By Gordon Wheeler
A version of this article appeared in British Gestalt Journal; Vol. 2, No. 2, 2002
What is the self? “Not-a-thing-but-a-process,” we are accustomed to answer, if sometimes a bit formulaically, under our Gestalt model. “Only a small factor in the total organism/environment interaction, but it plays the crucial role of finding and making the meanings that we grow by,” say Goodman and Perls (PHG, p. ). Not the meanings themselves, in other words, but the “finding and making” of them (and possibly not all meanings, but only those “we grow by”). Not the story, that is, but the need and capacity to tell a story, to make some meaningful whole out of the “booming, buzzing confusion” that is the world. Thus “the world” becomes “our world,” by which we mean a useable evolving narrative we can deal with and live in and from, even “grow by.” And thus too process is kept carefully separate from content — a dichotomy that Goodman allows, even insists on, for the heuristic and liberationist mileage he hopes to get out of it.
But is any of this real? Does process really exist anywhere apart from particular content, form without substance (to use Aristotle’s terms), self without story? What happens to us when we take these wholes apart, and hold them so separately? Or do all these abstractions just amount to another series of reified terms, ultimately taking us away from the holistic project the authors outline, in the direction of a new notion of self just as atomized and monadic as the old one (if refreshingly unmoored from some of the old social binds), isolating “contact” from confluence and belonging, health from identity and values, experience from politics, and personal growth from an ethic of care? In other words, in the direction of the world we live in and have today, some 50 years after the writing of our basic text?
When my aunt Margaret came to live with us, some eight years ago now, it did seem at times as if these various forms and functions of unified self-process — attention and identity, impulse and desire, narrative and meaning (roughly “ego,” “id,” and “personality,” among other self-functions, as Goodman liked to say in his more Freudian moments) — had all come strangely unglued, and did now ricochet around separately, now self, now story, coming together in novel combinations that somehow managed to seem both random and coherent at the same time. At the age of 94, she had been dodging time’s arrows with less and less agility for some years now, particularly the last ten or so, more and more plagued by the month, it seemed, by the accumlating toll of toll of illness and operations, falls and fractures, convalescences and rehabs that were now gathering speed in a downward plummet like some wounded bird in free fall, still flapping but to less and less avail. Meanwhile, in between these sieges, she’d go back to living alone, traveling and driving (and getting lost, but then she didn’t tell that part), still taking care of family and friends, still passionately progressive in her politics, still catching the symphony and museum openings with her young(er) friend Chuck and generally enjoying her life. Then all that changed abruptly. One day about a year before this time, as she put it, her “electric lights went out,” a wordplay she enjoyed on electrolytes, and when they came back on again she was much altered, still Margaret but unable to cook, drive, keep track of her medications, or manage her life or her day alone. And now the confusion seemed to be increasing from week to week, as some pernicious chaos progressively disorganized her mind.
Meanwhile, by day at least she was still very much “herself,” albeit with lapses, still much occupied with attending to a whole extended clan as she had now through six generations over the century, struggling to map each one into the two-hundred-year files in the oral history of her mind. “Oh, I’m so glad you got here,” she looked up brightly one morning during my last visit, though I’d been there for some days, “because I’ve been just waiting to consult you, it’s about Jackie, you know him so much better than I do. I feel he wants something from me, and for the life of me I don’t know quite what it is.” Jackie was a young great-nephew, who taken to pouring out his troubled life to her in long, rambling letters she was at a loss to respond to, though she was determined to try. “Now I want you to tell me frankly, do you think the trouble might just be that Jackie is gay, and he’s having a hard time coming to terms with it, and that’s why he can’t seem to settle himself and get on with his life?” This from a woman born in the 19th Century, a lifelong Southern Baptist now living almost in the 21st. And then a few moments later, looking up from a faraway stare, she was inquiring if I’d had any news lately of her Papa, because it had been weeks, no, months, since she’d had word from him, and she was starting to get worried, you know his health hadn’t been at all good, ever since the War (that’s the Civil War, mind you, her beloved Papa having passed to his reward in extreme old age sometime back in the first Roosevelt administration, I think it was, maybe seventy years ago).
That was by day. Nights were another matter. By night the kindly aides who loved Margaret, and whom she loved in turn, morphed into kidnappers and jailers. Unable to cross the living room alone in the daytime without cracking a rib, at night she could creep past her companion dozing in the recliner, fetch a heavy chair from the dining room, tiptoe with it to the front door, and climbing precariously up on it, fiddle with the multiple bolts and deadlocks that were set high up out of reach, each one a commemoration to some successful past evasion. Sometimes she made good her escape, and then they might find her next morning down the block, sitting patiently in a deck chair by the neighbor’s pool, waiting to be picked up by either me or her papa, two men in her life who had never met, separated as we were by a century or so, each of us born some fifty years on either side of her.
