Truce by Melissa Cundieff
When Albert Einstein’s brain was stolen from his freshly dead body and carried by car across the country, my father was seventeen, living in Abilene, TX, with his parents and three siblings. They were very poor, and at night in the surrounding air my father’s discontentment would hover like the white blot of a ghost.
When Einstein’s brain, suspended in a bath of formaldehyde, crossed new state lines, the memory of having traveled was saved somewhere in its gray tissue, as were the names of the places themselves, as were the high bells of many telephones and a blinking eye’s electrical impulse.
When my father left home to go to the army, he rode a silver bus from one part of Texas to another, and the trees’ rapidity outside the window repeated itself as if explaining something necessary.
*
The first time my father exhibited memory loss in front of me, he couldn’t remember having gone to an art-glass museum the day before. On a trip with my mom a few months before this particular episode, he couldn’t remember how to drive a manual car, and my mom said he struggled to understand where his feet and hands needed to be.
*
A few years ago, I began thinking about the shape of my father’s head, his skull, and most importantly his brain. I’d kiss his bald scalp and linger, with my knowledge of what was happening to him, above the location and source of his illness. I’d even try to communicate telepathically with his brain, as if it was its own entity, to please stop its decay, to declare its truce with my father and my father’s capacity for remembering his life.
Because of the pandemic and my father’s quarantine in memory care, it’s very likely that I’ll never see him in-person again. It’s the only time during his now eight-year decline that I’ve felt a kind of relief that he has no idea who I am, that he doesn’t remember ever even knowing me. When his caretakers Facetime me so that I can tell him hi and that I love him, the combination of his advanced-stage Alzheimer’s and the potent anti-anxiety medications he’s on reduces him to a person who cannot see, though his eyes are open and operating.
*
The first time my father introduced himself to me and asked me my name, the hard significance of that moment and what was happening in his temporal lobes felt both as reverberant and hidden as thunder does.
*
Vivisections of Einstein’s brain are on display in a museum in Philadelphia. His brain was kept in a mayonnaise jar under a bed. It was kept in a beer cooler. What wasn’t vivisected was eventually returned, as if letting go of its mass could finally conclude a life.
*
I’d put my hands on my father’s bald scalp and ask for time to travel at its slowest, for my theoretical twin in space, and my father’s theoretical twin (as relativity imagined them), to visit us; they would be young as children, healthy and unaware of what’s happening to either my father or me now.
*
Because I barely understand relativity, I like to reductively think that Einstein thought clocks were alive.
*
I delayed taking my father to memory care, though I’d signed the papers and decorated his room with framed pictures I’d bought at Target and a yellow wreath for his door. I thought the yellow wreath would help him remember which room was his, but he tore it apart in an anxiety attack the second night he was at memory care. He tore wires out of a lamp I bought, and he fractured a nurse’s wrist.
The afternoon I drove my father to and ultimately left him at memory care, he thought I was a bus driver and that he was a teenager. He had wandered from the house he lived in with my mom, and I found him and asked him if he needed a ride.
*
After an abdominal rupture, one of the last things Einstein said was that he wanted to die elegantly and not to artificially prolong his life; I think he was very lucky to have had that choice. I imagine each vivisection of his brain was equally responsible for those words and the ability to speak them so intentionally.
I like to imagine that a brain is not only the lapidary of thinking and speaking, but the place where the past enacts itself, and so our past selves are there too, living themselves.
*
After my father’s anxiety attack and violent outburst, he was committed to a psychiatric hospital where he stayed for a cumulative total of nine weeks. Heavily medicated and psychically broken, he returned to memory care in a wheelchair; he weighed 116 pounds, down from 158. His cognition, ability to eat and drink, speak, or sit upright have varied over the past ten or so months, and I often wish that whatever part of his brain is keeping him alive, via a beating heart and the instinct to breathe, would make peace with the part of his brain that isn’t keeping him alive at all.
*
Einstein’s brain was returned to the hospital where he had died and from where his brain had been initially stolen. I think about that return, forty-four years after Einstein’s death, and I wonder if something as inevitable as the weather that day was similar to the last weather that Einstein observed from his white room. I wonder if the radiator clicked on in whatever white room that was, and if the ICU’s polished floor smelled like a familiar antiseptic.
*
I wonder if I will ever look at my children and not even know who they are.
*
I chose to have genetic testing done and found out that I have two copies of the Alzheimer’s risk gene called apolipoprotein E (APOE)—one from my mother and one from my father. I was in a Dr. Martins store at the Mall of America when I opened the test results on my phone, and I remember thinking that, if I do end up with Alzheimer’s, this rough knowledge will eventually fall through me like sand, as will the fact that I somehow once used my tongue to speak as well as swallow. I remember my daughter asking me to buy her the same exact style of Doc Martins that I wore when I was her age.
*
Sometimes I remember my father like this: there’s a yellow motor boat in the garage of the house I grew up in, and I’m small enough that I can’t possibly see from the bottom of the ladder into the boat; I can’t see my father when he’s inside of or under it to make his repairs. And while I can’t see him, I know where he is, and I’m waiting for him to appear from inside or under the boat’s yellow hull.
Sometimes he’s contained in the objects that once defined his body: reading glasses, his own last night’s dinner fork, his wristwatch, his plaid button-up shirt bought from a Dillard’s department store.
But then he’s inside the yellow boat again, telling me to hold on for a minute. My father is throwing an old rope over the side, and the next thing I know we are in a car together.
We are dragging the bright boat behind us. We are giving all of it to someone else. I’m looking backwards out of the car, and I’m simply stunned that it’s snowing in Texas so early in the winter.
Melissa Cundieff is the author of a full-length collection of poems, Darling Nova (Autumn House Press, 2018), and teaches at both Macalester College and University of Minnesota. She’s currently working on a book of essays about, among other things, her father’s death and decline from Alzheimer’s. Her poems have appeared in such places as Best of The Net, The Adroit Journal, and Ninth Letter, and this is her first ever published essay.
29 September 2021
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