Somebody stole my china and then brought it back

Alzheimer's Disease is sorta like demonic possession. It happens upon you unexpectedly and before you know it an outside entity is controlling your every move. Partially because I'm a writer and partially because I describe myself as jovially macabre--which is a person who other wise is good-natured but  delves into darkness very easily--I often think of the famous paragraph from William Peter Blatty's book The Exorcist. The quote perfectly embodies my feelings on this insidious disease.

“Like the brief doomed flare of exploding suns that registers dimly on blind men’s eyes, the beginning of the horror past almost unnoticed; in the shriek that followed, in fact, was forgotten and perhaps not connected to the horror at all.”

 And there it is. In words. My sentiments. Looking back over the course of my mother's disease I can note the very moment the evil antigen was activated and my antibodies of fear and denial went into overdrive.

I never met my grandmother. From what I hear she was quite the character. A strong independent, church woman, much like mother. Vandelia was the matriarch of our family. A woman of unquestionable virtue and taste. As I've gotten older I realize the stories I was told as a youth were more myth that reality and the true nature of her personality resides somewhere between imperious and petty. She was a good cook and a very helpful woman. She helped the people of our close knit community. She was a business owner when black women were domestics and she even ensured that the poor children who attended the segregated depression era schools of Winston-Salem had hot food (usually soup) for lunch everyday. She would take large pots of hot food to the schools and serve the students who here hungry. She knew that a well-fed child learned better and that most of the students would not eat between breakfast and dinner. She was also an avid collector of fine home furnishings. Being the wife of a prominent physician did have its rewards. She loved nothing better than having goods from the white-only businesses delivered to her stately home on the "negro-side" of town. Though she lived far from the city's toniest neighborhood Buena Vista (say it like a real southerner: Bune-nah Vistah) her home was no less well-appointed.

My grandmother died 4-years before I was born and left a sizable assortment of fine china to her two daughters. Now somewhere along the way a set of Wedgwood Old New York Red accidentally (or intentionally--it greatly depended on the mood of my mother and her sister when the whereabouts of the china came up in discussion) was broken up. My mother swore before all the gods above that her sister had the cups hidden. My aunt said my mother had the complete set. This debate ran concurrently with most family gatherings until my aunt's death in 2004 at the age of 95. Four years later the mysterious cups that had been missing for 45 years showed up out of the blue in my mother's china cabinet. It was six months after her 82nd birthday. She called me one day very upset that some one broke into her home just to put the cups into her cabinet.

I was a blind man at the time and I did not see the blistering glare of the sun. At the time I thought it was a mere age related delusion. That my mother mistook one of the cups she already owned as the missing Old New York Reds. She kept mentioning them to the point of aggravation and I made a note the next time I was in North Carolina to visit her I would get to the bottom this. My mother was always a sensitive sort. She always thought people disliked her and she would take offense at any hint of dispute. She was to say the least, paranoid. So when I got in one afternoon from my flight I asked her to show me the cups. When she could not instead of admitting her mistake she argued me down that the cup-placing culprit showed up in the middle of the night to take the cups away again. She was determined to prove that some one was trying to drive her insane. If this sounded like a bad Tyler Perry movie with my mother cast as a black Karen Black; and now you begin to understand my childhood.

Unfortunately it was not a movie. The tale as well as both our lives soon began to unravel and now I often wish that she was just paranoid. That there wasn't a disease literally eating holes into her brain. Holes which started out with the delusion of missing fine china that grew to decimate memory and cognition. By the time I went to my priest--a neurologist--my mother was fully possessed by the demon of Alzheimer's. It made her do crazy things like loose her keys three times (the last for three weeks). It made her drive her car around for four hours even though she was just heading to Harris Teeter a mile-and-a-half away from home. It made her forget that I had called her the day before or that she had already paid the light bill; so she did so again and again and again. At one point she had enough money paid to Duke Energy that could keep the lights on for several months. It also made her set the stove on fire twice and caused her to think that all three bathrooms in her house were not working. I don't even want to discuss her solution to that perceived problem. But that was the demon doing its work.

And let my cry come unto thee was the title of the last section of the book The Exorcist. It is all about the climatic battle between God and the Devil over the soul of a little girl. Off in a room in a house that looks remarkably like my  mothers there are no priests fighting demons till death. Its just me and my mom trying to cope with an ever shifting reality. A new normal of lost memories and bodily functions in revolt. A vicious greedy demon trying to eat her alive. We shall use all the powers we have to combat it. But most importantly love and patience. I may not win but I won't give up.