The Forgetting Page 9

  Right onward drive unharmed;

  The port, well worth the cruise, is near,

  And every wave is charmed.”

  “There he sat,” his son Edward later recalled of the chilling moment his father first read the finished poem aloud, “with no apparent abatement of bodily vigor, and young in spirit, recognizing with serene acquiescence his failing forces; I think he smiled as he read. He recognized, as none of us did, that his working days were nearly done.”

  Sure enough, soon after this formal declaration of decline, expressive aphasia and short-term memory problems surfaced. Groping for the names of famous writers and close friends, for everyday words like “umbrella,” and “chair,” for new ideas to fill his notebooks and lectures, Emerson gradually settled into a slower, more sheltered life for himself. He cut back on lectures, limited his travel, and worked on a final few projects. “Father has sat quiet in a chair all the forenoon,” Ellen wrote to her mother in November 1872, “declaring that idlesse is the business of age, and he loves above all things ‘to do noshing’ [sic], and that he never before had discovered this privilege of seventy years.… also bragging that Edward was a lion over at the Cathedral yesterday, knew dates and facts like an antiquary, and saying he was glad to have him go to dinners with him, ‘so that when I am fumbling for the name of my wife he can remember it for me.’”

  Because of who he was and who his friends and colleagues were, Emerson’s forgetting was often both personally poignant and historically significant. In a visit by Walt Whitman to Emerson’s home in the early 1870s, Emerson turned to Ellen at one point and discreetly asked her, “What is the name of this poet?” Many years later, at the funeral for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, he is reported to have said of his friend of fifty years, “The gentleman who lies here was a beautiful soul, but I have forgotten his name.”

  It is a powerful irony that Emerson, of all people, should have lost his memory, not just because he contributed so much to the public discourse on the subjects of intellect, identity, imagination, and the human spirit, but also because he spent his entire life constructing one of the most elaborate external memory systems—in the form of books and journals—of any writer in history. His “Wide World” journals, which he inaugurated in his junior year at Harvard College as “a receptacle of … all the luckless raggamuffin Ideas which may be collected & imprisoned hereafter in these pages,” ended up filling hundreds of pages and being organized into many distinct subjects and meticulously cross-referenced.

  The young Emerson explicitly referred to his brand-new journal as a “tablet to save the wear & tear of weak Memory.” It is almost as if Emerson was in conscious preparation throughout his life for the time when he would lose his memory, constructing an elaborate mechanism to fall back on. In his later years, he withdrew to his precious notebooks and more formal writings in order to sustain him as a public figure for the fifteen years that followed the onset of his illness. “I cannot remember anybody’s name; not even my recollections of the Latin School,” he announced at the centennial celebration of his alma mater. “I have therefore guarded against absolute silence by bringing you a few reminiscences which I have written.”

  It takes memory, though, to make memory. Once his illness began, his life’s work of creating a reservoir of external memory was effectively over. His fertile notebook entries and evocative letters became fewer and terser, accompanied by steady acknowledgments of how his “broken age” had “tied my tongue and hid my memory.” His late letters are saturated with basic spelling errors (“som” for some, “claimess” for claims, “tahat” for that), missing words, and repeated words. In sum, he was, by his own third-person declaration, “a man who has lost his wits.”

  And yet he rarely let on that he was bothered by it. The decision to continue speaking in public perfectly illustrates his exceptional poise. “Things that go wrong at these lectures don’t disturb me,” Emerson said, “because I know that everyone knows I am worn out and passed by; and that it is only my friends come for friendship’s sake to have one last season with me.” On another occasion, preparing for a speech, he remarked to Ellen, “A funny occasion it will be—a lecturer who has no idea what he’s lecturing about.” In light of what Emerson had lost, and knew that he had lost, the good humor was remarkable. As Edward had noticed on first hearing “Terminus,” the world-famous Emersonian serenity had only intensified, it seemed, with the onset of his dementia.

