Thomas DeBaggio - Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer’s

T HAT JANUARY, MY FIFTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY, was pleasant and eventful and I began to adjust to middle age. I no longer noticed how small facial lines became wrinkles. I was active and happy. My son Francesco, home from California, joined Joyce and me in the family herb-growing business in Virginia. I was equipped with a thin body free of aches and pains. I looked forward to a life to rival my Midwestern grandmother's 104 years. I was buoyant and displayed, occasionally, the unbecoming arrogance of youth.

Then came a beautiful spring day later that year. It was the day after the tests were finished and the results reviewed. It was the day I was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. What time had hidden was now revealed. Genetic secrets, locked inside before my birth, were now in the open. I became a new member in the parade of horror created by Alzheimer's.

At first I viewed the diagnosis as a death sentence. Tears welled up in my eyes uncontrollably; spasms of depression grabbed me by the throat. I was nearer to death than I anticipated. A few days later I realized good might come of this. After forty years of pussyfooting with words, I finally had a story of hell to tell.

My parents grew up in an orderly, gentle time, or so they remembered it. Their epoch was also full of dirty secrets, enslavement, lynching, and two murderous convulsive world wars. It was a time to need luck. They escaped the influenza epidemic of 1918 and made it through the Great Depression of the thirties when food and jobs were scarce. Luck was with them in small Iowa towns named Eldora and Colfax.

Instead of focusing on the explosive reality of their time, they created a happier personal interval of their own imagining. This in turn created a great optimism in me and a gentle narrative of childhood tranquility. Soon I was scared and uplifted, as were they, by the time of my time, a world of conflagration, disorder, hope, ugliness, great beauty, and unnecessary death. Yet the imaginative world of kindness and promise they passed to me always remained untouched by the ugliness of congested cities, immoral wars, and encompassing greed.

Here I am at the moment of truth and all I can muster are hot screams and scribbled graffiti torn from my soul. Moments of slithering memory now define my life.

After a short, mild winter, a vivid spring settled around us. The weather was tame and herbs filled a sunny patch next to the greenhouse. They were strong and vigorous now, especially the rosemaries, the thymes, the lavenders. Their scents perfumed the air when I brushed by them.

The sun warmed the earth steadily and it was possible to spade and plant a kitchen garden with early seed crops of succulent lettuce to sweeten and color our meals. It was a spring in which you could be happy and a little carefree. There was much the earth had to say and you could hear it if you stayed quiet and listened intently.