by Subramani Mani
My first post as a clinical psychologist was in a corrections center. I found it hard to elicit their stories and empathize. The inmates’ tales of omission and mostly commission regularly generated outrage in me and I decided to accept a position at an assisted living facility when the opportunity arose.
Aptly named Serene, the senior complex was nestled among the hills in a quiet residential neighborhood with plenty of mature trees providing a nice green cover. The one and two-storied single-family homes had probably been built during the boom decades following the end of the second world war. They had well-maintained lawns and the flow of traffic on the streets was smooth. I also spotted an elementary school nearby with noisy children curious about the world around them. The senior complex was only a couple of miles from a major highway providing easy access to the facility for the residents, visitors, staff, and the local populace. The first time I visited a gentle breeze greeted me. Serene appeared to be newer in construction compared to the surrounding houses. The facility was oval shaped, with two floors enclosing a large inner courtyard with lots of mature trees and shade. There were two wings A and B; residents who had no significant cognitive impairment were housed in A and seniors with marked loss of memory occupied wing B and named the memory care facility.
Even for a person professionally trained in psychology it was not easy to observe the challenges the residents faced. In wing A many residents found it difficult to navigate themselves to the dining hall from their designated apartments. Sitting in the wheelchair and moving around inside the building in common areas many seemed confused, aimless, and lost in thought. In command of and surefooted in their environs in the prime of their lives they appeared to have wandered and somehow lost their way in the evening of their life. Aging, in a way, started slowly and surreptitiously at first, then quickly accelerated and became a great equalizer diminishing the body and then the mind, not necessarily always in that order. In some ways Serene resembled a kindergarten for the elderly with their activity rooms and games, a geriatric or eldergarten, if you will. I was suddenly reminded of the time when I got dropped off at the kindergarten by my mom. I felt scared and isolated and initially kept to myself in class for many days. And then I started making friends. Likewise, some residents after being apprehensive and feeling cocooned initially, started slowly opening up to some of the other residents. A few among them gradually also commenced telling their stories to me, and strangely, over time, a bond started developing between me and many of the residents in the A wing. I should credit these story-telling residents for making me comfortable and easing me into my job of acquiring and developing psychic insight into their minds and by extension their inner souls.
She was eighty-nine going on ninety; a petite woman maybe an inch taller than five feet and sporting a head full of neatly cropped gray hair with patches of blackness mixed in throughout as if she was wearing a felt hat with spilled India ink. Up close, her hair looked natural and not dyed in. Her skin had yellowed and wrinkled like crumpled and flattened tracing paper; it was also translucent. I could see some violet-colored patchy smudging underneath her skin. The superficial veins crisscrossing her forearms and hands were clearly visible, many appeared swollen and some of them even knotted and tortuous, seemingly under pressure while struggling to send blood back to the heart.
I had seen her strolling the hallways with small shuffling steps supported by a bright blue metallic walker. Some days she would use a wheelchair to ride the hallways picking up speed to get some wind in her hair. An air of exhilaration surrounded her, giving her an element of command and control over her existential state. On this particular day she was sitting in a wheelchair in a corner facing the courtyard where a game of musical chairs was taking place with mostly younger residents participating. She had been cheering, at times boisterously; she became suddenly quiet when the game was over, and it seemed a cloud of thoughtfulness and pensiveness had enveloped her face. Seeing me standing on the sidelines leaning with my shoulder on a pillar for support, she beckoned me to her side and started narrating her story.
***
“Priya is my oldest daughter who I brought into this world when I was twenty-eight. Two years later my son was born and soon it was the turn of my second daughter to come out of my womb. Priya was a cheery girl from her early days; her large seashell-shaped eyes would arch like a rainbow whenever she smiled. She was a naughty child, jumping up and down, falling and injuring herself frequently. But she rarely wept or made a big fuss of her injuries.
Once she made a diving jump from her bed to her brother’s. She sustained an inch-long cut above her right brow. When I looked towards her, I saw that her face was smudged with blood and it was also oozing from her wound reddening her eyelids and the eye. I took her to the bathroom to clean her up. Seeing her face smeared with blood she started giggling. Later, in the primitive ER when she got stitches without any anesthesia, she remained quiet; let alone screams, not even a whisper was audible. I still remember the doctor’s verdict, ‘She is a brave child; she will go places and make you proud.’
