last years as his dementia increased. Science fiction WAS reality for him. The way his mind worked, he DID go thru doors and get transported to different times and places, for he was seeing with his mind, not his eyes. Sometimes he was on a cruise ship or at the beach house or at the airport or with his mom. His memory so often seemed so much more vivid than his failing eyesight that it overwrote his real-time mental processes. He evaluated his observations with a logic that worked for him and his reality was the reality of a dream state - like those spiritual American Indians in the movies having visions. The dream IS the reality - ignore what you see, go with what you believe, believing is seeing. As we would walk Dad down the hallway at the nursing home, he would suddenly step to the side exclaiming “Look out there’s the opening in the floor! See it! Step in it, WOOSH! You’ll go right through!” And he was right, for he fell many times at the home. Even now I watch my step in unfamiliar hallways, wary of those unseen doorways.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Doors
With a brother 4 years older and sisters 5, 7 and 12 years younger, I had some breathing space growing up. Fascinated with the cool activities of my older brother, I too, drew pictures and made models (even though I didn’t particularity like cars and planes). Watching over my little sisters, I helped them build forts and arrange plastic animals in the sandbox, staying long after they lost interest to finish ‘our’ constructions. Escaping the hubbub of preschoolers, I often worked and read and drew and made things alone in my room - a lovingly built sanctuary, with a ready audience just beyond the door. Through that portal, there was always someone available - even if just to argue with, or to play cards with, or tell to shut up, or to turn down the TV, or to show what I was making. I remember working late out back in the rumpus room and coming into the house at 1 or 2 am to get a snack and say hello. It was dark and everyone had gone to bed. So immersed in my own creations - I had no sense of time. Hours flew by, and when I went to visit the ‘other’ world, it was already closed for the night. Dorothy opening her door to enter OZ and those space ships and time machines in Dad’s science fiction books were not such far-fetched ideas – they were just another way of describing that transition between imagination and reality. My Dad saw the world that way in his 
last years as his dementia increased. Science fiction WAS reality for him. The way his mind worked, he DID go thru doors and get transported to different times and places, for he was seeing with his mind, not his eyes. Sometimes he was on a cruise ship or at the beach house or at the airport or with his mom. His memory so often seemed so much more vivid than his failing eyesight that it overwrote his real-time mental processes. He evaluated his observations with a logic that worked for him and his reality was the reality of a dream state - like those spiritual American Indians in the movies having visions. The dream IS the reality - ignore what you see, go with what you believe, believing is seeing. As we would walk Dad down the hallway at the nursing home, he would suddenly step to the side exclaiming “Look out there’s the opening in the floor! See it! Step in it, WOOSH! You’ll go right through!” And he was right, for he fell many times at the home. Even now I watch my step in unfamiliar hallways, wary of those unseen doorways.
last years as his dementia increased. Science fiction WAS reality for him. The way his mind worked, he DID go thru doors and get transported to different times and places, for he was seeing with his mind, not his eyes. Sometimes he was on a cruise ship or at the beach house or at the airport or with his mom. His memory so often seemed so much more vivid than his failing eyesight that it overwrote his real-time mental processes. He evaluated his observations with a logic that worked for him and his reality was the reality of a dream state - like those spiritual American Indians in the movies having visions. The dream IS the reality - ignore what you see, go with what you believe, believing is seeing. As we would walk Dad down the hallway at the nursing home, he would suddenly step to the side exclaiming “Look out there’s the opening in the floor! See it! Step in it, WOOSH! You’ll go right through!” And he was right, for he fell many times at the home. Even now I watch my step in unfamiliar hallways, wary of those unseen doorways.
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Before my mother in law died of cancer she would often get up from her pain killer drugged state and point to the door and told my wife ," Look your dad has come to fetch me."
ReplyDeleteMy father before he died a natural death in peace, would often tell us pointing nowhere," Your Taaya Ji (Elder Paternal Uncle)has come."
My father in law and Uncle had been dead for long before my mom in law and dad's death.
Is it not strange!!!
the mental images that seem so real are perhaps so because they are often much more meaningful than the clutter of everyday vision -the human mind clings to those strong images of EXPERIENCES that have left such an imprint on us.
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