Shadow Boxes

Life seldom unfolds according to “plan”. Certainly no one plans to lose their mind…

My wife’s mother is aged and infirmed. She has many issues; mobility, self care, instability. But she has, for the most part, retained her mental sharpness. The nursing home system is extremely complex and she has progressed from hospital care to skilled care to nursing home care. To the extent possible, the family engaged in the process, but did not foresee the turn of events which resulted in her placement in an Alzheimer unit.

She does not belong in this unit and the family is working frantically to facilitate her transfer to a more suitable facility. In the meantime, she is confined in a lock-down dementia unit. Her attitude is so positive and her faith is strong. She said, “Perhaps I have been placed here to pray for these poor people…” Prayers notwithstanding, it has been an eye opener for us.

To enter the Alzheimer wing, access codes are punched onto a security keypad unlocking the heavy wooden doors. Often there are patients standing inside the door peering out through the two small windows… trying to find a way out. Some, who appear otherwise healthy, will insist they are staff or visitors in an attempt to make their way through those doors, back into the world. All 50 patients behind those doors are severely impacted by mental disease… except my mother-in-law.

Men and women dressed in casual clothes, tee shirts, sneakers and sweat suits, roam up and down the long hallways along the highly polished floors. Some hold dolls or stuffed animals. Some talk to themselves. Others, like loveable little Lizzy, always seem to have a roll or a handful of bread and munch as she randomly ping pongs from wall to wall along the bright corridor. Lizzy is small and painfully thin with short gray hair, her age somewhere between perhaps 70 and 80. She was the first person I met coming through the locked door.

Lizzy shuffled up beside me. Her speech is unintelligible, stuttered. But she spoke passionately, with a tight smile on her face and an urgent expectation in her eyes. “Aba aba chh chh buh…” she said between clenched teeth. She took my hand and I followed as we wandered aimlessly and silently down the hall to the activity room, There, several dozen people sat at tables or randomly wandered about the room. They took no notice of me and I stood still to take in the scene.

Some people were sitting silently within themselves, rocking, seemingly not focusing on anything or anyone. Others were animated, jabbering away about snippets of thoughts that ran through their ravaged minds. “I need to go home.”… “Has my meal been paid for?”...“Get them away from me. Leave me alone!”... “My mother is coming for me today”…  Others were speaking nonsense, words without meaning, without ceasing. Lizzy released my hand and wandered away.

I walked among them and most seemed not to see me, but few responding to my smile or words of greeting. So foreign. So disturbing. A thought… how might they react to my gentle, little white dogs? Previously, we had brought them into hospitals and nursing homes with good results. I asked permission from the head nurse and with their vet records got the OK to bring them in from the van. I was apprehensive that some of the residents might be afraid of them or that others might hurt the dogs so decided to carry them in order to control their introduction. I was not prepared for the response.

We (Sampson and Lulu, 2 eight pound Maltese and me) rounded the corner from the long hallway into the activity room. Many people broke into broad smiles.  Eyes, which had been expressionless, were alive. Hands were outstretched.

I quickly learned to approach cautiously before bringing the dogs close enough to be petted. Ken, a baseball capped, 84 year old former logger, toothless and confined to his wheelchair, howled at me, “GET THOSE SONS OF WHORES AWAY FROM ME…”

Minutes later, he gently scratched their ears and reminisced about how his old hound dog would ride with him on his skidder as he worked deep in the Maine woods.

But most of patients, some of whom had appeared catatonic moments earlier, smiled, stroked their fur, spoke to them softly and with love. One woman repeated over and over, ‘Look at those beautiful babies… look at those beautiful babies”. Another woman jabbered away excitedly about pie and walked over to me presumably to pet the dogs, The nurses broke into gales of laughter when instead she put her hands inside my shirt and began to pet me.

I moved from table to table, offering each person an opportunity to pet the dogs or, in some cases, to hold them. They were gentle, loving. There were those who were unable to respond in any way. Others who responded with fear. For those who could respond, it was an extraordinary glimpse of the person they had once been, if only for a moment.

The next weekend when we again visited, there was Lizzy walking the halls. She gave no indication that she in any way remembered our walk down the hall together, an event burned into my memory. Her expression this day was anxious, upset. She seemed about to cry. But later in the day she approached me in the hall, jabbered excitedly, reached up and gently stroked my face. “ Moh moh shibbabababa…” she said and laughed. Her eyes and her attention wandered and she shuffled away. Did she remember me?

