I believe that something remains hidden, something we’re not inclined to see, precisely because dementia steers us away from it. Having lived with a dementia patient for more than a year, I am not sure I agree.
And because we’ve labelled the anomaly, describing it as something carved out in the brain, a swerve from the norm, a deterioration of cognitive ability, we believe we understand it. For unlike diseases that attack the body, dementia, by degrading the physiology of the brain, induces an altered state of consciousness, a consciousness both like and unlike our own, both a mirror and a mask.ĭementia, of course, has been identified, classified, and even anatomically annotated. Although empirical research – brain scans and blood analyses – approaches dementia like any other physiological illness, it can inadvertently distance us from what Oliver Sacks referred to as “the inner state, ‘the situation’” of the person. Having studied pathology primarily through the dispassionate lens of quantitative analysis, I saw Mr Schecter as an opportunity to observe how a person fights to preserve his sense of self, even as a neurological disease is eroding it. So when I learned that Mr Schecter, like my maternal grandfather, had been interned in a Soviet labour camp during the second world war, I naively thought I could protect him, that I could somehow compensate for the resilience that had sustained him in the past.īut I had another reason as well. I had grown alienated from my studies and had recently ended a relationship that had both consumed and confined me. It was an apartment out of time, and perhaps unconsciously I felt that Mr Schecter’s past offered a way out of my present. The unimaginative furniture, framed pictures of grey city streets and sombre landscapes, and hundreds and hundreds of jacketless books, as many in Yiddish as English, seemed to contain the world of my grandparents. More than anything else, he wanted me to understand that he had agreed to the arrangement only as a concession to his son.Īs for me, any doubts about taking up Sam’s offer disappeared when I stepped into Mr Schecter’s apartment. He also insisted that he didn’t need help, that he still went to work (he had, of course, stopped), and that if I rented a room from him, it would be on a month-by-month basis. He repeated himself, his mind wandered, and he asked the same questions over and over. Short, solidly built, with a firm handshake, Mr Schecter exhibited at our first meeting all the hallmarks of dementia. For a man nearing 100, he was amazingly spry. Mr Schecter lived in a two-bedroom apartment on a pleasant, tree-lined street in the Bronx. And this denial, both clinical and profoundly human, led Sam to misjudge the illness as well. If he put the laundry detergent in the oven or forgot which floor he lived on, he’d shake his head and sigh, Mayn kop arbet nisht (“my head doesn’t work”). The most obvious paradox of dementia is the victim’s frequent inability to recognise it, and Mr Schecter went about his life as though burdened by the normal aches and pains of aging rather than by an irrevocable and debilitating illness.
I was employed because Mr Schecter’s son – I’ll call him Sam – had seriously underestimated his father’s condition.
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Although my background was in clinical psychology, I was by no means a professional caregiver. He was a Holocaust survivor in the first stages of dementia, and I’d been hired to look after him. This man, whom I’ll call Mr Schecter, wasn’t a friend or relation or anyone I knew. I n November 2010, when I was 25 years old, I moved in with a man who was 98.
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