For a little over a month, K and I have been dealing with the fallout of putting his grandmother in a nursing home and watching her be destroyed bit by bit. It’s a hard, heartbreaking lesson on how our society doesn’t consider the elderly as humans. At best, they are treated quite literally as unruly children; at worst, she is treated worse than a dog. I say this because Grandma’s elderly dog, Fred, is receiving far, far better care in his new home than she is.
Like many people, Grandma is an intersection of things great and terrible. She taught ballet for 60 years, to hundreds of grateful students, many of those years in her own studio. She learned how to fly her own airplane. She also was an alcoholic who probably abused her children. I say “probably” because, like most dark family secrets, no one talks about it. But one can’t ignore that all three of her children have deep psychological troubles; one committed suicide years ago.
All this history is now vanishing before our eyes. Grandma herself remembers only bits and pieces of her own life. K and I sit with her and listen to her stories, and we are the only ones left to bear witness to the fact that she had a long and complicated life, and that she deserves to be heard.
This woman of many achievements and flaws — and a dancer, no less — is left in her last days unable to walk, bedridden, and ignored. And I wonder: what makes me, or any of us, think we’ll escape the same fate? Further, I wonder: what’s the point of my achievements if, in the end, there will be no one left to bear witness for me, including myself?
That’s a good question. Or at least, one that cannot be ignored.
I was riding Muni the other day and it felt like a recurring dream I have lately. In this dream, I befriend a group of people, only to realize that the dream is ending and I will never see them again because they don’t really exist. Despite my brain’s ability to create imaginary people with great detail, I am still fully aware that I made them up and they will all vanish. This makes me sad every time.
The people on the Muni didn’t become my instant friends like the people in my dreams, but there was a similarity. After I got off the bus, I’d never see them again. I looked at them and realized that because of this ephemeral quality, they seemed less real to me than myself or those close to me. I guess that’s the way ego works: we are all the center of our worlds.
But then the inverse occurred to me: to all these people, I am not very real. In fact, I am even less than that: they aren’t even aware of me. They’re on their phones, listening to their iPods, whatever. In their world, I don’t even exist.
That thought led me to a memory of the worse time of my life, junior high. I was a social pariah with no friends. Days went on and on, and no one spoke to me. Some days I felt so emotionally numb that I felt that I didn’t exist, that I wasn’t even alive. Now, that thought came out of depression and loneliness and non-existent self-esteem, and the thoughts I have now come out of some sort of existentialist angst, so they don’t feel the same. They’re not the same. But they are related.
And now, a commercial break:
During junior high, I had a dream that Alan Alda came to my school and became my friend. You may not remember, but in 1976 Alan Alda was well-loved by many. Even after all these years, I recall that dream I had one night in the hundreds of nights of that time. In that dream, I was happy and not alone and had a special friend. That dream, something that never actually happened, is part of my memory of that time as if it were real. Linda Barry talks about this phenomenon a lot in her book What It Is. It begs the same question in another way: what is real?
So, am I real or not? If my experience is so subjective that it could be annihilated by dementia or death, as with Grandma, is it real? There’s part of me that feels either it’s all real or it’s all an illusion. It’s like when I stopped being religious. First I felt that one part of the Torah couldn’t be god-given, and then another, and another. One thought kept leading to another, and despite my efforts to stop it, it went back to the source of it all: that there is no god. And once I got there, I lost my religion forever. There was nothing left to believe in. I either believed in the Torah or I didn’t.
I’m thinking, though, this could be a little different. Because there are moments in life that just seem very real. Superreal, perhaps. When I’m in nature, everything feels more real to me, including myself. Sex can seem that way too. Also, looking at the body of a loved one who has died. Are these things more real (or even real, if all is illusion), or do they just
seem that way because of a flooding of the senses/emotions?
When I posed these questions to K, he had two responses. One: maybe there is no point to our existence. Two: we’re probably too puny and insignificant to understand what’s really going on.
While either or both those answers may be true, I find them unsatisfying. So I’m just left wondering.
Perhaps wondering is the point.
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[…] suppose I can blame it on the situation with K’s grandma. I came across the book Dying Well while shelf-surfing at the library and decided to check it […]