“Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most.”
That line was etched into a plaque on some long-forgotten office wall, I think it was one of my dad’s friends who had it. The caricature below the line was of a man sitting perplexed, hands on the sides of his face, as he stared down at a litter of papers on his desk.
I know the plaque was meant to be funny. It went hand in hand with two others I saw all the time, “Hire a teenager while they still know everything,” and “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit;” both were in my parents’ office and were meant to be chuckle-inducing.
While the humor, basic though it might be, is obvious-the less obvious thought about that first quote is what always struck a chord with me. The thought of losing one’s mind is terrifying.
One of my great-grandmothers lived to be 101 and for at least the last twenty years of her life, she had a mental-wasting disease. I don’t know if it was Alzheimer’s or dementia, all I am sure of is that it stole her life, one memory at a time. I remember her progressive and ever-quickening march into blankness. In the end she couldn’t remember who we were, who she was, or how to eat or speak. In the end she was a shell, void of everything that made her the person all of us loved.
The mind is an infinitely complex and fascinating thing. It isn’t physical, though it has physical factors, and it is able to remember, dream, conceive, and calculate a perplexing number of things. The mind is a large part of who we are and, to me at least, is the most frightening thing to lose.
If you have ever seen the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” then you know what a truly psychologically intense film it is. Even though the protagonist thinks he wants his memories of someone he loved and lost erased, the process and outcome are devastating. Though it isn’t a horror movie, it has the substance to be one if it were edited in the right way.
The shrinking of oneself, like the closing in of a cataract around reality, is something that at this point in history, isn’t curable. That loss of self, identity and memories seems unstoppable. A wound might be healed, a disease, cured-however the washing away of one’s mind, that is truly one of the most terrifying things I can imagine.