  “Memory” was not an isolated work, but had been conceived and written in his earlier years as a part of what Emerson told his close friend and literary executor James Elliot Cabot was the “chief task” of his life: a series of essays and lectures he called “Natural History of the Intellect.” Originally imagined in the 1830s, undertaken in earnest in 1847–48, and reworked in the 1850s, Emerson finally seized the chance to finish the lifelong project as a lecture series for Harvard in the spring of 1870.

  Because of their importance, Emerson made sure to invest the necessary time to get them just right. He devised a plan for sixteen lectures, and took most of the winter and spring to organize them. The overall goal was to integrate Transcendentalism with traditional philosophy and science, to bring a spirit of scientific inquiry to the consideration of the nature of mind, of imagination and creativity. “I wish to know the laws of this wonderful power,” he wrote, “that I may domesticate it. I observe with curiosity its risings and its settings, illumination and eclipse; its obstructions and its provocations, that I may learn to live with it wisely, court its aid, catch sight of its splendor, feel its approach, hear and save its oracles and obey them.”

  Alas, he had waited too long. Even with eighteen months of work—he reworked and redelivered the lectures the following spring—he couldn’t get it right. After a lifetime of masterly organization, Emerson complained to Thomas Carlyle that he was now finding his work “oppressive.” He had lots of good source material, he said, and some good ideas, “but in haste they are misplaced and spoiled.” His son Edward observed bluntly that it was “too late for the satisfactory performance of the duty.” Emerson wanted desperately to define the parameters of intellect, but his own intellect was no longer up to the task.

  After the Harvard ordeal, Emerson was treated to a luxurious seven-week trip westward by John Forbes, the wealthy father of his new son-in-law. A party of twelve piled into a private Pullman train car in Chicago, and were seen off by George Pullman himself. As reported later in a detailed journal by fellow excursioner James Bradley Thayer, Emerson was thrilled to do nothing on this trip but read, relax, talk, eat, and smoke cigars. He developed a happy morning ritual of eating pie before any other foods, and attempted to seduce others into joining him. When, one morning, he was unable to convince anyone within earshot, Emerson playfully slid a knife underneath a slice of pie and, gently tilting it up toward a companion, asked with exaggerated face and voice, “But Mr.——, what is pie for?”

  The first stop was Salt Lake City, where Emerson was introduced to (but was unimpressed by) Mormon leader Brigham Young. Then on to San Francisco, where he admired the sea lions and the California wine. At the San Francisco Unitarian Church, he read aloud his address “Immortality.” From there the group traveled to Yosemite. In the Mariposa Grove, Emerson was overwhelmed by the majesty of the giant sequoias, which he called “those gentleman trees.”

  He was particularly moved by their ability to age with grace, to survive the indignities of fire and other abuse. In thirteen hundred years of life, he remarked, the trees “must have met that danger and every other in turn. Yet they possess great power of resistance.”

  Continuing their tour of Yosemite, the group came to the majestic Vernal Fall, where someone recited from Longfellow’s “Wreck of the Hesperus”:

  She struck where the white and fleecy waves

  Looked soft as carded wool …

  Emerson was very glad to hear the verse of his friend, but he found it impossible to retain the words in his mind for more th
an a few moments. “Mr. Emerson gave a pleased nod, and desired it said over again,” noted Thayer, evidently oblivious to Emerson’s incipient decline. “And then he wished a reference to it when we should get to the hotel. Had he then let Longfellow’s poetry pass by him so much?”

  In Yosemite, the party on horseback was joined by the young environmentalist John Muir, a great admirer of Emerson. Muir, who would go on to convince Congress to establish Yosemite National Park in 1890, observed that Emerson was as “serene as a sequoia.” Emerson was delighted to discover a western protégé. As his group left Yosemite on horseback. Muir recalled: “Emerson lingered in the rear … and when he reached the top of the ridge, after all the rest of the party were over and out of sight, he turned his horse, took off his hat and waved me a last good-bye.”

