Amy Tan's Confessions

Confessions reminded me of my grandmother. She was my father's mother and was the go-to babysitter for me when I was a kid. I remember being spanked for touching her doll collection, and later when she was diagnosed with Alzheimers disease. My dad came in from taking her to Columbus for a doctor's appointment and sat me down.
"Your grandma has Old Timers," I heard. "She'll probably start to forget things soon, maybe even our names."
"Will she die?" I asked.
"They gave her medicine, it should help," he said, but it didn't. She moved quickly through forgetting names to forgetting pills to forgetting her age to forgetting how and when to eat. It was ugly and degrading and I still hate the memories I have of her weak and emaciated, dying because she didn't remember how to stay alive anymore.
But Amy Tan handles the issue of senility in a pillar of family authority with much more restraint than I would be able to. The first paragraph of Confessions stands out strongly for me. The way that she compares memory to an ocean tide seems spot on, and the imagery of being stranded upon the important, or tragic, events in one's memory is especially powerful. It remindes me of my grandma's fixation on her past, after the disease had taken hold but before it had completely wrecked her mind. She would insist she was decades younger than her age, or mistake her family for old friends. She would go from delight at someone visiting to irrate in a matter of seconds, needing only the time to forget who the person was and then attach an old memory to the face. The memories she seemed to live in most often were either painful and angry, causing turns to detest when she would mistake an identity, or nostalgiac and bubbling, instilling childish glee.
It was hard to witness as a child. I was confused by her behavior and by how a disease could cause such a drastic change in personality. The nature of brain chemistry was completely foreign to me, so I found much of her behavior offensive, but looking back, I find the movement of her memory fascinating. With the lack of a short term memory, Alzheimer sufferers are left with only their past and its jumping, chaotic interpretation and associations. The senile mind, with no strong narrative present to hold the disperate threads together, becomes more and more lost in reality. That the brain is effected so strongly by such changes speaks to how the healthy brain layers the past over the present moment to find meaning and give definition. The movement and function of memory is important to an understanding of humanity as a whole, and as with society, it's the descending, malfunctioning, extreme fringes that are of particular interest to me.