My uncle in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

So, I just got off the phone (my mom was on the line too) with my uncle. My other uncle on my mother’s side isn’t doing well. In some sort of memory way, that seems to have eaten his conversation and his ability to cope.

My bright uncle, who I used to have pretty good mutually-appreciating conversations with, who seemed over the last few years to have gotten shorter with me in our few encounters, which I am now told is a general pattern.
Who was always making solo expeditions in his van out into the Scablands of eastern Washington, and who always drove amazingly, in a bad way, meaning that it was like the Disney attraction “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride” and he constantly missed other cars by less than the thickness of the paint on either vehicle, but who, I am now told, has had to give up driving because he was now constantly hitting them.
Who always collected cluttered files, which filled his living space over the years to the point of unmanageability, and who was president of an Ice Age Floods society for many years, with, it was apparent from talking with him over the years, a strange difficulty with finding anyone to hand the reins to, connected, I am now told, to a remarkable inability to delegate anything at all, or to trust others with anything - which has now combined with an irrationally flaring temper so that he has burned bridges with many former colleagues and contacts by angrily attacking and abusing them personally in email and by phone.
It seems he now cannot function, cannot manage to eat or to make any arrangements at all or to do anything but talk in what my other uncle says are basically circles . . .

(There was a sort of notification and example a month ago. I had written something short and I hope amusing and not really hyperbolic on Facebook about how dizzy and almost drunk I am when I have edited for as many hours as I can manage. Through the exhaustion of that balancing part of the brain.
I had included a picture, which for some reason seems to trip an email notification to people who know me more than regular Facebook posts.
When I woke two mornings later, I found an email from him saying how sorry he was to read of what had recently happened to my mental function, and recommending that I see if there was a research program I could get into at a local hospital. I did not know what it was about, and it took me some time to hit on the explanation; it was a bad feeling: had I somehow, somewhere confessed to the onset of dementia on Facebook and forgotten? Or why would he think so?
When I figured it out I emailed back and let him know about the misunderstanding.
He mentioned in that email that he had been dealing with the same kind of thing for the last few years. Which gives two different explanations for how he could have misread me. It’s even clearer now.)

It will not be news to anyone that aging is a hard thing to look in the whiskers, but this hits me particularly personally. He did not have my personal pattern, much less condition, but what has happened to him is like my own vision of my ADD eventually winning. The clutter creeping in from the walls. And finally eating me.
(Yes, ADD types like me have a rate of developing one form of dementia that is triple the usual rate. Which is its own thing and topic, but, as my imagination picks it up, the thought feels like simply the end of my ability to fool anyone, even momentarily. There might even be a neighbor or two whose impressions of me from a distance wouldn’t be disturbed at all.)

And - it’s broader than that. We all have personalities with quirks, I assume, but, while we really live, our personalities are vehicles that we take out on our choice of voyages, and to appreciate us is to see a mix of our personalities and what we undertook to do with them, the boat and the sometimes discernable captain and the occasional subject of navigation.

What a terribly unflattering light to end up with other people just looking at our boats themselves, our choices gone, our voyages over, and the other people having to discuss (having no choice but to discuss) the boats in a condition no longer nuanced or moderated or improved by our reflections and our efforts. Such an awfully exposed condition, in the true sense of awful. As if to know one ended up consisting of knowing one’s uncleaned and abandoned lavatory. Rude to even take people up that way. Formerly.

Dammit, dammit, uncle, you have tried, you have tried. As we all try.

I’ve known or heard of a few people who were very likeable or angelic in their reduced mental state. What would any of our own actual chances be of that? I could see myself being generally placid and agreeable - maybe. But enough of what I think of (and what others have thought of) as my good points consist of things consciously done - or of merciful self-restraining equilibria enforced by lots of conflicting things I am aware of or deliberately bother myself with . . . Feh. If I had to build someone who’d be really presentable with an empty pilot’s chair and/or a faulty autopilot, I wouldn’t build me.
(And kindness, say, should the characteristic in some sense survive . . . is kind of a dead letter when you can’t do anything or really see people. It’s even less than a secret.)

We talked, as you do, more or less evenly and lightly, but it was a heavy conversation, and it is getting heavier in memory.

Fie! Fie!

He has been an occasionally-met uncle who I knew mostly through thinking about him in between encounters.

There is an old topic disagreement, stretched out over decades, where I had very unrealistic thoughts of one day persuading him or more like just interesting him . . . The game has been cancelled. It’ s now meaningless.

Fie.

Last updated March 14, 2017