Author’s Note:

Off Planet

Dementia, ironically, feels like it’s been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Perhaps this is why, until recently, it never seemed particularly scary to me.

One of my earliest memories is my mom taking me to a nursing home to visit her childhood babysitter—a pleasant lady, if a little bit vacant, but so was I many days, zoning out during math class, or losing myself in books so deeply that I didn’t hear my teacher dismissing us for the day. Later, as a community-service project in elementary school, my classmates and I were assigned “senior buddies” at a local nursing home, where you could have the best conversation of your life, then come back for the next weekly visit and have it all over again, just as fresh as it ever was. Even after my own grandmother started showing signs that she was losing her memory, she still kept most of her quirk, which was, as far as I was concerned, her defining and most valuable trait.

From what I’d seen, Alzheimer’s seemed like a relatively benign disease. Tragic, of course, but not the worst way to go. I envisioned it much like drifting off into a daydream, only very slowly, like a sailboat drifting towards the waterfall at the edge of the world.

This was before I went to medical school

After my first year, I spent a week in rural Kansas in a town so small and flat that, no matter where I was, I could look up and down the perfect grid of streets and see both edges of town. Beyond that was only endless fields. The utter wilderness felt crushingly bleak, almost otherworldly. The town did have a nursing home, though—equally unsettling, styled after a hospital, one long hallway with beige walls and linoleum floors, rooms with metal-frame cots and IV bags refracting light from the fluorescents sizzling coldly overhead. Only a handful of patients lived there. And one had horrible, horrible dementia.

She didn’t react when the doctor and I walked into the room. She hadn’t left the bed in months—hadn’t moved at all, except from being rolled around her bed to prevent pressure ulcers, left side, right side, left side again. A fly beat its head against the window, too fogged with humidity to see anything outside but a vague whitish light. When the doctor pulled away her blankets to examine her, she let out a primal moan. Her face was a rubber mask of fear, sagging from age, from so long without changing. Her eyes searched his face, and found nothing. We might as well have been aliens.

I ached for her to move. Do something. Say something. Escape this place, this terribly claustrophobic and unfamiliar place and body. Based on her wordless moan when the doctor probed her bedsores, her terrified eyes flicking between him and the nurses, she wanted to do the same.

That was the most terrifying thing to consider of all.