On Pluto by Greg O'Brien Read Free Book Online

ministers about the guilt of taking the Lord’s name in vain; they tell me that God is resilient, everlastingly forgiving; that the Lord has wide shoulders. While we have free will, in God, there are no secrets.
    Always persevere, legendary Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca, a mentor and father figure, instructed me as ayouth. Branca, who tossed the fabled home run pitch to New York Giant Bobby Thomson at the Polo Grounds on October 3, 1951, once told me, “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.”
    I never forgot that. Yet in a moment of doubt, I wonder. The fight against this disease consumes me, as with others, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day mostly, often intentionally outside the wheelhouse of observers, but more and more in an embarrassment of lapses when one side of the brain, the frontal lobe that directs executive functions, continually wants to shut down, while the occipital lobe, the rear most portion of the brain that controls creative intellect, declares: Hell no! The battle is numbing, like witnessing a head-on crash in slow motion when one can’t remember how to find the brakes.
    Today, I have little short-term memory, a progression of blanks; close to 60 percent of what I take in now is gone in seconds. It is dispiriting to lose a thought in a second, 72,000 seconds a day in a 20-hour period of consciousness; to stand exposed, and yet stand one’s ground, to begin to grasp in fundamental, naked terms, who one really is—the good, the bad, and the ugly. The ugly is haunting to me; the many things one would like to take back over the years, but cannot—feelings of failure and transgression.
    I rely on copious notes and my trusty iPhone with endless email reminders. I am startled when my inbox tells me I have 40 new emails, then I realize that 35 of them are from me. The reminders help, though often I have no sense of time or place, and there are moments when I don’t recognized people I’ve known most of my life—close friends, business acquaintances, and even my wife on two occasions. Sometimes, my mind plays games and paints other faces on people. Rather than panic, I just keep asking questions until I get some answers, or at least avoid yet another awkward episode. I work hard at deflecting the loss of judgment and filter. I find myself becoming more childlike,curiously enjoying the moments of innocence and potty talk. It’s a reversal of fortune. In college, I was a history major, an honor student, good at rote memory. Fuggedaboutit now, Mr. Potato Head!
    The most disturbing symptoms in my private darkness are the visual misperceptions, the playful but sometimes disturbing hallucinations—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling things that aren’t there, as my mother once did. There was a time in Boston, for example, after a late business meeting when I retrieved my car on the third floor of a parking garage near Boston City Hall, only to find that a thick grated, metal wall had been pulled down to block my path. I feared I was locked in for the night. Walking toward the obstruction, the wall suddenly disappeared. It wasn’t real.
    Then there are those crawling, spider, and insect-like creatures that crawl regularly, some in sprays of blood, along the ceiling at different times of the day, sometimes in a platoon, that turn at 90-degree angles, then inch a third of the way down the wall before floating toward me. I brush them away, almost in amusement, knowing now that they are not real, yet fearful of the cognitive decline. On a recent morning, I saw a bird in my bedroom circling above me in ever tighter orbits, then precipitously, the bird dove to my chest in a suicide mission. I screamed in horror. But there was no bird, no suicide mission, only my hallucination. And I was thankful for that.
    To add to this mix, in what may be a brush with vascular dementia, I haven’t had feeling in parts of my feet, hands, and lower-arm