Preservation of the Fleeting
The stained glass doors are automatic, swinging open as if an invitation, briskly welcoming you to the world inside. An array of paintings, dotted with bright colors, vivid imagery and open-minded strokes cover the right wall, catching the eye; on the left, the wall is composed of a selection of portraits featuring prominent historical figures — MLK, JFK, Muhammad Ali. They’re omnipresent, 12x48 and dangling by a lone thread of yarn, drooping down from a tiled ceiling.
At the Virginia Care Center for Alzheimer’s, every choice is meticulous. The entryway, as much as anything else, is a warning of that. The VCCA doesn’t leave anything to the whims of chance. There’s a routine, sure, but it’s certainly not ordinary.
Peer to the right, squint down the corridor and you can see the main room. It’s busy: a row of tables, neatly separated to allow for a parade of wheelchairs and walkers, men and women teetering along to a hum of dull Jazz, treading on white-tiled floors.
James is among them, one of many secluded in the VCCA, grasping onto the final straws of a life they once led.
He doesn’t say much. The bulk of his actions occur on a bit of an unsettling loop. He hunches forward in his wheelchair, hands clasped to the sides in a way that turns his knuckles white. He fidgets, groping for comfort, shifting the weight of his body left, then right, then back to the left, a mission ultimately rendered futile. He raises his head, beady eyes staring through you: You, nothing but a silhouette.
He groans.
“I don’t want that, had it already.”
Sam looks across the way, brow furrowed.
“What don’t you want, Dad?” She gestures, helplessly, encircling the empty marble table-top.
By now, Sam has grown accustomed to James’s behavior. Sam, 28-years-old with lush blonde hair and a pale complexion, revels in her father’s glory days:
The late-nights in the countryside, James on break from work, divulging Sam in his world travels as a pilot; his uneasy upbringing with Papa and Nana in the Boston suburbs; his first time meeting Mama at that diner on Main Street when they locked eyes and fell in love.
That was then, this is now.
James is sixty-seven, three months post-diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s. Blank spaces occupy the slots where memories once sprawled out and made their home.
Sam, oversized jeans and a raggy white top, looks across the table, then down at her watch.
1:25.
Five more minutes.
James glances up, quizzically.
“You,” he stumbles.
“Go on, Dad.”
“You haven’t been here in a while.”
James makes that declaration each time Sam comes to visit. He’s done it four times already this week, piercing a dagger through a daughter biding her time by lending company to a stranger, to a man she convinces herself she once knew. Each time the gravity of those seven words grows a little more dull. Today, Sam puts on a brave face. Those words don’t hurt.
“Dad, I’ve got to go soon,” Sam says to no one in particular, wrinkled tissues wiggling their way out of her back pocket. “It’s time for you to go do your work.”
A shadow hangs over the table, tall and gangly, arms floating. A voice, baritone and steadfast, accompanies it.
“Everyone, please proceed to room 474 for today’s session,” the voice reads, monotone. “Room 474 for today’s session. Again, room four. seventy. four.”
Dr. Kipper carries himself with a head honcho-esque vibe, the walk and talk of a man who has spent the last 34-years of his life submerged in Alzheimer’s research, devoting the better part of his prime to endless experiments and papers. He founded VCAA last year, buoyed by a psychological experimentation he executed with a team of researchers.
“Today’s session will go as follows,” Kipper recites, speaking as much to double-check himself as inform the swath of zombie-like figures in front of him. It's an early wake-up day in the ward, so the patients are sluggish for a reason. This, Kipper hopes, will reinvigorate them.
“You’ll each enter 474, one at a time for 10-minute intervals, immersing yourself in the surroundings. Look around at what you see. Touch. Feel. Smell. Taste. Pretend that it’s your home. Once ten minutes have passed, we’ll yank you out and you’ll head back into the main room.”
Kipper has carefully constructed a mock-apartment replete with items typically found in a 1960s-style home. These surroundings, ideally, evoke nostalgia and comfort, eliciting thoughts and memories from a better time in the patients’ lives. Upon entering the room, the patients, each of whom came of age during the ‘60s, will be thrust back in time.
Kipper’s train of thought? Through the past, perhaps, the future can be staved off.
“James. Lance. You two, first.”
The walls of 474 are draped with photographs of indelible moments from the era — Armstrong setting foot on the moon, free-spirited teens basking in the glory of Woodstock, civil rights’ pioneers marching through Selma. Ballads of the Beatles, the ‘Stones and the Temptations fill the air, their voices piping through a dial radio.
A black-and-white TV airs Fox’s MLB Game of the Week, with the nightly news queued up for 6 o’clock. A grandfather clock beckons in one corner. Lava lamps, beanbag chairs and cassette tapes are scattered throughout, seemingly randomly placed but in actuality anything but.
