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Paste is the title

For my sixty-first birthday, I got the confirmation that I had early-onset dementia. Or, as my tactless neurologist put it, my tests showed signs that I was “dementing.” Insofar as I had thought of dementia until then, I was unaware that the word had a verb form. He/she/it dements, they dement, we all dement. At the same moment I encountered dement as a verb, I was told I am dementing.

My sense that the verb form of dementia could not really apply to me will seem disingenuous in the light of what I am about to tell: my mother had a form of mental disconnect starting in her seventies, which led her to be out of touch with reality in the years that preceded her death at eighty-two. During an episode that took place in 1996 when she was seventy-two years old, the word dementia did come up in relation to her illness, though it never attained the weight of an official diagnosis. Given that experience, together with the generally known fact that dementia can run in families, why did the phrase I am dementing fall so dissonantly on my ear? It is of course possible, even likely, that my failure to bring this knowledge to bear on my own circumstances was a form of denial. However, while I do believe that denial is an inevitable component of coming to terms with an unpleasant state of affairs, I think my own bafflement at being the subject of the present continuous form of the verb to dement had as much to do with the workings of language itself as it had with a refusal to face the facts.

I spent much of my adult life studying contemporary linguistic theory, which often focuses on the powerful effects of language on how a person or situation is perceived. My belated pursuit of a PhD in English during my forties introduced me to the Enlightenment thinkers’ obsession with the idea of naming, an issue they discussed in terms of Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Finding himself in a “strange Country,” with “all Things new, and unknown about him,”[1] Adam copes with his discomposure by giving names “distinct and appropriate to the facts”[2] to the unknown objects and concepts of his new world. Like Adam, I was familiar with the “facts” of a world of mental illness, a place as east of Eden as the godforsaken Land of Nod.[3] My Tree of Knowledge branched not only from my experience with my mother, but also from my own growing sense—from my mid-fifties onward—that I myself had been exiled to a “strange Country” of memory loss and other bewildering forms of disorientation.

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[1] John Locke, An Essay Considering Human Understanding.

[2] John Whewell, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences.

[3] Country to which Cain fled after killing Abel.

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