Assassin's Screed

I'm a gamer. Ever since my cousins introduced me to the magnificence of that heart-pounding game known as Pong in 1974, I've been hooked. We'd sit for hours watching that slow-moving white dot float methodically from one side to the other across that black screen. Too young for pinball, I grew up as part of the Arcade Generation---those noisy hangouts with coin operated masterpieces that transported millions of us into the world of killer space insects while playing Galaga, or bouncing on cubes escaping coiled snakes in Q*bert. And then came Ms. Pac-Man---the baddest bitch in the room. She was the original cash money ho', what with all the currency she took from me and all the angry faces when my crew and I would walk into that arcade in the mall and run my hands on the top of the machine to find that sweet-spot:  the reset button. (I often popped that lever and watched the other boys' faces melt as the game went dark only to power it back on with their high scores completely obliterated. Such fun).  But my favorite game, however, was Gyruss.  I discovered Gyruss in the back of the Busy Bee convenience store across the street from my alma mater, Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, NC.  My friend Terence and I would play that game for days on end.  It had a left-handed dial joystick and you had to battle your way through spaceships and space mines in order to reach the different planets in our solar system.  Starting with Neptune, you blasted invaders to the beat of a suped-up version of Bach's Toccata und Fuge in D Minor, a sure precursor to the techno mixes of 20 years later. Many players of Gyruss, then and now, suspect it is impossible to actually reach Earth. Yet it is possible, and occurs at level 25.  My high score of 979,250 remained unbeaten until a kid with a fifty-cent Tropical Fantasy fruit punch hit the reset button; it erased my high score forever.

The arrival of the PlayStation brought home gaming RPGs (role playing games) to the masses.  I played Final Fantasy VII until the timer stopped after 99 hours.  I think my ex still wakes up with cold sweats from the constant, jarring, and unchanging fight music plunging like an ice pick through his brain. I was so emotionally connected to that game that when Sephiroth killed my beloved Aerith I actually mourned her death. I still remember the shock I felt watching him impale her. Now that I'm a grandpa of video gaming I choose games for substance and complexity rather than loud volume.  I like to play RPGs that carry some meaning for me. I choose them like a sommelier looks for a fine wine. Infamous 1 & 2, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City, Mass Effect 1-3 and Assassin's Creed.

So, allow me to draw an allegorical point between real life and video games.  Amidst killing the baddies and puzzle-solving in the game Assassin's Creed, you have the opportunity to climb to the top of large towers during different points in the game. Climbing these towers gives you a tactical advantage as you can see across massive swaths of digital landscape. It also gives you an opportunity to blindly jump into what the game calls a "Leap of Faith"; from improbable heights onto impossibly small haystacks. Recently, a close cousin (who is like a sister to me) came to me with great concern. She deeply hated her job and wanted to change her career. I told her sometimes in life you have to take a leap of faith. Sometimes you just have to walk up to your fear. Climb to the very peak of it. And jump. 

As human beings we are conditioned to stay in our comfort zone, even if that zone is filled with dissatisfaction and dysfunction.  From childhood we're programmed to soldier on with stiff upper lips and our heads held high even though unhappiness and petulance tend to abound in this oasis of such misery. It's the enemy we know. Why strike out in the feral darkness of the unknown when you can hang out in the light of shame, guilt and anger that you experience everyday. At least in the light, you know the hurt you're going to get. You'd say, "I can anticipate the anger at working a dead end job. I can anticipate the fussy lover, the bitter mother, the adolescent acting father, the stupid boss." All of these things culminate to assault us with wretched intentions. Since we've surrendered so long ago we often allow the foot soldiers of despair march over us. With their familiar boots and recognizable gazes we allow these feelings of fatalism to stomp our souls as if this doom is part of our nature. Why change? If you transition out of this zone, who's to say it won't be worse?  You probably sit there and enumerate everything that is wrong with your present life and how each step of the way could be worse than the last. Murphy's Law is your mantra. Repeated with deference like a prayer each day of your life. But what if your salvation is through a thicket filled with something that scares you? What if the fear you fear the most is the fear you need to move forward? What if you accept the fact that life will be hard. That there will be grief and pain. And that it isn't fair. That the truth is ugly and grim and--once faced head on--far less powerful and penetrating than we thought it would be. What if we climb that tower and just jump?  Down into the depths of it...Our unrelenting fear. 

So when my cousin came to me with her fears I told her that sometimes you have to take a leap of faith. A leap off that tower of pain and just hope that something, anything will be there to provide you a soft landing. Oftentimes facing that fear is the leap of faith. As soon as my cousin put in her notice within an hour another opportunity came her way:  a phone call offering her the start of the career she wanted with a salary twice as much as she was making.  Now, sometimes things don't come so quickly. But through it all you must remember that feeling of unrequited joy and fearlessness of your childhood gamer and jump. 

My cousin jumped. And she is doing something she loves.  That, in and of itself, is the most valuable high score.

Jason is Tresha's father and Ferren is Tresha's daughter

I stared at the child-like scrawling handwritten note on the upstairs credenza. I don't think she tried to hide it from me. After all it was just there beside the door to her room. A note detailing how far my mother's condition had travelled. A simple bit of information detailing intimate knowledge of her life that she could no longer hold in her brain. The Jason of the note is my brother. Her oldest son. Tresha is his daughter. And Ferren is his granddauther. Straightforward you would think. My mother only had two sons and two grands and four great grands. Surely eight names and relationships should not prove to be so ponderous that she would have to document them. But here it was in front of my eyes.

