Holding on to the self

In A Widow's Story, Joyce Carol Oates writes about how bizarre and frightening it was when her husband wasn't his usual coherent, intelligent self. The doctors told her his dementia was probably temporary, caused by his difficulty breathing, but that wasn't quite as reassuring as she wanted it to be.

She wrote:

Harrowing to think that our identities – the selves people believe they recognize in us: our “personalities” – are a matter of oxygen, water, and food and sleep – deprived of just one of these, our physical beings begin to alter almost immediately – soon, to others we are no longer “ourselves” – and yet, who else are we?

Is the self the physical body, or is the body but the repository of self?

Long before I knew her,
Sandy was a force.

I'd always said that my favorite part of Sandy was her brain, and by that I meant, of course, her intelligence and quick wit, but also all the personality traits that made her uniquely Sandy. The parts that let her understand and appreciate me as no one ever had before, and the parts that attracted crowds of friends and strangers alike.

In her last five weeks, her Sandyness shifted around, almost gone at times, and at other times, almost completely back. She lost so much of her self every time she had a sodium drop or a narcotic fog. The bright and shiny bits of her brain and personality were obscured by physical malfunction. I still loved her; I remained by her side and fought for her to regain as much of her self for as much time as she could. But my memories of those last five weeks are mostly about her confusion and her pain, her nausea and her impatience. We had moments of connection, and I cherish those, but those were somehow about reaching through the fog to the core part of her, the part that remained Sandy until the moment her heart stopped. 

We like to think that who we are is so real, so strong, that it will survive physical challenges. But while we're enclosed in these cages of flesh, we are dependent on myriad chemical interactions to keep us in sync. As a migraineur, I know how subtle changes in sleep, eating, or exercise habits can upset the balance. Add cancer into the mix, especially into the nervous system, and all bets are off. Really, in many ways, it's amazing how much of the time Sandy was herself in her last five weeks of life. And it's definitely a relief that the parts of her I related to most deeply are the parts that remain a force in the world now.