On Vanishing. Lynn Casteel Harper
disappears from an observer’s view. The person with dementia exists beyond my capacity to keep her in my line of sight; she remains a person despite my (or anyone else’s) limited powers of vision. Still, we must reckon with the disappearing—even if it is, in some sense, illusory.
Leonardo’s Last Supper contains perhaps the most famous vanishing point. Our eye is pulled into Christ’s head at the center of the composition; it is the aggregating point. We are drawn to and through the mind of Christ—both to disappear there and to gather there. Christ dies on the cross (dissolution); Christ merges with the divine (unification). As we reach the vanishing point, we both dissolve and converge.
Having previously made arrangements with a Detroit funeral home for Janet Adkins’s remains, her husband, Ron, headed straightaway to the airport to catch his flight back to Portland on the afternoon of Janet’s death. “He wanted to get out of our jurisdiction as quickly as possible,” one prosecutor involved in the case told the Los Angeles Times. “He wanted to disappear.”
Ron Adkins publicly voiced support for his wife’s decision, but I wonder if he pled with her not to do it—that it might be his honor to be burdened by her. Perhaps he resented his wife’s determination that he should not be asked to do so. Perhaps he could come up with nothing more pressing in his life that would render caring for his wife a lesser good. Perhaps he was willing to risk their futures. He had purchased his wife a round-trip ticket, in case she changed her mind and wished to return to Oregon with him.
I have witnessed many loving partners unable to rise to the occasion—and perhaps this is what Janet Adkins wished to avoid. I have seen one spouse keep the other alive by any means necessary because the idea of being without the person was simply unbearable. Maybe Janet Adkins knew that love is blindness at times. Maybe the only person she trusted was herself, in the present—and a pathologist in Michigan.
I don’t think Janet Adkins wanted to kill herself—rather, she wanted to kill her future self, the deteriorated self she imagined, the self she worried would put her family “through the agony of this terrible disease.” The Janet Adkins on the tennis court and at the piano killed the projected Janet Adkins in a wheelchair, unable to find notes on an instrument whose name she cannot recall. The self-determining Janet Adkins killed the dependent Janet Adkins. The strong Janet Adkins killed the weak Janet Adkins, before the weak Janet Adkins got a foothold. The story is a familiar one: the strong subjecting the weak—the strong eradicating their fears through expulsion of the weak. Is this not the fascist impulse, the imperialist compulsion? Or might it be the compassionate impulse, the yearning to be free of unnecessary affliction? How blurry the distinction between exterminating weakness and alleviating suffering.
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What does it mean to vanish well? After all, the result is always the same: you end up gone. There are no tricks to undo this finality. Magic’s familiar script—the sudden deletion into thin air; the breathtaking reappearance out of thin air—does not seem to apply in the end. The stage assistant’s role, however, may abide.
Perhaps, to vanish well entails allowing others to help unbind you, trusting them to keep your secrets. I think of Dorothy, who stood just offstage, offering a measure of knowing assurance, as Houdini attempted improbable escapes. We need compassionate attendants who help us in our final stages of disappearance, too. I think of my mother, soaking her dad’s feet in a tub of warm water; of the nursing assistants, tenderly lifting spoons to open mouths; of Ron Adkins, sliding Janet’s return ticket into his breast pocket. I imagine a world in which securing good support is not so hard, because living and dying with dementia is not so feared or fearful. For most of us, our vanishing will occur slowly and may mercifully give us time to gather willing assistants who know the illusoriness of disappearance when we reach the vanishing point.
IN EARLY 2013, MY GRANDFATHER JACK MOVED TO THE Veterans Home in Mexico, Missouri. He was joining the ranks of the 1.4 million older adults who reside in nursing homes across the United States.
The facility was set on the edge of a remote town in the plains of north central Missouri. It was not an easy place to find. I had never been to that part of the state before Jack was moved there, and I doubt he had either. He would not get out of the car when he and my mother arrived. My mom had to walk away—racked with sadness and guilt, exhausted by the four-hour drive—while a nurse’s aide coaxed him out. This was the third move he had made in three years; it would be his last.
My grandparents moved to Bonne Terre, Missouri, in 1953 after my grandfather had finished his medical residency. At the northern edge of the Ozarks, sixty miles south of St. Louis, Bonne Terre was a mining town, in a region known for having the richest lead ore in the world. During peak years of production in the early decades of the twentieth century, the mines employed thousands of people. A network of more than three hundred miles of underground haulage tracks brought the ore—a total of 8.5 million tons—to the surface. Once the profiteers exhausted the region’s galena deposit—the largest in the world—they vacated the area. The Bonne Terre Mine closed in 1962. Within a decade, mining operations had ceased in St. Francois County and the surrounding area—what had constituted the Lead Belt—and had moved to the underexploited western side of the St. Francois Mountains, the New Lead Belt. After my mother finished college in the mid-’70s, she did not return to live in her depressed hometown. My parents settled in Cape Girardeau, about ninety miles southeast of Bonne Terre. Stretches of windy, two-lane highway with blind turns made the trip between them a particularly long, treacherous drive.
During one of my visits to Bonne Terre when I was in high school, my grandmother Edna showed me a painting on a dim wall in the guest bedroom. A farmer’s wife had painted a pastoral scene of Bonne Terre’s Big River and gave it to Jack for saving her husband’s life. The farmer, who was half-blind, had picked up baby copperheads, mistaking them for big worms. That painting—its sparkling stream knifing through springtime bluffs, rolling along groves of weeping willows and fields of wildflowers—suggested resonance with the early French settlers’ designation of the area as la bonne terre, “the good earth.” The landscape of the town I knew was marked by littered highways, run-down trailer parks, and an eroding chat dump—a large mound of lead-flecked sand, left over from mining operations. I once scaled this chat dump with my cousins on a hot day during our summer vacation; my mom remembers sledding down it in the winters of her childhood.
In 1992, the EPA identified the Old Lead Belt as one of the nation’s most contaminated areas, designating it a National Priorities List Superfund Site; it remains on the list. In 2003, the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center—the facility where the state executes all its capital offenders—opened in Bonne Terre. This cluster of nineteen metal-roofed buildings, located on a barren 213 acres, inspires one to think neither of good nor of the earth.
After Edna’s sudden death in 2009, my mom knew her dad could not live alone. He had trouble thinking and had relied on his wife to keep their household running. My mom left her job and home in Cape and moved in with her father in Bonne Terre, until she could figure out a more sustainable arrangement. Four months later, my mom moved Jack into an assisted living facility near Bonne Terre. He had lived in St. Francois County for nearly six decades; it was home to his church, beloved Rotary club, and former medical practice. It seemed worth a try to see if he could situate himself there.
Soon after the move, it became obvious that there was no compelling reason for him to remain local. The trip proved too far for my mother to drive regularly, which left her navigating, from a distance, new complications regarding Jack’s care, such as his resistance to bathing. No one from Bonne Terre visited him anyway—no one from Rotary or the church—or, if they did, they did not communicate these visits to my mom. Within the year, my mom moved him to a memory care facility in Cape Girardeau, near my parents’ house. Even if Cape had never been Jack’s home, it had been home to his daughter and her four children—and our