My Landlady’s Secret – Falling

The lag is my way of saying, through prolonged silence, that I have–once again–fully allowed the trivialities of life to completely overshadow my ability to do justice to the real deal. As penance, I’m gonna keep writing until I’ve caught up with my thoughts.

It’s already 10:27pm. Gonna be a long night, folks.
 
 
I’ll take you back to 4th of July. Gorgeous day. Food, folks, and fun–a decidedly impressive fireworks display care of Chevron (apparently, they own El Segundo).

When I got home, on a lark, I downloaded a sexual hypnosis audio series. Isabella Valentine claims that she can make a man ejaculate merely by the power of suggestion. And me–being a longtime fan of the brain’s inclusion in sexual excitement, and curious, and generally disenchanted by run-of-the-mill pornography–decided to give the tracks a spin.

I turned off the lights, climbed onto my bed, systematically relaxed every part of my body and opened my mind. Izzy did her thing. She does indeed have a sultry voice, and a tantalizing sense of creativity–but my poor brain, so hardwired to eye candy, so conditioned by body types, and hair color, and glamorous poses, and fabrics, simply did not know what to do with a disembodied voice. That’s not to say that there weren’t aspects of the experience that enticed, only that I was a long way off from a handless “jackpot.”

 

Now. Me telling you this. It is nothing base, or kinky, or even narcissistic. You have to know this. You have to know this because if the stage is not properly set, you’re not in the know. I’m letting you in, so you understand what’s going through my mind when I–at 2:00 in the morning, trailing in and out of a sexually charged slumber–start to hear my landlady stumbling around just outside my door.

It’s a studio apartment. The immediacy is inescapable. If I can hear your shoes clacking on my driveway, then you are a single wall away from my bedroom, my kitchen, my office, my boudoir. It was a particularly muggy evening, so I had the door open.

After a prolonged traipse back and forth between her garage and home, she actually came to my door and–competing with the hypnotic minx that was still oozing loud, crystal clear, unmistakably unsavory propositions from my bookshelf speakers–calls to me.

“Eric, are you there? I need your help.”

I stared up at the ceiling for several seconds. There was embarrassment, of course, there was disbelief, and that nagging suspicion I sometimes get, that my very frame of mind can actually call into reality strange, inappropriate responses from the world in which I live.

She walked away, and I hopped into action. Turning down the audio, throwing on a robe, taking in the night, I chased her down.

Linda was bleeding from the bridge of her nose. She had fallen. This wasn’t the first time she fell, and it wouldn’t be her last. The Alzheimer’s is starting to send her into a downward spiral, and the symptoms become perilous when compounded by alcohol, high heels, and late night thrill-seeking.

It looked scarier than it was. The gash had a trickle, but it was definitely clotting properly. All the same, I called her into my bathroom so I could apply antiseptic and a bandaid. She protested the fuss, but I could tell that she appreciated the gesture. I know that it’s the little kindnesses that save us from The Big Bad. I walked Linda to her backyard porch, and we discussed the angles. We said our goodbyes. I went to bed.

And she fell again. Sliced her arm bad enough to require stitches.

I should have known. Even as I was walking her back, she was stumbling, falling backwards, away from me.

She let me sleep, but she bled over everything–a bin’s worth of bedding was put into the trash; it looked like the aftermath of one of those virginal wedding nights you hear so much about in ancient folklore.

The next time I talked to her, she had no recollection of the previous night’s doings. The wounded nose, our conversation, my medical expertise–a spot of past so faded as to be indistinguishable from a blank canvas.

And that’s just one story amidst piles upon piles of unreported incidents that have been occurring on an increasingly regular basis. I can’t even give them all their due. I have to reduce it all to a fistful of footnotes.

I was instrumental in helping her get her license back. I went on the Internets and printed out a shit-ton of sample questions off the DMV website. I spent several evenings drilling her on those admittedly counter-intuitive questions she would repeatedly get wrong. I helped fill out the accident report and made sure her physical and cognitive evals got where they needed to be. I burned the California Driving Manual onto several CDs, adding a homemade loop of the 16 Driving Tips mentioned on her lawyer’s supplemental DVD that specified how she could ace her in-car driving test (see above).
 