I asked how she managed to remain quiet and motionless while her cut was sutured. And she responded— ‘Remember my teddy was torn during a rollercoaster ride. I was so sad for her gaping belly. When we got home you put the teddy on your lap and stitched her up with black thread. The teddy lay still and never squealed even once. Mom, I just thought of my teddy and remained quiet.’
I did not want to tell her then that her teddy was only a toy and that it was not a living being. It would have devastated her. Her explanation seemed simple and sincere, and I let it stand. It was admirable to say the least.
In elementary school she mastered poetry recitation in three languages—Tamil, her mother tongue, English, and Hindi. She would bring home the first prize in recitation and elocution competitions whether intra-school or inter-school. She was growing up into a beautiful girl and was teasingly nick-named Sharmila Tagore by her friends and admirers after the leading movie actress of the day. In middle and high school, she took to athletics in a big way and started winning medals and breaking school meet records. Without much coaching and training, mostly fueled and propelled by her motivation, she ran one hundred meters under 12 seconds, two hundred meters close to 24 seconds, long-jumped more than 18 feet and cleared 5 feet in high hump. Of course, these timings and measurements are laughable when compared with current Olympic performances; but in her milieu, in those days, she was a golden track star.
In college we wanted her to pursue an easy or “light” discipline, graduate, get married and start a family. Being fiercely independent Priya had other ideas. She topped the high school leaving certificate exam conducted by the state government which enabled her to become eligible for acceptance to medical schools directly after high school. And she was adamant about joining med school. After much hesitation and a lot of back and forth between her dad and I, we finally relented with the hope and some understanding that after finishing her MBBS degree she would get married.
As expected, she aced her first MBBS exams administered after eighteen months. She put in a good effort, but I always got the feeling that the courses didn’t challenge her much. She got the highest grade in her class of 180 students. Only half of the students cleared all the three preclinical subjects of Anatomy, Physiology and Biochemistry in the first attempt. During the third-year, clinical postings and interactions with patients started. She seemed happy but I noticed subtle personality changes in her. She attended school living in our house and she always gave a full and frank accounting of her time outside of the house. She told patient encounter stories and narrated interesting and mundane events in the lives of her classmate friends. Gradually, such anecdotal expositions became less and less, and the chronicles of her time became blurred and fuzzy if not completely evasive.
The news started filtering in— ‘I saw your daughter dining late at night with a guy who doesn’t appear to be from our community.’ Another family friend politely asked— ‘Is your daughter engaged? Saw her casually strolling and laughing with a guy on the beach. I marked one thing; he is a tall and handsome guy.’ When these types of comments, bordering on insinuations, became more frequent and persistent, I told myself— I’ll have to ask her about it and get to the bottom of the matter.
I should give you some context here. Our community is upper caste Hindu and marriages are supposed to happen within the same caste. Inter-caste alliances are frowned upon even though all castes come under the umbrella of the broad Hindu religion. I want to emphasize this. Marrying within one’s own caste is dharma and also good karma. You set a good example in the community—as an individual, as a couple and as a family!
I was coming out of the mall, and I saw Priya, absorbed in conversation with him, entering a bookstore. Later that day when she was home, I asked her about the guy she was with. ‘He is my classmate Rahman, I’ve been dating him for a few months now’, she said in a firm unflinching voice. I suddenly felt my muscles tightening, my heart racing, and my face warming and reddening. I picked up the two-foot cylindrical ruler standing in the corner of the room and started beating her, yelling, you will not date a Musselman while I am alive. She didn’t dodge the blows or even move away. She stood there with her feet planted firmly on the floor while the blows rained on her. Now recalling it vividly after all these years, she looked like a pedestrian caught in an open field during a severe thunderstorm. Come to think of it, I hadn’t even spanked her when she was a kid.
