get her there would require subterfuge. I told her we were going for a checkup.
“I already checkup this year,” she said.
“We need another one,” I said, and then I took the plunge: “I think we should check out this problem with your memory.”
“What problem?” my mother said.
“Well, sometimes you forget things … It could be due to depression.”
And my mother shot back: “Nothing wrong my memory. Depress ’cause can not forget.” Then she started to recount the tragedies of losing her mother, my brother, my father. She was right. Nothing was wrong with her memory.
“Well, let’s just go to the doctor to check your blood pressure. Last time it was high. You don’t want to have a stroke, do you?”
A week later, we were in her internist’s office. He asked her a few questions. “How old are you?”
“Oh, I already almost eighty-one.”
The doctor glanced at my mother’s chart. “She might mean her Chinese age,” I said. The doctor waved away my explanation. What I wanted to tell him, of course, was the problem with her age, how it had always been a source of massive confusion and exasperation in our family. Her age was no easy answer. Even a person with all her wits about her would have had a hard time answering a question that sounded as simple as “How old are you?” But then I realized I was trying to protect my mother—or perhaps myself—from hearing the diagnosis.
The doctor posed another question: “How many children do you have?”
“Three,” she said.
I puzzled over her answer. The doctor, of course, had no idea what the correct answer was, but neither did I, unless I knew what context my mother was using. Maybe the three referred to the children she had had with my father: two sons, one daughter, though one son had died in 1967.
“What about Lijun, Jindo, and Yuhang?” I gently prodded, reminding her of her daughters from her first marriage to the bad man. She had been separated from them from 1949 until 1978, so in some ways they had been lost to her as children. When they reappeared in her life, they were “old ladies” by her estimation, not children.
My mother recalculated her answer. “Five children,” she decided.
And this was correct in one sense. There were five living children, three from her first marriage and two from her second. The doctor went on: “I want you to count backward from one hundred and keep subtracting seven.”
My mother began. “Ninety-three.”
“And seven from that?” the doctor asked.
My mother paused and thought hard. “Ninety-three.”
I remember feeling bad that my mother, the one who scolded me for anything less than straight A’s, was now failing miserably. While I knew she had a problem, I was not prepared to see how bad it truly was.
“Who’s the president of the United States?” the doctor posed.
My mother snorted. That was easy. “Clinton.”
“And who was the president before that?”
My mother crinkled her brow, before she answered, “Still Clinton.” She was obviously referring to the previous year, not the previous president.
The doctor did a brief physical, testing my mother’s reflexes, tapping her tiny knees, running his stethoscope over her doll-like body. The test was almost over, when the doctor made an innocuous remark, which I can no longer recall. Perhaps he apologized to my mother for putting her through so many questions, as if she were on trial. Whatever it was, my mother began to talk about O. J. Simpson’s trial and how she knew he was guilty because she had been right there when he killed his wife. And in her mind, she again was right there, as she had been at the Thanksgiving table. She reenacted the scene: how she hid in the bushes, how she saw the blood “spurt all over the place.”
The doctor gave me his diagnosis that day, although I did not really need to hear it to know it.
Some months later, I decided to throw a black-tie dinner in a nightclub for my mother’s eightieth birthday. I invited family and all her friends. I hired a professional ballroom dancer because my mother adored dancing. In the invitation, I wrote a note about my mother’s diagnosis. I explained what difficulties she might have, what changes might be noticed in the future. I said the best present anyone could give her was continued friendship.
I did not know the term for Alzheimer’s disease in Chinese, nor did my sisters. They described it to my aunt and uncle in Beijing as “that malady in the head that affects old people,” in other words, benign forgetfulness. I could tell by my sisters’ attitude that they had no idea how serious this disease really was. To them, it was an illness of guilt, their guilt for having been inattentive, that had caused our mother to become inattentive to the world. My sisters blamed themselves for not visiting her more often. They prescribed favorite foods as a cure.
My auntie Su said her sister-in-law’s mind had slowed because she didn’t have enough people to speak to in Shanghainese, her native tongue. She promised she would take my mother out to lunch more often and talk to her.
My sister Jindo sent Wisconsin ginseng, the best kind, she said. “She will get better,” she assured me. None of my sisters felt the numb shock I did in recognizing that our mother’s brain was dying and thus she would disappear even before her death.
Yet as I discovered, her memory losses were not always a bad thing. For instance, she seemed to forget what had happened to my father and older brother. She no longer dwelled on their deaths as much. Instead, she began to talk about happier days, for instance the trips she and I had taken together. She counted them out on her hand: China, Japan, China again, New York, China again and again. She loved to tell people about the year we lived in Switzerland, when I was so bad and so was my boyfriend Franz. “So much headache you give me,” she would claim proudly. It was astonishing how much she remembered, details about my misadventures that I had forgotten.
She recalled the night she drove my younger brother and me through the mountains in Spain: “You remember? We afraid to stop, because so many stories about bandits. So I drive, drive, drive all night, but too sleepy to keep my eyes open. I told you, ‘Start fight about you boyfriend so I can argue, stay awake.’”
Oh yes, now I remember, I said. She could summon the past better than I. How could she have Alzheimer’s? I fantasized that she did not have that dreaded disease at all. Her earlier confusion and delusions were due to a stroke or a tumor, perhaps vitamin deficiencies or severe depression. Soon, with medicine, she could be restored to her old feisty self, but as happy as she was now.
One day, she talked about the first time she met my father. What a joyful day that was. “You remember?” she said. “You with me.”
“Tell me,” I said. “Your memory is better than mine.”
“We in elevator,” she reminisced. “All a sudden, door open. You push me out and there you daddy on a dance floor, waiting. You smiling whole time, tell me go see, go dance. Then you get back in elevator, go up. Very tricky, you.”
Instead of being saddened by her delusion, I was choked with happiness. She had placed me in her memory of one of the best days of her life.
In part, some of my mother’s newfound ease may have been due to a pink pill, an antidepressant. Ostensibly the new medications she had to take were for her hypertension. That was the lie, the pill that was easier to swallow. Paxil was rolled into the lot, as was Aricept, various benzodiazepines, a changing assortment of antipsychotics, all of which in time lost their effectiveness or yielded peculiar side effects like the lip-smacking and foot-twirling of tardive dyskinesia. Her neurological tics were more exhausting for us to watch than for her unconsciously to do. I kept a journal of what she took and why, what her symptoms were and how she was changing as she lost bits and pieces and chunks. I often