James enters before Lance, pushing himself forward as his bony fingertips make their way around the wheelchair axles. Lance, a strip of white hair dangling from his forehead, crooked glasses hiding his face, hurries in behind him, leaning the weight of his slender frame onto his walker.
Dr. Kipper watches on, from a distance. Like a bad memory, never too far away.
Lance fixates on the radio, massaging its surface and twisting the dial. He jumps with the changes in music, swaying ever so slightly. Out of the corner of his eye, he catches a glimpse of the TV; his mouth agapes.
In the right corner of the room, James stares through a lava lamp, the gel inside mirroring James’s own stale body.
“OK, Lance and James, well done, time to head out,” Dr. Kipper interrupts. “Onto the next. You two, back down the corridor, into the main room you go.”
James rolls his way out, face dull.
At the table, Lance stirs.
“James,” Lance begins, permitting his counterpart a narrow pathway into his mind, “I, when I was younger, I went to this amazing concert. It was at the Garden, and I went with three of my friends.”
He pauses.
“I don’t know why I’m talking about this now. It just feels so, it feels so close.”
James stares back.
“I’ve never been to a concert.”
“Really?”
“Nope.”
“You like music?”
“Don’t listen too much.”
“Did you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I’ll name a few groups.”
“OK.”
“Jimi Hendrix.”
“Huh?”
“Pink Floyd. Bob Dylan. The Who.”
“Nothing.”
​
Sam whittles away her hours in the VCCA following the same routine. It’s one ridden with boredom but driven by an unremitting love.
She pulls into the parking lot early in the morning, her stomach churning with alternating pangs of hope and despair. She’s never liked being late, so when those glossy sliding doors unlock at 9:00 o’clock, she thrusts her way through the entryway, whistling by the artifacts that transcend her back in time, into an era that she never lived through.
From there, she parks herself down in the corner of the room, which James and Lance share, and watches on. There’s not much to do, but she tells herself that her presence is imperative.
Sam has more wrinkles now than she did three months ago. There are more nervous twitches. When James first fell in his bathtub four months back, she assumed it was merely a freak accident — not the beginning of an arduous, painful demise.
That first phone call lingers at the front of Sam’s memory like that stubborn bit of grease sticking to the frying pan. Sometimes, she thinks she’s drowned it out, only for it to rear its head again, right when she needs it to be gone most.
When she first asked James what he wanted to do and where he wanted to go, he opposed any sort of change, staunchly against an intervention. The answer was both expected and reasonable. Checking into a facility would mean conceding the remnants of pride and freedom he had been clenching. He would be under constant surveillance; there would be no car to drive away in; there would be no grand future to look forward to, no sunshines and rainbows on the horizon. It felt, in a way, like capitulating.
The VCCA, though, promised otherwise. Sam had gotten word of this unorthodox facility through the grapevine; she picked up the phone, called and came away impressed.
But those preliminary conversations ring hollow now. She believed the upbeat talk of restoration and possibilities. On the tour, she witnessed the practices and their apparent success stories. The warning signs were visible — the VCCA is blunt and conspicuous, quick to inform prospective patients and their families that the treatments are not foolproof — but Sam chose to remember the vision that aligned more closely with her own aspirations for her father.
Now, she isn’t quite sure what to think.
“I know it doesn’t work for everyone,” Sam stuttered through the onset of tears, Dr. Kipper by her side. “But, why me? Why my Dad?”
She outstretched her arm, first motioning towards Lance and then James.
“Why not us?”
Dr. Kipper nodded, slow at first and then quick, extending his hand as if an olive branch.
“There is one thing that we haven’t tried yet,” Dr. Kipper said, his hand placed on Sam’s shoulder. “It’s a last resort. But James, as you’re certainly aware, is approaching that threshold, being that he’s two-and-a-half months into his treatment and proving mostly unresponsive.”
Sam glanced forwards.
“So,” Dr. Kipper went on, “do you want to do it.”
She shook her head, a desperate teardrop escaping from the eyelid and careening its way into an open, solitary mouth.
​
Once she chose the right key, Sam cracked open the door to James’s home, greeted by an array of dust balls and cobwebs. That’s what ten weeks out of the house will do.
She didn’t want to go back, partially out of privacy but mostly out of a wishful vision of her and James returning together. But, last resorts are last resorts.
The afternoon unfolded like a scavenger hunt, Sam clawing her away around to find the items she needed — which, according to Dr. Kipper, were anything that would make a 20-year-old James feel at home. She didn’t know too much about her Dad’s youth, which made the task all the more onerous.
