An Author's Multiple Personality Disorder

It's four o'clock in the morning, usually my best time for writing, but it seems all my characters are still sleeping in those back rooms of my head where they go is between adventures.

I read somewhere a long time ago that four A.M. is the best time to launch an attack on someone. That's the time that most people's circadian rhythms are the lowest, and they are most vulnerable. At the time I read it, I wondered about the ones launching the attack; shouldn't their energy levels also be ebbing?

"Ah," I say to myself, (and myself listens eagerly, always excited to hear a revelation) "not all of us march to the same drummer." Some of us clearly pulse to a different rhythm, and four in the morning is when we peak. It seems then, that we insomniacs could take over the world... but unfortunately most of us seem to prefer to spend our time at serious introspection.

Or writing. Which some might consider an introspection of another sort. All those characters, after all, do come from within my own mind: Rainie, Jack, Thelma, Nate and Phenny, George and Katrin... I suppose in some way they are all aspects of me. Does that make me Sybil, suffering from multiple personality disorder?

Some might think so, when I explain how it can be when I'm writing. How sometimes I am shocked by the way my characters behave.

"How is that possible?" I'm asked. "You are doing the writing, the characters do what you tell them to do."

Well, not so much. I start a character with a very basic personality and no more than an outline so far as looks go. For instance, maybe it is a woman with a sense of humor and high intelligence, medium build, brown hair.

Imagine you are meeting someone at a party for the first time, and this is all the description you are given of her. You might form a few opinions of what she will be like, but then you meet her and spend an evening with her.

You are surprised to discover that her brown hair is actually a stunning shade of auburn, and she has nearly golden colored eyes that keep you almost mesmerized. You hear her discussing string theory with someone as if she has studied it since birth, but the next minute she turns and guffaws at a fart joke with a laugh so contagious the whole room cracks up.

Suddenly a fire breaks out at the party, and this woman heroically throws a man over her shoulder when he is overcome by smoke and carries him outside before returning to the burning room to rescue a couple more...

Now, if asked the next day about this woman, would you repeat the description you were originally given? Probably not, because you know so much more about her beyond brown hair and a sense of humor.

That's how it is with my characters. And as I get to know them, I get to understand how they will behave in certain circumstances, and if I try to write them behaving in a way that is counterintuitive, they will balk. They simply will not do it.

Now, don't get me wrong; they often surprise me. Just like my friends in the "real world," they can do unexpected things that make me laugh, or cry, or simply shake my head. That's because human beings are unpredictable... which is why I like them so much.

And that includes the human beings that are currently napping in the deep recesses of my head, waiting for the next adventure.

 

 

The truth about lying...

Have you ever told a lie?

Most people have, at one point or another in their lives. It can be useful as a form of self-preservation (Suzie, did you break Grandma’s antique china dish? No Mommy, I don’t know how that happened....) and it is also an important social tool (Hey, honey, do you think I’m too fat? No dear, you look wonderful...).

Some lies are told to others, some to ourselves. Even the most introspective person needs to lie to themselves once in a while, or facing our imperfections would become overwhelming and we’d end up rocking in a corner somewhere, wearing a hair shirt and flogging ourselves with a knotted rope. Ok, maybe not that bad, but you see what I mean.

There are a lot of people who lie to better their own positions, in work, in relationships, even to get a better place in line at the grocery store. There are people who seem to tell lies as a matter of course, to make themselves look better or maybe just because it amuses them.

I have always had trouble telling a lie. I blush and stammer and look away, sure that I will be confronted and then die a slow death of embarrassment.

But caregiving has taught me the usefulness of some lies.

For a time I took care of a wonderful elderly man who was in a nursing facility. This was a beautiful place, well laid out and clean, but the staff... not so much.

During the course of my day with Mr. Smith (there, a lie... that is not his real name) I would have occasion to interact with the other residents. There was one very sweet lady, a retired schoolteacher I will call “Mary.”

Mary’s husband had died some years before, but she was long lost in the dark woods of dementia, and didn’t remember that. She would sometimes walk around the facility, asking if anyone had seen her husband “Bill.”

“No I haven’t, Mary,” I would tell her. “Maybe he isn’t home from work yet.”

“Oh, you’re probably right!” She would say brightly, and go on about her day. She might come and ask me the same question a few minutes or an hour later, but the same answer would satisfy her.

