I felt the room grow heavier as we watched Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter, and I knew I wasn’t the only one thinking about someone I loved. I could almost see my own mother sitting across from my grandmother, hoping for a moment of recognition. Even when we were together, it often felt like we were waiting for her to come back to us. Professor Harrington described that feeling so well when she talked about missing her mother even as they sat together. I knew that strange feeling of grieving someone who was still alive, and I could only imagine what it was like to experience it with your own parent.
As Professor Harrington shared more about her mother, I learned that she had once been adamant that she would never want to live with advanced dementia. Yet when she developed it herself, she still seemed to find happiness in everyday things, like watching Judge Judy and going for walks. At one point, someone raised their hand and asked whether people with advanced dementia were really living, or simply being kept alive. They also wondered how we could know whether those people wanted to be here. It was a question I’d asked myself over and over as my grandmother’s dementia progressed. I would have loved to see her enjoying a television show or looking forward to a walk, but I would leave our visits wondering whether anything about her days still felt good to her.
After watching my grandmother’s decline, both of my parents became very clear about what they would want if they ever developed dementia themselves. They put in writing that they would want the option of ending their lives, and I understood why. But hearing about Professor Harrington’s mother made me wonder how much we can really know about a life we haven’t yet experienced. Her mother had been just as certain, and yet she seemed to find happiness in circumstances she’d once considered unbearable.
I think that’s part of why our earlier discussions of coma patients resonated with me so much. I recognized the frustration of looking for some outward sign of what someone was feeling and not knowing how much to make of what I saw. With coma patients, we were trying to figure out whether they were conscious at all. With my grandmother, I knew she was conscious, but I couldn’t tell whether her experience of being alive was a happy one, a painful one, or something I couldn’t even begin to imagine.
Our discussions of anesthesia also came to mind. We’d talked about how someone could have an experience without forming a memory of it, and I wondered whether I’d been placing too much weight on everything my grandmother could no longer remember. It was painful to know that the time we spent together might disappear from her memory almost immediately, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t mattered to her while it was happening. Professor Harrington’s mother might not have remembered watching Judge Judy or going for a walk, but she could still have enjoyed those things in the moment.
I don’t know whether my grandmother found happiness in those final years, and I wish I did. I wish I could have asked her whether she wanted to be here and trusted that I understood her answer. But I think this class has made me more aware of how much can be happening in someone’s mind that we cannot see, remember for them, or fully understand. We can lose so many of the familiar ways of reaching someone without knowing how much of their world is still there, beyond our reach.
Leave a Reply