Editor’s Note: I am lucky to be with you this morning on Marlow’s side of things. These days it is hard to tell.

– Vic

Waiting in line looking back at a world of visions

Inside and outside of Savannah’s vaccine site at the Alee Shriners Temple

Author’s Note: As I waited Friday afternoon at the Alee Shriners Temple’s here in Savannah for my first dose of the miracle plague preventative, my mind wandered back to times past. Here’re my recollections.

-Marlow

For fifty to sixty years, we shared with our parents, their friends, and our friends the same world. Then, as their health declined due to disease, its treatment or their meds, an altered state and visions became their and our new reality.

At first, it was occasionally an entertaining performance at certain levels.

But as their descents steepened, it was jarring. They could remain articulate for long periods. Familiar almost. When they would describe things that were from movie or TV show plotlines that they now treated as yesterday’s personal doings, we at first asked “tell me more” questions. We learned not to do that since they’d stop and give us a suspicious look. Sometimes, they’d ask, “You don’t believe me, do you?” or even worse “Am I crazy?”

When they woke up in the morning, they sometimes would describe what they had seen, done or said, not as perceptions but as beliefs. They were dazzled, so were we by their bedazzlement.

Their former passions were now being submerged, their creativities and opinions gone or amplified into another dimension.

Midway on their journeys, they often seemed to be on some form of internal tourist bus tour as if they were on vacation in a foreign city or on a cruise. At the end of it, they wanted to tell us all about it. What came out was interspersed with word tangles.

Slowly but surely these brief jibber-jabbers became more frequent and confused.

Then came the depressed phases after they had grasped momentarily what was occurring to them. We worked hard to deflect and refocus their minds in these moments.

As all of this was happening, different medicines and therapies, some standard, some new agey, some experimental, were applied.

Behavioral and quality of life improvements might arise but then disappear suddenly under the waves.

Lots of specialists, tests, scans, specimens were taken, results/advice considered, and more things were tried.

Recent past moments were the first to go for good with long term memory still going strong. We knew we and they were more than halfway down the rabbit hole when long term, deeply rooted ones with strong emotional ties started to get jumbled or lost in the mists.

Some of what they described was Alice-in-Wonderland breathtaking.

We couldn’t see what they saw, but we could see them. And feel their joy, confusions, and terror.

There was beauty — or a new beauty in this — from time to time. At times, their faces were beatific as they described their inner scenery.

We made sure to never let them look as crazy as the movies would have you see them. So, regular visits to stylists, barbers, manicurists, aestheticians etc. were de rigeur.

Maintaining their striking good looks due to lives well lived (due to good diets, exercise and no bad habits) would hide their conditions at least to causal friends and strangers.

For a time as rock bottom approached, we could manage their conditions.

As it became harder to deal with their new interior lives, most became becalmed and silent. Yet with some of them, normal household objects started to jitterbug all over the house. Their surrender to their new life, slow at first, then plummeted off the charts.

We were lucky as they rarely shouted, became angry or acted out.

When last-chance medications lost their impact, we avoided whenever possible snowing them to give them or us peace.

Holidays’ approach brought special sadness but brief moments of respite, when a distant moment was lived again to the joy and tears of all those present.

When eating became a problem, we family caregivers needed more help in the house.

As I waited in line to be jabbed yesterday, I was glad that a plague didn’t occur during those times. Explaining why we couldn’t get them a haircut or go out for a meal would have been horrible. Justifying a lockdown to people who lived through multiple quarantines of the sick but not well people would have been impossible. We stressed-out helpers would have resorted to taking calming sedatives with a slug of red wine to get through the end of another bad day of isolation. Their plague times in hospice care would have been nightmarish due Covid-19 restrictions. Communicating with them via screens, Zoom or smartphone would have been Orwellian BS.

Yet, despite it all, I would bear any burden, even those of a plague, to have all of them back here once again.

PS: As I exited the vaccine site after less than 25 minutes of total time, I returned to our current reality. Someone driving up to the Temple asked me if you had to pay any money at this 500-shot per day location. I told her that the Federal government paid for all of it. She then asked about administrative fees. I responded in the negative and relayed that they provided a shot, bottled water, acetaminophen, and a cool shot ID card. She was still uncertain about it as I drove off.

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