How insidious this disease. Late one night, after everyone was in bed, I walked the halls and read the “shadow boxes’ secured on the walls at the entryway to each room. Locked wooden boxes with plexi-glass covers. Names printed on tags, pictures of smiling people now silent, of grandchildren and children, husbands and wives, of lives now gone forever, the owners but shadows of their former selves. It touched me deeply.

The following week we arrived on Friday and accompanied my mother-in -law to dinner. I arrived ten minutes after my wife and her mother were seated at a table with 3 other women to find one of the women verbally terrorizing the table. My wife looked at me anxiously. The woman’s name was Martha.

“God damn you. Don’t look at me like that. You sons of bitches. Talk, talk, talk. That’s all you do. Just shut up! Shut up!” She glared at everyone and especially me, the only man at the table. I attempted to speak with her and she cut me off.”Talk, talk, talk” she taunted and began to knock food onto the floor and put silverware into her glass of milk. We ignored her misbehavior and soon she sat, sullen and withdrawn.

After dinner, while my wife was helping her mother prepare for bed, I wandered down to the community room and found Martha sitting with another resident. She was cruelly berating him as he sat happily, pulling on his suspenders. He, in response, was laughing foolishly, smiling broadly and making train noises. I decided to join the conversation.

Pulling another rocking chair close to them, I asked if I might sit there and getting no response, began to quietly rock away, not making eye contact. Soon she began to rant. ‘HE wants it HIS way… always HIS way. HE thinks because he works he can have it that way… and I suppose he can... Peculiar… I call it Peculiar.” I began repeating her words back to her. “Yes, he wants it that way.”… “I suppose he can.”… “Yes. Peculiar.”…

“Choo-Chooo” said Suspenders, complete with arm pull. I replied “Choo-Choo”. He grinned. She rocked and ranted. “I like these rocking chairs” I said to no one.

We rocked for 30 minutes. Several times Martha got up from the chair and each time that she did, I stood in the presence of a lady as my mother had always taught me to do. And when she sat, so did I. And we rocked some more.

Finally she rose and walked stiffly down the hall, farting loudly, muttering. I resumed the conversation with Suspenders. He railed about “working and working and I told them they can’t do that. That’s not right…. not right.” as his face clouded up at some distant grievance yet traversing the wrecked synapses of his brain.

When Martha reentered the room, I stood and she walked directly to me, but avoided my gaze.

“ It needs to stay here. Right here.” she instructed as she handed me her blue knit sweater. I hung it on the back of her rocking chair and smoothed it down gently. “It will be right here for you”, I said.

She continued to mumble about her room and how she wanted to “just get back”. “Can I walk with you to find your room?” I asked. Remarkably, she took my arm.

“Good night” I said to Suspenders. “Woo-Wooo”, he replied

Martha rambled as we walked until we met Lizzy who decided she was going to hold my other arm. Martha raised her voice and cussed her away. As we walked by the activity room, the big, friendly nurse smiled and said, “You found a friend Martha?” She gripped my arm tighter.

At the far end of the hall, I spied her shadowbox. Pictures from before, when she was whole. She was not smiling in any of the pictures. Hard, stern expressions. Life had not been easy for her.

She seemed relieved when she recognized her surroundings and announced, “My room… see, my rocking chair… and my bed.” She released my arm and sat on the side of the bed. And then she looked up and locked eyes with me, her eyes softened, looked wounded. The hair on the back of my neck stood up as she spoke directly to me. “This… has been wonderful. I can’t tell you how much I have enjoyed it. Just wonderful….” She lay back on the bed and closed her eyes.

Her moment of lucidity hammered my world view. How remarkable that she was able to surge through her disease, if but for an instant, to connect with compassion and warmth, to overcome the raging fear and anger within her crippled mind. An aberration I wondered?

I walked down the now dark and quiet hallways, past the shadow boxes and the shadow people, lost from the world, mindless, just waiting. I felt a mixture of emotions, an odd sense of awe and a profound sorrow. Lizzy wandered down the hall toward me, solitary, mouse-like, munching on a biscuit and leaving a trail of crumbs behind her as if to mark her trail back to sanity.

I felt badly that she had been driven away earlier by Martha’s bitterness and so I smiled and reached to hold her withered hands in mine. She smiled vacantly, food dribbling out the corners of her lips as she chewed with open mouth. I whispered in her ear, “Lizzy, you are my favorite,”

 She whispered back…“Thank you…” and drifted into the shadows.