  I’m blessed to have a wonderful daughter.… I sent her to school and to college, and now she knows how to take care of all my business. I depend on her. I’m in her hands. I’m in my baby phase now, so to speak. So sometimes I call her my “mumma.” Yes, she’s my mumma now.

  —B.

  San Diego, California

  Chapter 8

  BACK TO BIRTH

  Old men are children mice over.

  —ARISTOPHANES, 419 B.C.

  Queens, New York: Fall 1999

  The decline was sure and steady at Freund House, in Queens.

  After two years in the group, Doris was now facing more severe aphasia. Her sentences were now so pockmarked with “yeah” in place of other words that it was difficult to tell what she was trying to say much of the time. Even the most productive conversations with Doris involved almost no exchange of information. Over lunch one afternoon, someone mentioned tuna fish. Doris’s eyes lit up.

  “My mother had a … a …”

  “A recipe?” someone offered.

  “Yes … she … yeah … she …”

  “She had a recipe for tuna fish salad?”

  “Yes … wonderful.”

  The thread of conversation ended there. Doris clearly had much more to say on the subject, but translating these thoughts into spoken words was no longer possible. Her world did not collapse entirely on her inability to discuss tuna fish, but to have all potential conversations restricted to a handful of words effectively extinguished her ability to communicate any real thoughts out loud. (One suspected that the intended subject of this un-conversation was not tuna fish, but Doris’s mother.)

  Rachel, another veteran member of the group, was also deteriorating, and—perhaps blessedly—oblivious to the decline. At the end of one week’s session, Irving felt the need to be blunt with her. “Rachel, please talk to your son about getting a review, a medical update. I think it’s extremely important.”

  “On what?”

  “On the progression of your dementia.”

  “Why—do you see something?”

  Irving paused briefly to check his frustration. “Yes—I mentioned it to you before that we see a little more progression.”

  “About remembering? Really?”

  “Well, what’s happening is that there’s even a little bit more of the not-remembering that you’re forgetting.”

  “Not remembering forgetting?”

  “Not remembering that you’re forgetting. In the beginning, you used to come in and say, ‘Oh, I forgot.’ Now you don’t even remember in some of the cases that you forgot.”

  “Oh.”

  William was much more confused than before. He got lost on bathroom breaks. Greta had also deteriorated and seemed headed to soon join the middle-stage group for which she had once volunteered.

  The group was collapsing. The original vision had been to cycle individual members out of the group as they progressed into the middle stages of the disease—once they were no longer “bothered enough,” in Judy’s words, to contribute. In practice, this had proven very tough to do, a lot tougher than Irving or Judy had anticipated. Whenever they tried to discuss the exit of one or another member, Irving explained, “The other members jumped on us. They were horrified. ‘He’s not hurting the group!’ they would say.”

  Even as minds slipped away, the group still held a lot of meaning for these people. They didn’t want to let go of their friends, or to acknowledge decline. Shortly before the group disbanded, there was a frank discussion about the future. Or rather, there was an attempt by the group leaders at a frank discussion. Stefanie, another group facilitator, tried to prepare the group for what was in store. “This group is a temporary group,” she said. “Things may get worse. And you may not remember if they get worse.” She raised the possibility of the group retaining the same members, but beginning to meet for a good portion of each day instead of once weekly. This would mark a transition from self-help to day care.

  The group would hear none of it. Even in their impairment, they were sharp enough to know what she was driving at. She was warning them that the early stages were coming to an end.

  They weren’t ready. The group had been working on coping mechanisms for two years, but simply could not confront the wretched truth head-on. “A lot of people are worse off than me,” William protested. “For me, it hasn’t changed since I walked in the door. My wife would back me up in that.”

  “That’s right,” Greta said, in effect demonstrating her own deteriorating memory and judgment. “He has improved tremendously. He can express himself much better than before.” Turning to the issue of her own decline, Greta disputed claims that she had recently been seen walking around Freund House in a state of confusion. “That’s just crazy,” she insisted. Doris also claimed she wasn’t getting any worse.