The following day, packing all her books in a bag, she left home and moved into the college hostel. I heard that she married Rahman the same year. The first time she visited after that breakup was when her dad suddenly passed away. Gradually she introduced her husband and their two daughters. Priya and her husband found jobs in another city and her visits mostly stopped. I started living by myself and was managing my activities well until one day I fell inside the bathroom and broke my hip. I had to undergo hip surgery. Priya came down to help out in the hospital and spent a lot of time with me in the rehab facility I was then transferred. After rehab when it became clear that I needed help to manage my day-to-day activities she found this nice assisted-living facility and community for me that I have slowly embraced. Early on Priya used to visit once in two to three months and then she just stopped coming.
A few days ago, a memory day was declared in the facility and on that day wing A residents were taken on a tour of wing B. We were introduced to different types of memory games and puzzles. I did well and it was also lots of fun. On our way I noticed that in front of every room stood a decorated curio cabinet with lots of personal memorabilia. They were veritable autobiographical shrines to their past with old photographs, paintings, childhood toys, school diplomas, medals, awards, clothing, greeting cards and what not. I even saw a wedding gown and a tuxedo. When I asked our guide about these biographical displays she responded— ‘These residents have loss of memory; they cannot remember their room numbers. Their old photos, snapshots of their parents, siblings and children, the toys they played with as kids, old dresses and costumes rekindle their memories and help them navigate to their rooms. It is a museum of memories and an autobiographical shrine of their existence. These are the remains of their curated life, the artifacts from their past glory, when their mind and will, commandeered their lives. In a way it still seems to teem with life, a moving testament to their existence, snapshots from the journeys of their wandering life before their mind caved in, and time, place, space, and memories started confounding them.
I wandered away from the group to explore some of these exhibits. They seemed to tell interesting stories of these people. As I moved from one display cabinet to another my eyes latched on to the framed photo of a three-year-old child in a blue frock with orange collars and her mother clad in a snow-white sari. I moved closer for a sharper focus. The little girl was sending up a chain of bubbles using a straw sitting on her mom’s lap. Her large eyes were unmistakable. My gaze moved to the tender mango patterns in the sari and froze on her face. It was Priya and I, on her third birthday. There was a yellowing teddy bear from her toddler years, her old lily-white Ted. There was another photo of Priya, her dad and I when she was six; a wedding portrait of Priya and Rahman, a medical school graduation photo of Priya, and finally a family portrait of the couple and their two kids. There were some medals and awards from her grade school years that I recognized. I pulled in a nearby chair and sat down facing the display.
I saw many of the things she had gathered over the early years, some for the first time. The soft-drink bottle caps were a surprise. There was Coca Cola and Pepsi for sure, but also Fanta and Thums Up. The newspaper headlines cut out from the front pages of the Hindu newspaper spanned a decade from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, a curated microcosm of national and international events with significant ramifications. Carnage in Indonesia (1965), world’s first heart transplant (1967), the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (1968), Apollo 11 moon landing (1969), coup in Chile (1973) and the declaration of national emergency in India (1975) were all displayed.
The “Chattakkari” movie poster in her collection was not a total surprise. It was one of the old color movies of Kerala from the early seventies which told the story of a bold and independent woman though the title literally means “a law-abiding woman.” My brother had taken Priya to that movie and I wasn’t pleased with him for that. Priya had also displayed the lyrics of the sad but hopeful popular song from the sixties hit movie “Aswamedham”. It was also a favorite song of mine. The yellowing piece of paper with her pearl-like Malayalam handwriting made me happy. I can still recite the first two lines from memory—
Ezhu Sundara rathrikal
Ekantha Sundara rathrikal
(Seven beautiful nights
Lonely lovely nights)
It all seemed like a time and memory capsule, a microcosmic contextualization of her life while growing up, and now serving as a navigation guide to her room! It felt strange and meaningful at the same time.
Everything now seemed like a dream, and it all took a few minutes to sink in. I understood clearly that there was no waking up and out of this dream. I slapped my cheeks and pinched myself. It was all real, Priya and I on her third birthday and everything else the exhibits conveyed.
