Breaking the Ice

It is a deep-seated fear of mine to be trapped inside my own mind and unable to communicate with the outside world. I wrote about it when I was a teen. This was the era of legal battles over Karen Ann Quinlan, a fellow Jersey girl who was in an alcohol-induced wreck when I was in junior high and admitted to the nearest hospital to our home. She was in a coma, and remained there for ten years, until the courts finally allowed her parents to remove her respirator. I often wondered if she could feel, sense, or “see” but not speak. And if she could speak, what she would say.

I wrote a short story and sent it to a couple of magazines. The core of it was connecting the dots between slipping through broken ice on Greenwood Lake and being trapped there, drowning but seeing the light above, with slipping into a coma from a car wreck and being able to hear and see everything and everyone but unable to communicate with them, even with a twitch.

At hospice, I learned that such communication can still happen when it seems impossible. It shook me to the core when Mom blurted out “I don’t have words” and “help me” after she’d slipped into what looked like a coma. Our family struggled with how Mom could lose her ability to communicate overnight.

In recent weeks, reading of Muhammad Ali’s last days, I realize it was probably toxic shock, something the doctors at the hospital had warned her about as she underwent procedures to relieve the pain of ascites, the fluid buildup from liver failure.

When the words ceased, there was still communication. She could lift an eyebrow or squeeze a hand. At least for a few days. The hospice staff told us that hearing was the last sense to fail. So we talked, even if we didn’t know she was listening. On every subject. Alone and in groups. For hours.

Today, John called and told me his mom had a rough night. “She woke up in the middle of the night and sat on the bed and cried,” he said, sharing his father’s account. She told her husband, “I must be brain dead! I can’t remember anything!”

In response, John’s father got out a couple of photo books we’d made for them of the travels we did together. He patiently sat and talked her through the memories. That calmed her down and brought them closer. Together.

I didn’t know that Alzheimer’s patients can have moments of lucidity. Today, I learned. It broke my heart to hear him recount this story, of course, because the pain of watching my mother lose her ability to communicate is too raw and fresh. But it was a source of joy for my father-in-law to make the most of those lucid moments and to know the woman he loved was still in there, housed in a body and mind that is failing her. And for that, I am grateful.