“During those moments I’d sit with my uncle aslant in his wheel chair with his eyes shut against the glare of the lights and the blur of the common room. It was mostly a quiet time but, now and then, he’d speak to the air. He’d say things like, “Well, Barbara, what are we going to do about the tree this year?” and, after a minute or so, “Biggest damn Walleye I ever saw.” Fragments and scraps of thoughts. As the poet says, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

It came to me that perhaps we sometimes mistake senile dementia for sanity in the elderly; that we are so impressed with our slivers and crumbs of knowledge about the workings of the human mind we mistake them for insights into the terra incognita of the human soul. It seemed to me, as I sat with my uncle, that maybe what I was hearing from him was a sane man’s sane reaction to his circumstances.

If you knew to a certainty that every single day for the rest of your life, you’d be dressed in diapers and confined to a wheelchair with blurred eyesight in a small brick walled room what would you do?

If you knew to a certainty that at every meal for the rest of your life a woman who talked to you as if you were a baby would spoon three flavors of baby food into your mouth, what would you do?

If, opening your eyes, you knew that all you would see would be a bright fluorescent glare and the blurred shapes of dozens of others, mostly women, lolling about in wheelchairs, what would you do?

If you knew to a dead, solid certainty that you were never going to be released from your room until you were released, at long last, from your body, what would you do?

If you were a sane man, just what would you, at long last, do?

I don’t know about you, but I would figure a way out of that prison. And if that way out was only deeper in, that’s where I’d go. I’d go deep into my Palace of Memory and I’d use all my energy to construct a world inside that was made of the most vivid moments of all the years I’d lived.”

 

Here….