The Oval Moon

I have a macular pucker in one eye, scar tissue on the macula, and now straight lines that I see with this eye are distorted, objects are elongated, the full moon is an oval. I’m seeing things both differently from the other eye, and differently from all the years before this happened. But, when I look at the moon with this eye, it looks just as right as when I look with the other eye, or when I remember that the moon was round for all the years before this.  

This makes me think of how reality is defined by the nature of our observational methods — telescopes, microscopes, stethoscopes, ears, eyes, taste buds, and then whatever parts of our brains do the processing to interpret what we’ve experienced.  Do you see blue the same way I see blue? Does your C# sound like mine? Simple questions, but we live our lives mostly not asking them, accepting that much of reality is an external thing, existing outside of us, shared by most of us. But reality is in fact filtered through our senses and our brains -- defined by our senses and our brains.  

My husband has dementia, and he has no idea that he has dementia. The inability to understand that one has an illness is called anosognosia. His brain has been slowly changing the way he understands reality for probably 10 years now, about the same length of time that my eye has been slowly changing the way that it takes in light. The difference between what’s happening to his reality and to mine is that, in effect, his moon is now oval, but he doesn’t remember that it used to be round.  

A few weeks ago, he asked, “Are you still driving the bullet-nosed Studebaker?” For a few weeks, this was one of the questions he asked me repeatedly. I always said yes. Once I asked him what color the car was. Light blue, he said. His sister confirmed that they'd had a light blue Studebaker when they were children. I am no longer driving this car, however. I'm apparently now driving a Volkswagen Beetle, a car that he had when he was a young man, a car I never shared with him. 

It is said that people with Alzheimer's disease slowly regress backward in time, time-shifting, so might we know how far back he is by the car he thinks I'm driving? Perhaps, but then, the Studebaker preceded the Volkswagen. To me, my husband's dementia is so mysterious that we can have very little idea what it is like to have this disease. And, anosognosia -- we can't ask him. 

My husband is in memory care. I entered his room a few weeks ago, and found him lying on the bed, as he almost always is when I go in, but this time he was very agitated.  

“Who am I?” he asked me, with an urgency that was frightening. I told him his full name.  

“But then, why do I think I might be someone else?” he asked. I suggested that perhaps he was waking from a bad dream.  

“No!” he said. “Someone’s telling me I’m someone else! Keith someone.  Keith Waterson, I think!”  He pushed his hair back from his forehead.  “This is the most frightening thing that has ever happened to me!”  

I put my arm around him.  

“We need to go check with someone else!” he said, again urgently.  

So, with the difficulty he has now in getting out of bed, he rose, slipped into his shoes, and I led him down the hall, around the corner, and into the director’s office.  He sat down.  I thought he’d have forgotten why we were there in the 3 minutes it took us to get there, but no.  

“Who am I?” he asked her, urgently again, afraid.  

She said, “You’re Ken Weiss.” 

“Then why do I think I’m someone else?” he demanded.  

“I think you probably had a bad dream,” the director said. 

He whispered to me, “No! That’s the easy explanation.”  

So, this was not helping.  He stood up and we returned to his room.  He was still agitated, and nothing I could say reassured him.  Eventually he went back to sleep, and I left.  

The following day he was still I’ll say delusional. 

“Why did you come here? The building’s on fire!” But, he said this while lying down and with no indication that he felt any need to leave the building. 

That thought disappeared quickly, but the next day when I went into his room he asked, “Are the streets safe?” I said yes, and he seemed to quickly forget about the safety of the streets. Or maybe he was reassured, I don't know.  Maybe both -- feelings do seem to last longer than thoughts. I think he'd been right that these hadn't been bad dreams.  

By the following day these what I called delusions seemed to have disappeared. Though, given that most of what he thinks now is less and less tethered to his old reality, or mine, what looks delusional to me is reality to him.  

Indeed, all he sees now is an oval moon.