  Denial is an important part of the Alzheimer’s experience, very commonly employed as symptoms first appear, or at the time of diagnosis, or at any juncture where a truth is so horrifying that the most emotionally healthy choice is to pretend that it does not exist. The poisonous reality is pushed back into the recesses of the mind and only slowly, in small drips, is it allowed to seep back into consciousness.

  It’s also customary for denial to fade away and then return again sometime later. This psychological mechanism of last resort can be invoked as often as need be, and in Freund House most of the group members now apparently needed to fall back on it again. For the time being, it didn’t matter that they had bravely faced down their disease together for two years. It didn’t matter that they had accepted their decreased functioning and voluntarily given up liberties like driving. It didn’t matter that they had brought much frustration and despair to the surface. A new awful truth was emerging that was too hard to confront. What they each had glimpsed, if only briefly before suppressing, were the middle stages. It wouldn’t be so long now before they were singing the Barney song and being escorted to the bathroom.

  In effect, without anyone quite realizing it, the group had already become a middle-stage group. They no longer knew what had brought them there in the first place, could no longer examine the implications of their own deficits. Of the six of them, Arnie was the only one left still bothered enough to talk about the problems with some candor.

  “I think we need to own up to the fact that change occurs,” Arnie finally said to his friends in one of their last meetings together. “And in the main, these changes are not positive.”

  He paused for a moment. “I think I’ll leave it at that for now.”

  Bel Air, California: Fall 1999

  Ronald Reagan was also slipping well past the early stages. “Not good” was how Reagan’s daughter Maureen characterized his condition in the fifth year following the diagnosis.

  The mythic significance of the once “Great Communicator” now steadily unraveling was felt even by Reagan’s detractors: Once the most powerful man on earth, he famously confronted the Soviet empire. Now he was caught in a humbling downward spiral, so powerless that he no longer even knew who he was. On the Today show, Ann Curry asked Maureen, “Does he remember being President?” She evaded the painful question.

  Earlier in
the illness, supporters had made much of the fact that Reagan was continuing to go to his office in downtown Los Angeles every day. He played the occasional game of golf and took casual walks in public parks, making himself accessible to passers-by.

  Those visits and games were now over, and the Reagans had sold their beloved “Rancho del Cielo” mountaintop retreat. They were hunkering down for some more difficult times. As expected, Reagan’s descent had progressed steadily. Friends and family watched his memory lapses become the rule rather than the exception. There was, for example, the day that former Secretary of State George Shultz visited his old boss. In the midst of a casual discussion about politics, Reagan briefly left the room with a nurse. When he returned a few moments later, he took the nurse aside and pointed to Shultz. “Who is that man sitting with Nancy on the couch?” he asked quietly. “I know him. He is a very famous man.”

  Incidents like these drove him into further isolation. Partly out of simple courtesy to Reagan and partly due to their own personal discomfort, many of his friends stopped visiting when he started having trouble recognizing them.

  Then came language stumbles. Over the course of a few years, aphasia crept steadily in and eventually took from him the ability to articulate his thoughts. He could, for a time, still read others’ words out loud from a children’s storybook. But then that too slipped away.

  In visits just after the diagnosis, Maureen and her father would tackle large, three-hundred-piece puzzles. “He and I do jigsaw puzzles together,” she said. “He loves doing that. When I was a little girl he used to tell me, ‘Do the border first.’ Now I sit there and say, ‘Dad, do the border first.’”

  When the intricate puzzles got too difficult, she brought him simpler puzzles of a hundred pieces or so; then simpler puzzles still, with farm animal scenes. Finally, even those became too challenging. In other homes all over Southern California and elsewhere, tiny children were, day by day, learning to distinguish colors and shapes, gaining in depth perception, improving their hand-eye coordination, slowly gaining confidence as their brains developed to full capacity. Here at 668 St. Cloud Drive, the former President of the United States was heading through that same developmental process in reverse.