I am sitting at a table by a window of our little desert house, typing this foreword. At the other end of the table sits Barbara, her white hair newly washed above the purple oxford shirt, her carved face in profile, metal glasses glinting, as she focuses on the television screen, an air force drama, “Pensacola: Wings of Gold.”
Four years ago we went together to Beijing, to the U.N. Conference for Women, and Barbara spoke under a large tent to rows of grey-haired women about the invisibility of old women in human rights campaigns. A week later, we were in Tokyo. Look Me in the Eye, Barbara’s groundbreaking work on ageism, had just been published in Japan, and Barbara spoke to Japan’s largest organization that addresses aging issues. She also gave magazine and newspaper interviews and readings to different groups several times a day.
Today, Barbara can barely construct a complete sentence. She still stares sometimes at a women’s newspaper or magazine but the page never turns, and mostly, as this morning, she watches television. She cannot turn the tv on or off. She needs to be reminded to brush her teeth or how to wash herself in the shower, and takes my hand or arm to steady her when she walks.
So a woman who became known, among feminists at least, for her passionate defense of old women against ageism, including the assumption that old women are mentally unstable, is spending her last years with mental instability, with Alzheimer’s.
And yet. These three and half years have been a rich time for both of us, have brought me closer to the mystery of life.
I want to share a bit of that mystery, and I also want to share another one, about my own mind, which for most of my life I didn’t understand.
Soon after we became lovers, Barbara told me of the shame, through much of her life, from her dyslexias. Her difficulty with spelling, though writing mattered so; her difficulty remembering faces, even the faces of her own clients on the street when she was a therapist, though she knew every crumb of their lives. Later I saw her try to learn Spanish and how the struggle pulled her back into the darkness of childhood. I saw that child, self-hating and baffled, balanced between determination and hopelessness.
I didn’t know, then, that I lived with my own dyslexias, an attention disorder, attacking focus and memory, baffling me until ten years ago with the intractable riddle of my own nature.
These entries from my journal bring together some of these mysteries of mind and memory, of what it is like to live beyond what we pretend to know is normal.
Read more of this in Ensemble Anthology no. 1
