The view from my hospital room the morning after a heart procedure. The version of myself that sees the physical world in terms of light, color, lines, and forms has a lot of vitality, but it’s pretty specialized, somewhat obsessive, and more than a little vacuous. Fortunately, other versions of myself know there’s more to life than forms, angles, the play of light and how things look. These other versions know that being thoughtful and caring towards other people and the world we live in is important, too. But these more thoughtful and caring versions frequently take solace from the patterns and order that the specialized version can see.
This duality is all the more intriguing because my cousin, who has been living with Alzheimer’s for the past eight years or so, seems to have it too. Her life has changed dramatically, and she’s lost the ability to speak and purposefully remember, but her awareness of meaning and feeling for visual forms is still somewhat intact, and similar to mine.
I’ve noticed this in how she looks at things while I tell her stories. At one moment, for example, she’ll be picking a piece of lint off my shirt or smoothing out the crease in a pillow case. In the next she’ll drop that and turn to look at me with delight as I recount how she taught me to smoke when she was 12 and I was 8. But when that reminds me to mention that her brother-in-law was recently diagnosed with lung cancer, her smile will fade. She’ll lower her eyes, and her gaze will be drawn back to the pillow case. As she smoothes the creases out once again, her fingers are tracing a kind of continuity I hadn’t previously thought to look for.