Success. She passed. In gratitude, she gave me a month off rent.
 
Several days later she lost her car. I drove her to the PCH, and we cruised around the eatery that she parked as close as a busy Saturday night would permit. The Pacific Coast’s privileged were particularly insufferable in their swerving, honking luxury sedans as I did my best both to follow Linda’s instructions and to keep us from turning into the same alleys and boulevards we already covered. It was gone, and she was convinced that she had left several binders worth of notes and contacts in the trunk that were absolutely vital to her business. After about an hour of fruitless searching, she had started to accept the worst. We were driving home in defeat when, wouldn’t you know it…

“Here’s one. Is that–?”

“Oh my God! I don’t believe it!”

Her white Lexus. Abandoned, forgotten, missed. Linda was so happy that she pecked me on the lips and slapped a c-note into my palm.

Later… Her wallet was… stolen? We tried to track that down. No dice.

Lotsa laptop related drama. I get turned around so many times helping her out with her e-mail that I actually run into myself coming the other way…

She fell again. And I don’t mean another time a few days ago, I mean about an hour after I started this very entry. 
 
“Well, Linda, you came into this world a tomboy, and here we are scrapin’ knees all over again.”
 
Hydrogen peroxide, another bandaid… when I see that she’s wobbly like this, I now accompany her into her home, make sure those infernal high heels come off, and earnestly hope that she’s well enough to take it from there.

She claims that her car broke down and that she had to walk home several blocks.  It’s on some street off of Laurel Canyon. I was in the middle of writing down a note telling her just that, a little something to remind her for when she woke up tomorrow, when she suddenly decided she’d go back outside and park her car.

“Well, you can’t do that, ‘cause it broke down several blocks away.”

A dreadful pause. She had completely forgotten what she just told me not five minutes prior.

“What?”

“Yeah, um… It just happened. Your car broke down several blocks away and you had to walk home.”

Another silence, as profound and limitless as a vacuum in outer space.

“Isn’t that amazing,” she asks me, her skillful smile belied by two frightened eyes.
 

Alzheimer’s is a death sentence, albeit an extremely slow one. And unlike some forms of dementia, the level of physical degeneration alone is intimidating enough. It’s not some blocked relay or a microscopic transmitter that fires in the wrong direction. It is brain tissue ravaged explicitly by disease over time–shriveled and consumed–and nobody knows what causes it, and nobody knows how to prevent it. I have no clue how I’m leaving this planet. I just know I want to be able to do it with my mind intact.
 

We talk in her kitchen. I am practical and supportive, she is strong and matter-of-fact. She is still amongst the top 5 earners at her company. They don’t know. Her brothers know, but they don’t know how bad it’s been getting. Her boyfriend…

He’s a younger man, they love each other, she doesn’t want to tell him because she doesn’t want to lose him, but she knows it’s not fair…

Love and work… It really is the only things that are keeping her going. But I encourage her to let her brothers in on the truth while she still has a few marbles left, because she won’t be able to maintain the ruse forever. Her take on things, her memory, her grasp on reality, it is a ball that bounces down, down, down the stairs.

“Life is never wasted,” I tell her. “And I don’t think we’re ever asked to deal with more than we can handle.”

“Well that’s–”

“I know, I know. I’m saying, in a world where there are other people that love us and can take care of us…”

She nods understanding. “You’re right, but… I’m very private.”

Private, independent… proud. It’s her time that she has left. She has every right to spend it her way, even if it means she’ll be doing it without a net.
 

Fate has brought us together. I have been working regularly as a caregiver since 2006, and I started on the dementia floor. We have history, but we are bounded by inevitability–we give meaning to one another.

I breathe deeply and embrace the present moment just enough to squeeze the future out of existence.

Knowing that it will not end well does not do anyone any good.