recognize that I'm someone who is associated with him. Perhaps
I'm much the same — difference being I can express it here.
Last week we spent a little time searching his home. Objects have been
misplaced, and we need to find them. In some cases, he hid them. The trouble is,
there's no way he'll recall his hiding spots — or, at least, be able to communicate
any recollection he might have. And so I find myself sifting through the
evidence of his life, of his liveliness. All of these objects attest to those
certain atomic elements I mentioned earlier. They were there once. They operated
on these things; made these things into crafts and art and expressions of
beauty and passion and love.
|