A lie. I could tell it without the slightest stammer or averting of eyes, because in that case it was a kindness.

Sadly, the staff didn’t see it that way. They were told to “keep the residents oriented. Tell them the truth.”

So, one day I was sitting on the sofa with Mr. Smith, and Mary came running in, sobbing almost hysterically. She had asked one of the staff members if they had seen her husband, and the staff member had bluntly told her “Your husband is dead.”

Mary, thinking that she was twenty years in the past, believed that this tragedy had just happened. She curled up next to me, crying her heart out, having just lost the love of her life.

And so I told her another lie. I told her that staff member was just being cruel, that of course Bill wasn’t dead, he was at work, it was only two o’clock in the afternoon, after all. He was probably sitting in his office sipping a cup of coffee.

After some discussion as to why that staff member would be so cruel (it helped that Mary had been a schoolteacher for years, and understood the ways of bullies) she finally calmed down, and went back to wandering the facility, waiting for Bill to get home from work.

I went in search of that staff member.

It was not a lie when I told her I would come looking for her if she did such a cruel thing to Mary or any other resident again. Did I threaten her with bodily harm? Don’t be silly, I’m a caregiver, I don’t resort to violence...

I have no idea why that woman avoided me with a look of fear in her eyes thereafter (why am I blushing and averting my eyes while I write this...)

I do know, she never again told Mary that her husband was dead.

So go ahead, call me a liar. I’ll wear the label proudly if it saves a lonely old woman from grief.

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A kick in the ass

Client: “I’m not getting up today. I’m just going to stay right here in my bed.”

Me: “Yeah? Good luck with that. I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.”

This is an actual exchange that took place between me and a client. Now, some of you might be thinking “Wow, she’s really rude!” Well... yes, sometimes I am.

It isn’t that I am disrespecting my client. It’s just that some people don’t respond well to cajoling and weakness. They require a bit of a push on some days. In fact, my client calls it me “giving him a kick in the ass.”

And yes, he got up fifteen minutes later, and had a lovely breakfast, and we went for a walk and in general enjoyed the day.

The alternative to my rudeness would have been to just agree to his desire to not get up. He would have stayed in his bed until his back started to hurt and he got really hungry and maybe had a seizure because he skipped his meds.

There usually comes a point in my elderly client’s lives when it is better to just let them stay in bed. Their bodies start to wind down, and the effort to get up or even eat is tantamount to running a marathon. At that point, it becomes cruel to force them to get up; you see it in nursing homes, people slumped in their wheelchairs in the hallways, their heads and bodies at awkward angles, probably in pain, but out of their beds because they are “supposed” to be.

Don’t get me wrong; I have also seen people left in their beds when they needed to be up and about, socializing and still allowed to live their lives. And I don’t completely blame the nursing facilities; they do have a lot of people to care for in a day.

But I am privileged to do homecare, where my one on one relationship with my client allows me to make a considered judgment on what course is best.

Some days, I get my client up and I can tell from his posture and demeanor that yes, he would be better off in bed. He is, after all, ninety two years old, and sleep is practically a hobby. On those days, I escort him back to his bed and tuck his blankets in exactly the way he likes them and I let him sleep.

But not that particular day. That day he still had some living to do, and I am there to remind him of that fact and to help him do it. Even if it requires a kick in the ass.

Dementia & the Hostess Mode (or, Why We Sometimes Miss the Obvious)

“Are we going to the grocery store today?”

 “Yes, Mabel, after breakfast.”

“Oh good, I’m out of soup.”

“Are we going to the grocery store today?”

“Yes, after breakfast.”

“Oh good, I’m out of soup.”

I wrote this in “Rainie Daze,” and as I said then, no, it is not that I am trapped in a time loop like the intrepid cast of Star Trek or Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day.”

This is an actual conversation I would have several times a week with a client of mine, who I shall call “Jenny.”

Jenny was (yes, she passed, and oh! How I still miss her!) a warm, intelligent, hard working woman for most of her ninety-plus years. She ran a successful business and raised wonderful children and was actively involved in charity and community projects, many of which you folks local to the area probably still enjoy to this day. She lived alone for a couple of decades after her husband passed, still very social and very much a part of the world.

Then... dementia started creeping in.

Dementia is a tragic, frightening attack on the brain that can rob us of our loved ones long before their heart stops beating. In Jenny’s case, it first affected her short-term memory. She would do little things, like put money away and forget where she hid it, or put water on the stove to boil and then go take a nap.