She scooped up a pile of baseball cards he must have collected as a kid; gathered a bundle of pictures from summer camp, high school graduation and college basements; unearthed a box of keepsakes from his fraternity house.
Once a few hours passed, she brought the past with her, carefully repackaging it into a cardboard box.
Upon re-entering VCCA, she shifted the onus of time to Dr. Kipper. He sorted the items into various categories, strategically placing them throughout the confines of the curated reminiscence apartment. Halfway through, he stopped.
He asked: “Do you have everything you need?”
Sam paused.
There were a few items that she came across but left out of the time-warp, a purposeful act. It was a distorted picture of life in James’s twenties: nothing about his time in the war, nothing about his first love gone awry. The box was for happy memories, meant to provoke a nostalgia for the good times, not the bad. None of the latter should interfere and risk plunging James deeper into the abyss. It was, of course, a tight line to straddle — how do you manipulate the past while preserving its natural essence?
Sam hedged her bets:
“Yep, everything’s here.”
Given the green light, Dr. Kipper got back to work. The radio switched to an array of James’s favorite songs. Picture frames, once filled with generic stock photos, were fitted with images of family and friends from his childhood.
With the room ready, Dr. Kipper beckoned for James.
And so James turned the corner and walked back in time, through the corridor and into the room curated piece-by-piece to reinvigorate his 20-year-old self, one forgotten but perhaps not totally lost. James entered the room. Dr. Kipper stood in the doorway, observing. Sam, meanwhile, stood a few steps to his right, purposely obstructing her own view.
James made his way around, touching a few items and pausing once next to the radio. No words were uttered.
Soon enough, fifteen minutes — the designated time allotted for this specific go-around — passed, and Dr. Kipper ushered James back into the main room.
“What do you think, anything different?” Sam asked.
Dr. Kipper exhaled.
“It’s too early to make a definitive conclusion, of course,” he started. “Preliminary results and my own observations, though, show that his motions were mostly the same. There was no emotion, no recognition. Sam, we can stick with this personalized treatment and hope for the best. I’m not a betting man, but I’m fairly sure there’s nothing but fog up there.
“I’m sorry.”
At once, Sam felt that piercing blow to her heart. It wasn’t the pain of a first-timer: the knife had stabbed her when James’s diagnosis first occurred and many times since. But this, well, this news was like the knife being pulled out of her heart. As long as the knife was in there, her heart was still beating. This was an end, a crushing blow to the last lingering hope.
Sam stood in the hallway, grappling with the fact that her father, the man she once knew and still loved, was lost. As she contemplated this unsettling reality, Lance appeared from around the corner.
“Oh, Sam!” he exclaimed, blissfully unaware of the situation. “I just heard the most wonderful news on the radio!”
At that, Sam paused. She was happy for Lance — he seemed rejuvenated, more upbeat than when she first met him back in December. He was more conversational, too.
But there was something a bit dystopian about his revitalization. It seemed artificial. The news that Lance was about to tell her wouldn’t be anything contemporary, it would be about something that happened before she was even born. Did she really want her Dad living in this world, one so far removed from reality that it would feel as if they existed in two separate spheres?
In the past three months, this wasn’t a question she had considered. A fervent desire to keep her father mentally alive had taken a stranglehold over her brain. Perhaps she was going too far.
Sam snapped back into the moment.
“That’s great, Lance, I’m so happy for you,” she responded, the lightbulb flickering. “How did you hear about that?”
“Well, Dr. Kipper showed me this new room with a great radio and it tells me all the news,” Lance said. “It really keeps me in the know. I feel so connected to the world. How great is that?”
“Great,” Sam said, knowing at last that ‘great’ wasn’t the right adjective to use — at least for James.
​
Sam went through her same routine the next day. She drove up the hill in her beaten-down minivan, pulled into the first parking spot on the left and brisked her way through that eccentric entryway, turning a blind eye to the artifacts that littered the wall. In the main room, she found James. He sat across from Lance at the table, with the latter chatting away.
Sam pulled over a third chair.
“Hey Dad, how are you?”
James murmured.
“Lance, how are you doing?” Sam asked, switching topics.
“Good good good,” Lance repeated. “My family is taking me outside today for a walk. I’m so excited.”
Leaving the facility, even briefly, necessitated reaching Level 4A, the second-highest level for patients undergoing treatment. Lance hadn’t reached this mark before. Neither had James.
“I’m happy for you, Lance,” Sam gushed, reaching out for a hug.
After they embraced, she peered back at James. He looked fragile, lost and estranged.
“I love you, Dad.”
James picked his head up. For once, Sam was happy when she saw his eyes look through her.
​
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