On Vanishing. Lynn Casteel Harper
general relevance, as I consider my own gone and not-gone self. The cells that comprise my body—all of our bodies—routinely break down or slough off, and new ones take their place. Some cells, like neurons, die and are never replaced. Paradox lives at the heart of my faith, too: the gone and not-gone ego, the gone and not-gone Jesus. The play of presence and absence infuses all of life, I think, both before and after dementia.
Maybe if we can learn to inhabit this tension, this space between opposites, then dementia and the lives it touches can rejoin the spectrum of human experience, rather than being reduced to tired tropes and burdened by outsized fears, its sufferers and caregivers made to disappear. Imagine if we received all lives—those with and without dementia—as conglomerations of the ordinary and the peculiar, the fragmented and the whole, the present and the vanishing.
I HAVE OFFICIATED ONLY ONE MEMORIAL SERVICE IN which I thought the dead person might come back. Dorothy was 103, and she was known for surprise reappearances. Dorothy had resided in an independent living apartment at the retirement community, and I had visited her on the few occasions when she had come to the Gardens to recover from an illness. I had learned over the course of these visits that as a teenager, she had left home to become a stage assistant to Harry Houdini—against her parents’ wishes, of course. What did a nice Methodist girl, a preacher’s daughter, want with an older man—a Vaudeville magician, no less—rumored to be a Jew, the son of a rabbi? Only after Houdini and his wife, Bess, visited Dorothy’s parents and promised to care for her as their own daughter did her parents relent.
In Houdini’s shows, Dorothy would pop out from the top of an oversized radio that Houdini had just shown the audience to be empty, kicking up one leg and then the other in Rockette-style extension. Grabbing her at the waist, Houdini would lower her to the floor, where she would dance the Charleston. In another act, she was tied, bound feet to neck, to a pole. A curtain would fall to the floor, and voila!—she would reappear as a ballerina with butterfly wings, fluttering across the stage. At the end of each night’s performance, Dorothy stood just off stage next to Bess to witness Houdini’s finale: the Chinese Water Torture Cell. A shackled Houdini was lowered, upside down, into a tank of water from which he escaped two minutes later. Dorothy knew how he accomplished this stunt—what was often deemed his “greatest escape”—but she never broke confidence.
Dorothy was the last surviving member of Houdini’s show. Long after his death, she attended séances on Halloween, awaiting communication with the Great Houdini—which, apparently, was never forthcoming. Eighty-five years after Houdini’s death, now she, too, had died. Each time I had visited her, I had felt her end was imminent. Already a petite woman, she seemed to grow smaller and smaller, until I was sure I would find her one day simply gone. But somehow she persisted—until she died about three years into my tenure.
As I prepared for her memorial, I imagined her doing one of her famous acts at the service. Instead of an oversized radio, her legs would kick open and emerge—up one, up two—from a once-closed coffin. Back to do the Charleston one last time. Or, breaking free from the chains of death, she would pirouette through the parlor in her butterfly wings. Instead, her son, who was in his eighties and also lived at the retirement community, opted for a casketless memorial service rather than a traditional funeral, and this somewhat allayed my anxieties about the coffin popping open. While a reappearance out of thin air seemed less likely, I knew by then that anything was possible with her.
Dorothy went to her grave without ever having revealed Houdini’s secrets, true to the vow she took at seventeen. I wonder what it is like to hold the keys to illusion, to know how to unbind one’s self, to learn the mechanisms of vanishing, to feel the weight of magic’s wisdom. Had she not been so scrupulously loyal, perhaps she could have helped the rest of us solve the riddle of how to vanish well.
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I came of age in the 1990s when terms like “the right to die,” “persistent vegetative state,” and “advance directive” infused public discourse, and debates raged over euthanasia. In grade school, I became vaguely aware of Nancy Cruzan, a resident of my home state of Missouri, and Terri Schiavo—women who could not articulate their end-of-life wishes, whose bodies became the site of fierce political contestation. Dr. Jack Kevorkian was solidly a household name. In defiance of the law, he had helped dozens of seriously ill patients end their lives. His visage saturated the media, even appearing on a 1993 cover of Time with the title “Doctor Death” and the question “Is he an angel of mercy or a murderer?” It was only recently, however, that I learned of Kevorkian’s first client, a fifty-four-year-old English teacher from Portland, Oregon, named Janet Adkins. Diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, she could and did articulate her wishes and decided to make herself gone before the disease got the chance.
At a press conference shortly after his wife’s death, Ron Adkins read from Janet’s suicide note: “I have decided for the following reasons to take my own life. This is a decision taken in a normal state of mind and is fully considered. I have Alzheimer’s disease and do not want to let it progress any further. I do not want to put my family or myself through the agony of this terrible disease.” One week after beating her sons at tennis, according to reports, she lay supine in the back of Kevorkian’s 1968 VW van in a parking lot in a Detroit suburb. In her arm: an IV hooked to the pathologist’s own invention, the Thanatron, which delivered heart-stopping potassium chloride into her bloodstream.
Janet Adkins’s sympathizers pointed to the horrific prospect of this dementing disease’s pathology and her calculated courage. While she could still act on her own behalf, in what she had called in her note a “normal state of mind,” Janet Adkins headed off what she imagined as agony for her future self and her family. A pianist, Janet Adkins feared losing music, reportedly telling her pastor, “I can’t remember my music. I can’t remember the scores. And I begin to see the beginning of the deterioration and I don’t want to go through with that deterioration.” Perhaps the scores might degenerate into strung-out smudges of black, and she might find notes tangled, unable to fight themselves free to make melody. Perhaps her deterioration would be depleting in every way; it would be saturated with sorrow; it would require heroic fortitude. Perhaps her family would be drained in Sisyphean service to a Janet Adkins unable even to thank them. I imagine Janet Adkins wished to spare her loved ones the torment of her slow self-disappearance.
In the days leading up to Dorothy’s service, I read the tributes to her that appeared in major newspapers. I learned that she was the last of two hundred women to audition for Houdini’s show and had instantly dazzled the illusionist. After her contract with Houdini had ended, she went on to create a Latin dance called the “rumbalero” and to appear in several movies, including Flying Down to Rio with Fred Astaire. In her later years, she donated $12.5 million to build an arts center.
Reading these tributes prompted me to consider the story of my grandfather Jack, whose life—while not as glamorous as Houdini’s assistant’s—had seemed remarkable to me in its own right. A World War II veteran, Jack received the Distinguished Flying Cross for rescuing a fellow pilot by making a tricky, unauthorized landing in the Himalayas. Upon his return from the war, Jack had considered becoming a band teacher but instead pursued a career in medicine. He played jazz trombone in dive bars at night to pay for medical school. Jack was a committed and smart country doctor. He made house calls and forgave patients’ debts. He delivered babies and aided the dying. In the days before defibrillators, Jack once frayed a lamp cord, plugged it in, and shocked a patient to revive him. In retirement, he owned and helped to operate a local pharmacy. Jack was an avid hobbyist—always working in his woodshed or on his computer or on perfecting his omelets. He traveled the world as an ambassador with Rotary International. He maintained his passion for music, singing solos at church, playing the electric organ for his grandkids, and leading songs at Rotary meetings well into his eighties.
The Jack of all these activities—and the Jack who