An Open Letter to Cindy Sheehan
by Christopher Ferdinandi
ChrisFerdinandi@hotmail.com

As long as I’ve been old enough to notice that sort of thing, my great aunt Christine has been a little bit spacey, but this is different. I walk in to a comfortable but relatively bare room – two tables, two paintings of pears hanging on the wall, a mute radio, and my aunt. The only other décor is a pair of gentlemen sitting silently in the back of the room.

“Hi, Auntie Christine!” I approach with my trademark ear-to-ear grin, and an inquisitive look on my face begging the question, “remember me?” She emerges from her daydream, and after a moments pause, smiles and gives me a warm hello. Her facial expression, though, says, “You know me, and you’re looking at me like I should know you, too, so I guess I do.”

After a few minutes of formalities, she confirms my suspicions, asking me, “What’s your name again?” Now, this isn’t as heart breaking as some might imagine it to be, or as it might have been for other members of my family, had they been there. She’s my great aunt – my mom’s aunt and my grandmother’s sister. She’s not a stranger to me by any means, but we’re not particularly close either. But for the first time in my life, I get a small taste of what the families of Alzheimer’s patients go through on a daily basis.

My Auntie Christine doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, mind you. She suffered from a diabetic coma several months back that caused a decent amount of damage to her brain. According to the Mayo Clinic, “If low blood sugar isn’t treated promptly, you could loose consciousness or develop seizures. And if you become unconscious and no one knows you have diabetes, you could experience permanent brain damage.” My grandmother found her face down on her kitchen floor; She had been unconscious for an indeterminable amount of time.

A few months ago she wasn’t that bad. Aside from insisting that my grandfather (who died ten years ago) was sitting only a few chairs away, and telling us about her recent trip to Boston (she’s not allowed the leave the facility because of her failing mental condition), she was able to carry on more-or-less normal conversation. During this visit, though, she keeps referring to my mom’s new baby (my little brother, my only sibling, turns 16 this year) and asking me all sorts of questions about the sister I don’t have.

“Your sister, is she working now, or… ?”

“I don’t have a sister, Auntie.”

“Oh, you don’t? … So how’s the baby? He’s cute, huh?”

“What baby, Auntie?”

“Your mother’s.”

“My mom doesn’t have a baby. Matt is almost 16. He’s bigger than I am, now.”

“You sure? So how’s your sister doing?”

And so the conversation works itself in this tiny circle – intermittently interrupted by comments about the squirrels running circles of their own in the courtyard – for the better part of an hour.

When she wasn’t asking me about my sister, my aunt Christine was telling me how she’s been disappointed that she hasn’t been able to go to school for the last few days. “Joyce – you know Joyce, she lives up the hill from me – she goes to high school with me, and I know she wishes I could go, too, but I can’t.”

My aunt explains that first she was sick, and now her mother is sick and she has to stay home to take care of her, and now her grandmother is getting sick, too. Of course, my great aunt isn’t in high school anymore, and neither is Joyce (if Joyce, whom I’ve never met or even heard of before, is even still alive). Her mother and grandmother both passed away years ago. For some reason her brain is stuck on this period of time back when she was a teenager.

Since her coma, it’s not uncommon for her to jump back and forth between the past and the present, but I’ve never seen her stay in the past with such determination before. I still can’t decide if she thought my brother was still a baby because her mind was fixated on a different time and place, or if she simply didn’t know who I was and confused me with someone else.

And even if I did know which of the two it was, would it even matter? Is there anything I could have said or done differently? I don’t think so. A degeneration of brain function is perhaps the cruelest way to lose someone you care about. You don’t have the option of mourning them in one big emotional experience. Instead you’re forced watch them slowly slip away.

First they don’t remember where they are. Then they’ll recognize you, but forget your name or how they know you. The last (and I imagine most painful) step of the process is that they forget who you are entirely. To see someone you love not even realize that they know you must be, at its very best, crushing.

While a quick Google search yielded me no information to prove it, I can’t help but feel that her time in a nursing home has worsened her condition. This is not to say that she would be better off at home – there would be no one there to watch her – but the environment there isn’t really conducive to keeping one’s whits intact. Conversation among patients is minimal – remember, all the folks in her wing suffer from some sort of mental debilitation.

And while we visit as often as we can, my aunt spends an inordinate amount of time doing absolutely nothing. In addition to not really talking to the other patients there, she’s not allowed to leave, or even to step outside. She doesn’t like to watch TV and she doesn’t read. With a brain that’s already working below capacity, I can’t help but believe that living in such an unstimulating environment only makes things worse.

This all brings us to a bigger problem, though. All of the people who live with Auntie Christine are more or less in the same boat. They sit around doing nothing all day. If they talk to each other, it’s short, though seldom sweet. Some of them never get visitors. They’re physically restrained by the walls of the nursing home, but it’s really their minds that enslave them.

Last time I saw my mom, I made her a promise: “Mom, I will never put you or dad in a nursing home.” We may drive each other crazy sometimes, but she’ll come live with me.





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