Jenny’s family picked up on it early enough to prevent a tragedy, but often families aren’t aware of the problem until something drastic happens... like a person mistakes the gas pedal for the brake while driving, or takes a walk and gets lost miles from home.

Even in families where there is close contact every day these first signs can be missed. How?

One way is what I term “hostess mode.” Jenny was very good at it, even after the dementia was well advanced. Somehow, when confronted with “company,” her brain would switch to another track, and she would sound... normal, for lack of a better term.

One morning, before I arrived, the local newspaper called her for a comment on the closing of a wonderful community project she and her late husband had initiated. Now, Jenny knew nothing about it; no one had told her, for fear it would unnecessarily upset her. But the reporter gave her a brief rundown, and they apparently had quite a chat. Jenny’s quotes were in the paper the next day, coherent and intelligent as she had always been. Clearly, the reporter had no idea of Jenny’s condition. For that space of time when Jenny was speaking with a stranger on a social issue, her brain seemed to be functioning as it had a decade or more before.

She did not, however, remember the incident. She never told me about the reporter’s call, and none of us would ever have known if we hadn’t read the article.

I think we all have this ability to run our minds on alternate tracks. We use it in many social situations. It is the route our brain takes to prevent us from laughing out loud at something particularly stupid our boss says at the office party, and to keep us from slapping the annoying store clerk, thus getting ourselves thrown in jail.

What I’m saying is, that track seems to be an integral part of our survival set, for, like it or not, we are a social species, and we have to learn to get along.

What strikes me as odd is how that track can survive, even thrive, in the face of dementia. Oh, not always. Believe me, I have taken care of plenty of clients where the opposite is true, where they will literally bite the hand that feeds them!

It doesn’t seem to matter whether the victim was outgoing before dementia or not. Like so many things that affect our wonderfully complex and mysterious brains, it seems to be random. The one thing predictable about dementia, after all, is that it is not predictable.

Irascible people turn sickly sweet. Sweet-tempered people turn angry. “Neat freaks” suddenly won’t shower or change their clothes for weeks at a time, while modest folks might suddenly be found in the neighbor’s yard in their birthday suit.

But often, that social mode remains intact, concealing dementia just as a bright but fake smile hides a migraine from your coworkers.

So pay attention to your loved ones as they age. If their smile seems a little too bright, or their eyes seem to be focusing on the middle distance, they may be seeing you as an annoying boss or a cranky cashier, and be simply behaving nicely so you will go away.

So they can hide their money in the toe of a long forgotten shoe, put the kettle on the stove... and go take a nap.

Today’s subject is rather serious, although there are times that I find the same subject rather humorous.

Families.

I deal with them a lot as a caregiver. When I take on a client, it’s rare that they are completely alone in the world. There are usually children or siblings to deal with, and they often become an integral part of what I do.

Some need as much –or more – comforting as the client. Family members are often wracked with guilt when their loved ones begin to decline. Maybe because they have work or other family obligations that prevent them from providing the full time care they must hire me to do, or maybe because of past issues that were never resolved, and with the onset of dementia never can be. (Don’t wait to tell your people you love them. Tomorrow is NOT guaranteed!)

Some family members are angry with my presence. This can be a bit of jealousy, when they see their Mom or Dad become dependent on someone who is a virtual stranger to them. Others see the checks written to me as a direct reduction in their inheritance, and the relationship becomes outright adversarial. Sad, but true.

I accept all of these reactions to me as legitimate positions, and I don’t take them personally... well, not too much, anyway.

I often find myself being the mediator of family disputes, mostly in an effort to keep the drama away from the client, but as my relationship grows with the family, I find myself concerned with how all of them feel. I can’t seem to keep myself from trying to repair rifts within the family dynamic. The thing is, it is imperative that I stay neutral...and yet, that is virtually impossible, if I am doing my job right... I am a giver of care, after all.

It’s a common thing within families with multiple children to have one sibling doing the bulk of the work: first, identifying that the parent needs care, then determining what care is appropriate. Often that sibling has spent a year or more running the folks to doctor’s appointments, helping with housework, shopping... often at the expense of their own personal lives. I have seen people neglect their own spouses, even take early retirement in order to take care of their aging parents.