I tell people that my vision of Alzheimer's is like magic. Not the fun legerdemain of rabbits in top hats or sawing pretty assistants in half. No, this magic is menacing. It is trickery. It is illusion. Imagine yourself sitting in a chair. Watching television talking to your son. The sun is out and your dog is sitting by your feet. Then you blink your eyes and suddenly its night. And there's a person sitting in front of you asking you questions you are at odds to answer. Then another blink and the dog is back by your feet and your long dead mother is sitting in front of you and its 1967 all over again. Blink. You're back sitting in your recliner watching television and your son is telling you things he's said you've said but you have no idea what he's talking about.

Blink.

Dementia is like a reducing math problem. You start out as a child with a massive black board. It is empty. Pristine. You're given a piece of chalk. And told to write. So you set forth and start your math. You start out with the number One. That singular number that is your life. To that equation you add friends, husbands, children, education, careers, houses, bills, dramas, churches, artistic expressions, travels, illnesses, beauty and death. As you near the other end of the board you look over the totality of your life and you see this mesmerizing array of  calculus. Sprawling across the ether. Your life rich and dense. A massive equation that started way down there and through lush experiences has delivered you to this point in your elderly life. But then something goes wrong. A mechanism that's out of sync. A leaky pipe you can't find. Soon parts of those equations start disappearing. Not enough at first to mess up the math but just enough to make you look at it differently. A repeated question, a lost item, a missed bill payment. That's all the signals you or your loved ones get. Not that a blaring tornado siren would stop the onslaught of what is to come. And then the reduction starts in earnest. You stand-by helplessly as the numbers disappear as if its been written for a scene from a thriller. A montage of images from the hero's life slowly erasing from his mind. Then as the up-tempo music builds the random numbers on the blackboard start blinking out in rapid succession. Reducing and reducing counting down to the hero's doom. The evil villain off to the side handwringing and laughing maniacally.

Soon there are only a few scraps from which your loved one can pull their life together. So that's what she does. It doesn't matter if those memories are discordant with reality. Sometimes my mother thinks I'm her mother; which I guess is a complement to me. At least its somebody she feels safe around. Sometimes she thinks I'm my step-father and sometimes still she questions me as if we've never met. What many people don't know about Alzheimer's and other neurological diseases that cause dementia is that the sufferer's brain literally is eaten away. As much like science fiction as that may sound to witness it or worse to live through it is a daunting maze of sublime heartache. Haunting nostalgia and the bittersweet realization that the little bit your loved one was holding onto today may not be there tomorrow. You both are dangling from an ever shrinking ledge. Down below you see the swirling morass of obsession and delusion. The brain is like a battery and dementia is like corrossion. It simply decomposes the mind. Once the connections are gone they will never return. It renders even the most mundane chores insurmountable. To watch my mother, a well-educated former entrepreneur who ran several successful businesses over the course of her life, struggle through a monthly bank statement or a recipe or instructions presses me to find the beauty in caregiving. The constant barrage of the same questions fired rapidly always within minutes of each other and often during times when I am trying to do something else would try the most saintly of patience. This fierce woman becoming more childlike and fragile by the day. But unlike a child who learns that fire is bad once my mother forgets, that lesson will never return. Ever. She will never know that again. So the vigil becomes more dire as her behavior is framed by this memory reduction. I can't blink because if I do all the household trashcans may be laid-out in a straight line on the front walk. Blink and the phone is ringing and she's trying to answer the TV remote.

Blink.

But I have to say that so far it doesn't feel like a burden. Stressful but not a burden. Through pain and hardship I have been driven, bullwhipped I would even say into this inclement harbor. Docked to my mother at the end of her life. But somehow I think this is where I'm suppose to be. This seems right. This is the hour of the most important time of my life. To taste and touch every moment of this. To be here now in this place. More for her than me but it feels like I'm getting more out of the experience that she is. Savoring it no matter how painful. Because just around the corner there maybe a wonderful horizon. To float on those stories of her youth; like the time she snuck away from home at fourteen to go to a party and ended up talking to a boy at a local beer hall. Or the one where she married her first husband a second time (after a tumultuous divorce) when he swept into town and took her to Brooklyn where he promptly locked her in his apartment for three days while he went on a drinking binge. I can see her now escaping that apartment in her 1954 black and white Ford Skyliner driving all the way from New York to North Carolina non-stop. And how about the time when she was six and her mother became the first black person to have a play produced at the Carolina Theater in downtown Winston-Salem. In Wake Up Chillin' there was a scene in a cemetery. The children were to talk to their ancestors. Because of budget restraints none of the child actors which included my mother practiced in costume. Opening night the children were onstage ready for the emotional climax of the play when the adults came out covered in white sheets. Of course this sent her and all of her young cast mates screaming up the aisles in fright! They thought real ghosts were after them. These are the bright spots of the day when the steely grasp of the disease releases her. And I'm here to tell that story. We often ask God "Why me?" I know I have. But I think I've been given my answer. Why me? Who else but me. Because Gwen is my mother and I am her son.