The Deep End
My wife died of early onset dementia about six years ago.
While I have a little over 60,000 words of non-fiction on the ordeal, I am scared to read it. It was written in the white heat of the moment, and I suspect it’s full of disturbing details I've erased from memory.
It’s colored everything I’ve written since. The elastic nature of identity. The relentlessness of disease. The mechanics of consciousness. The frailty of everyday reality.
I’ve never written about it directly. I’ve plotted a now abandoned novel about it, but interestingly I changed dementia into a less frightening disease. I think the novel lost its engine then. Lost its engine, and its heart. I was attempting to use the idea of a haunted house as a metaphor for trauma. Ghosts, stuck in one spot, performing the same actions over and over again, unable to move on. Sounds suspiciously like PTSD, don’t you think?
I'm just whistling as I pass the graveyard.
I’m going to try writing about it directly now. There is a simple test used to diagnose dementia. The doctor asks the patient to draw a clock face. Apparently, the ability to draw a clock face involves a lot of differing skills. The shape of the clock, the length of the hands, the positioning of the numbers. The ability to parse the position of the hands into numbers, and to translate those numbers into a time of day. It was how they first diagnosed my wife.
I sometimes draw clock faces in my head. The idea that I might someday not be able to draw one successfully fills me with panic and jittery fear. It terrifies me.
So. I’m writing about someone trying to draw a clock face.
That’s the new story. It’s a dive into the deep end.
Peace.
Incidentally, my short story, Veronica Scissors, drops in four days. It’s up for pre-order right now though! The trope I mentioned earlier, involving the relentlessness of disease, is all over this story. I hope you will give it a read.
https://www.amazon.com/Veronica-Scissors-Jeff-Wood-ebook/dp/B08VN93JW8/