All this, while more often than not the other siblings sit in the background and complain about the care they are providing.

Again, this can be a matter of jealousy or greed. It can be a matter of long before seeded sibling rivalry, you know, the whole “Mom always liked you best.” I try very hard not to take sides in these situations. After all, I wasn’t there to see them grow up; for all I know, the parents did show favoritism, and those feelings are legitimate. But sometimes, when I see an adult child crying over some ugly thing a sibling said or did, my protective nature flares out, and I can’t help but rush to their defense.

But always... ALWAYS... I keep the best interests of my client in the forefront. I have literally ushered family members out of a dying client’s room when the ugliness creeps out, and make them “take it outside.” This often causes the anger to be turned on me, but that’s okay. I can bear the brunt of it, and usually that anger is just a part of the grieving process, part of what my job entails. In the end, I almost always get hugs from all the family members, who eventually come to realize that I always had my client’s best interests at heart.

As for those who never do... their bitterness will flavor their lives, and that is sad, but when all is said and done that is their sorrow, not mine. I have enough sorrow of my own, losing a beloved client... but that is also a post for another day!

I've been thinking a lot about the differences in people, why they exist, and what is our role in judging them.
My conclusion is: we have no role, unless we are serving on a jury of their peers. And even then... well, that's   a subject for another day.

Stephen Hawkins created quite a controversy in his book "The Grand Design" when he stated that there is no god, that we are basically the results of a chemical reaction, an accident of nature of sorts. I don't pretend to have all the answers to the universe, but I must agree that the human mind does operate on chemistry.

Love, hate, depression, anxiety...it is all a matter of a chemical reaction in the brain. Craving a sweet? A cigarette? Sex? That's because the pleasure center in your brain is begging to be triggered. What triggers it is different for everyone, a single thing, or a particular combination.

So, you look at the fat man using the electric wheelchair at Walmart and you think, "Oh my God, what is wrong with that man? Why doesn't he go on a diet?"

Well, first of all, maybe he has. Maybe it hasn't worked for him, or other health issues are preventing him from exercising enough to drop the pounds. Or maybe he has already lost a hundred pounds, and only now is strong enough to get out at all. OR... maybe he simply doesn't want to. Maybe he gets so much joy from the foods that he eats that giving them up simply makes life seem too bleak.

Do you think that's sick? Well, maybe he looks at people jogging down the road and secretly thinks "That's crazy. Who would subject themselves to such pain and torture?" Yet those people jogging may be getting the same joy from the chemicals coursing through their brains as that fat man gets from eating a carton of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. Who says which is the right course?

The answer to that is: society, social mores driven by the media. All I'm saying is, try looking to yourself for an opinion. And then keep it to yourself.

Oh, you say, but the jogger will have a more fulfilling and longer life. Really? For one thing, joggers drop dead unexpectedly from heart attacks every day. For another, just because a man looks fit and happy, you don't know that he is. Maybe his family hates him because he spends all his time jogging; maybe he's a philanderer or a pedophile or even a serial killer... there is no way to know all the secret places of a person's mind. No one is that good at chemistry.

And so what if the fat man lives twenty fewer years? Maybe that is exactly how many years he wants to live. And maybe he will live them very happily... which he might not do if he spends his days depriving himself of that which brings him joy.

It's a matter of quality, not quantity, folks. Believe me, I see it in my elderly clients all the time. They give up this and that to live longer, and often they do, well into their nineties, but just as often they tell me every day how much they miss those things they gave up. Smoking, drinking, pastries... yes, even sex.

Now, I'm not saying throw caution to the wind and go have sex with forty different partners while on a drunken bender, smoking unfiltered Pall Malls and munching chocolate eclairs. I'm just saying, maybe you don't want to give up ALL your vices.

And maybe some people don't want to give up any.

Me, I like to smoke and have the occasional beer. I like to write and read and drink way too much coffee while standing under the stars on a chilly morning. Not everyone likes those things, and yes, I know some of it will shorten my days on this earth. But my brain chemistry responds well to it, and I am a happy person.

Now, you over there, spending an hour on the elliptical machine every night after work and drinking raw carrot juice... I don't get that at all. But hey, it isn't my place to judge you... I just hope it is your bliss, and not something you do because you think you should.

On my death bed, I will look back on all that wonderful coffee I drank under the stars while enjoying my morning cigarette... and I will smile as the lights blink off.