A Memoir of Delusion
Preface
A memoir conveys one’s perception of a life. But what if, over a lifetime, a person didn’t carry a single perception, but three radically different ones depending on who was in charge at the time?
Three often unreliable narrators dole out this story: Delusion Personified, Deluded David, and David Set Free. Switching between them will jar you. But each is essential, uniquely qualified to tell his part of the wreckage. Should you choose to continue reading, it is my sincere hope that you will acclimate to these shifting perspectives without succumbing to the delusion yourself.
I invite you into my mind, my psyche, and my history of multi-generational delusion.
Whisper. Special. Blank pages…
Blank Pages
Standing in the ICU, I felt no loss or sadness as my mother drew her last breath. They had implanted a pacemaker the week before, so her passing was not announced by the requisite long, shrill beep of a Hollywood drama. No flatline appeared on the monitor to signal that her body lay empty. Instead, a simple, empty box outlined in yellow appeared on the black screen as the lone indicator that her wick had been snuffed, that her blood no longer carried oxygen.
Before they removed the breathing mask which forced pure oxygen into the lungs, her oxygen reading was rock steady at one hundred percent. The ICU resident had explained this as an illusion. My mother’s problem wasn’t oxygen related, rather it was the buildup of carbon dioxide, CO2, in her system. Her late-stage lung disease had progressed to a point where she could no longer expel CO2.
The buildup of carbon dioxide caused her lungs to fail, which triggered a further buildup of CO2, cascading into a recursive downward spiral of dysfunction. It was a perfect metaphor for what she had put our family through – a metaphor for my life.
The choice, the resident said, was straightforward. We could let her go, which was her medical directive. Or they, the ICU staff, could perform a tracheal intubation which would require her continuous sedation. He was quick to add that at her late stage, she had lost lung function to a degree from which she could not recover.
My stepsister and I, along with my uncle, my mother’s brother, made the decision as she lay struggling against the breathing mask.
With the mask removed, her CO2-laden lungs no longer performed as the bellows of life. Her blood oxygen level began its slow, deliberate descent.
95… 94… 85… 77… 77… 77… 65… 64… 64… 54… 54… 45… 44… 54… 54…
Is there hope?
45… 44…
The numbers vanished. The yellow on black square sat empty.
It struck me as curious that the monitor’s designer had chosen not to let the oxygen readout hit zero. When a person was gone, the screen simply displayed a black square surrounded by a thick yellow border. Why an empty yellow box? Was it a design choice, or a personalized metaphor? Perhaps my mind was playing tricks on me: For those who cannot feel grief, you get the empty box.
But I knew I was capable of feeling loss. I had felt the crushing weight of sadness when my father died years prior. I missed him. But with her? Not then. Not a drop.
This is the story of why, at my mother’s death, I felt no grief – only a sudden, profound blankness. It was as if a book were being read aloud, only for the reader to turn the page at a climax and find nothing printed there.
That was my life with my mother: blank pages. Absurdly, mercifully blank pages.
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