The door beside the display opened and a woman who appeared to be in her early sixties emerged. She wore a yellow skirt and a blue top. Her hair was cropped short, and I noticed many gray streaks. And those large unmistakable eyes squinted as she saw me. There was no sign of recognition on her face. There were dark shadows beneath her eyes and her face was freckled and creased. My warm smile and caressing look gave her a pause and she moved close towards me. Then in an animated way she pointed to the photo and said― ‘That is my mom and Priya as a kid.’ You were very cute then and now you are quite beautiful, I said. I wanted to hug and embrace her. I wasn’t sure if she would accept it or turn away. Should’ve hugged her more often when she was growing up; but this wasn’t the time or the place to make up for that, I surmised.
A couple of weeks before her fifth birthday I asked Priya what she wanted to celebrate her upcoming milestone. She perked up and tilted her head upwards as always when she got excited. As the gaze of her arching eyes traced left, she prescribed ‘I want a yellow and green frock exactly like the one my friend has, green top and yellow bottom.’ Yellow and green, you got it, I promised. Happily, she went off to play with our neighbor’s daughter. A week later I headed to the “Kidz” readymade boutique shop and purchased a beautiful frock for Priya. It was yellow and green for sure, but yellow at the top for and green at the bottom. I giftwrapped it and secured it for the big day.
That morning I sat watching as she unwrapped the gift. Tearing away the covering she pulled out the frock. I saw her face darken, her eyes rolled up and she started screaming, ‘This is not what I wanted, the colors are all mixed up.’ Tearful and red-eyed she went to her dad and complained. Later that day I saw Priya entering with a beaming smile wearing the new frock of her dreams. ‘We first went to a cloth shop and took the pieces of cloth we purchased to the tailor. While he was stitching my dress we ate ice-cream in the nearby café,’ she said with pride. Well, that was my kiddo, sweet and stubborn as only she can be even at that tender age.
I got up slowly from the chair. Good luck my sweet darling, I said to Priya. Walking sluggishly back to my wing a thought crossed my mind—if I hadn’t beaten her black and blue mercilessly that day would Priya be in this state, I wondered. I have nothing to lose but only my memories. Unfortunately, memories and remembrances seem to cause huge problems for me. I wish I could touch up my memory canvas, brush over parts of it like a painter, whiten and erase some of the troubling strokes that are gnawing at me from within. Or would I feel better if my memories are also mostly swiped clean like Priya’s?
Priya surely seemed happier. Measured by happiness as the goal of a successful life Priya was far ahead of me. Even when she appeared lost in life she radiated joy, her face was lit up and the twinkle in her eyes was still palpable and unmistakable after these many decades. I started to wonder that an aging body might need a tandem cognitive decline and memory loss to cushion its fall. I could also see that without a proper recollection of your life, without preserved memories of your life’s journeys, a good mapping and alignment between the lived and remembered lives, the colorful canvas of life would start appearing like a white plaster board. It would be like a portrait painted in vibrant colors losing detail and becoming fuzzy and out of focus and finally turning blank, no traces left behind. Memories are priceless, they needed to be preserved, like fine art, I muttered to nobody in particular.
Aging is a strange phenomenon. And in life and death there are some unwritten rules, not always observed. Children aren’t supposed to die before their parents. Parents should not be burying their children or making funeral arrangements for them. It should be the other way around. Likewise, loss of memory and cognitive decline should manifest in parents long before their children start showing symptoms. Facing up to my daughter’s mental fragmentation and dissolution and disfiguration of her memory garden was in many ways worse than making funeral arrangements for your little loved one.”
I couldn’t move, but I felt I needed a break to gather myself. I slowly walked away from her.
Subramani Mani trained as a physician in India and moved to the US to pursue a PhD in Artificial Intelligence. After teaching graduate students and medical students at Vanderbilt University and the University of New Mexico for more than a decade he started writing, feeling the urge to share the memories of certain life experiences and perspectives which could not be done within the bounds of normal day-to-day interactions. He believes that honest storytelling can change us, and our world for the better. His stories and articles have been published/forthcoming in Marathon Literary Review, Same Faces Collective, The Charleston Anvil, Umbrella Factory Magazine, New English Review, Fairlight Shorts, and The Phoenix, among others.
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