This spring, I rode the Harley Davidson from Minneapolis to Portland, Oregon to visit my brother, Greg; eighteen hundred miles of hard, cold rain and sixty mile-an-hour winds riding the high plains and the Rocky mountains on two-lane asphalt.
Greg is sixty-six, two years younger than me. Growing up, our family moved every couple of years, new house, new school, new neighbor kids, new siblings. Greg and I were best friends, we had to be. Then the Army, college, Peace Corps, travel, careers, marriages, kids, and all the other oddities of adult life happened and we went our directions. Greg was a windsurfer and the wind blew him to Portland.
Greg can no longer assemble coherence. His stories are predicates without a subject. My refrain, as we work to communicate, is “Who?” who are we talking about, who did that wonderful, awful, amazing, inexplicable thing? Only to discover often that the predicate itself, that event, that story, that meaningful anecdote that he’s working so hard to relate, is itself a figment. He’s started having conversations with his bathroom mirror.
A few weeks ago, he walked out of his house at six o’clock in the evening and spent the night on the streets of downtown Portland. Drugs are a problem in Portland and the streets at night are tense and dangerous. Greg struggles with anxiety, his terror as he wandered those dark streets must have been overwhelming, stumbling over people sleeping on the sidewalks, recognizing buildings and street names and unable to assemble that information into directions home. He didn’t have his phone, he can no longer work it anyway, and it took his son, Morgan, until four o’clock the next afternoon to find him.
His kids, Morgan and Madeline, are on it. They’ve hired help and visited assisted living situations and they’re on waiting lists. The memory-care facilities of drooling old people staggering behind walkers are not an option; Greg hikes the Cascades several times a week with his care-provider, Evyn. A large, extended family from the Philippines hosts people struggling with dementia. There is gardening and home repairs to do. It sounds promising.