Generally the aide woke up, and then Margaret might wax belligerent, she had to get out of there, she was already late and I was expecting her, right over there in that house across the way. That one right there, she would jab angrily through the window, to show the logic of her position. The ensuing struggle might verge on violence, or more than verge, and then maybe she’d watch her opportunity and find the phone where it was hidden in a drawer, and ring up the police to tell them she was being held prisoner in some unknown place, a kind of jail which looked like her house but wasn’t her real house, and they must come and rescue her at once. Sometimes they did come, nice young men and women with grandmothers and great-grandmothers of their own, but there was not much they could do, and eventually some one of her younger friends, probably Chuck, would have to be called in, someone who could penetrate the fog and panic and get her settled down again. Since most of her younger friends were pushing 80 or so themselves now, and many of them didn’t normally drive at night, the situation was getting more and more untenable by the day.
And then next morning she was fine again — more or less, albeit a bit canny, as if watching sharply to see what story she was waking into today, who was who and what might be expected of her. Since she didn’t keep notes from the day before, she relied on the overlearned skills of an adoptive childhood to put the pieces together, scanning the people and the faces for clues, inferring the whole from the parts, all of it woven together with whatever memory bits were up and firing that particular day and hour, till she could get some kind of coherent gestalt, in which she could then take her place, and maintain (believe?) that she’d known it the whole time.
Memory being, as we know now, a present construction, the results of this process could be pretty seamless. Sometimes I had the feeling, then and later, that if I were to walk in one morning and say, “well, what do you think of things here in Russia? — and don’t forget, this is the day we planned to open the school, so we have to get on down there, all the children will be waiting” — Margaret would be startled, but not incredulous. “Russia!” she might exclaim, and then quickly, covering the reaction by reframing it, so it no longer counted as a slip — “Just think if Grandma could see us now — wouldn’t she be surprised! She would never have dreamed we’d make it all the way to Russia, would she, back when we were all growing up together? It’s funny, you know I don’t really remember the flight. I mean, of course I remember it, but I mean just not the details. I think I must have slept most of the time. But now what about the Revolution, and the poor little Princess? Are you sure it’s really safe here now — for the children, I mean?”
Of course we didn’t grow up together, Margaret and I, at least not in this lifetime, and I never actually knew her Grandma. That was my dad, youngest of the three Wheeler boys, her cousins by birth, the family that adopted Margaret in infancy when her own mother died. But if I looked at her and said, as I sometimes did, mock-chidingly, “Now Margaret, exactly how many Wheeler boys were there, according to you?” — she’d only look doubtful for a moment, checking the math and then changing it to fit the story, before replying firmly, “Four. George, Paul, Ben — and Gordon!” Firmly, and yet with a twinkle. Gotcha, didn’t I? her serene smile seemed to say, a metastory somehow disconnected from the running story itself. That is, maybe this is Russia and maybe it isn’t, and probably we were children together back around 1910 but maybe we weren’t, and yet definitely we’re here together now, enjoying this moment and each other, which is what matters, so we needn’t take the rest of it all that seriously.
Finally came the call from Chuck, in his capacity as Chief Friend — only not the one I’d been expecting, all this past year. Instead of saying it was all peacefully over, he said Margaret was more or less unchanged, up and down, different every moment but otherwise always the same. It was the friends who couldn’t take it anymore. It just wasn’t safe, for her or for them. In other words, this was the end of the road for Margaret. Either it was time for the nursing home, or somebody from the family had to take her in.
Now the funny thing is, if ever there were anyone for whom the words “nursing home” held no terrors, it would have been Margaret. Half her friends were over there, she always said, she was in and out constantly in those days, checking on them and doing little errands for them. “When the time came,” why, she’d just drive over and book a room. If she didn’t know when it was time, she’d count on us to tell her. And if she couldn’t drive by then, why then one of us could just drive her.
What neither she nor the rest of us anticipated was that when “the time” finally did come, her old friends would mostly be long dead, and her debility would be not physical but mental. It just wasn’t something we’d ever faced in the family before. Her cousin Sim, a couple of years her senior, was still driving to his practice every day and seeing patients — though he liked to say that they came in more to check up on him, than the other way around. Sim couldn’t retire, he told his children stoutly, because his “staff were all too old to get another job.” Likewise Margaret’s older brother George, still driving, though nobody but his wife would get in the car with him — and you couldn’t make him stop as long as he was still turning out the scientific articles on insects that he’d been producing now for nearly 80 years. The idea that Margaret’s mind, the archive and the census of all the family lore for the past two centuries, could suddenly be pillaged and looted by some barbarian disorder like the Library of Alexandria, had just never occurred to us.
As things were, it was only all too clear what a nursing home would mean. Margaret’s last days would be few but terrible, and probably not few enough, a nightmare hell of fears and falls, drugs and restraints, as she lurched her way through the ruined corridors of a once-handsome mind. The youngest by far of the next generation, I was the only one still in a big house, still with young kids at home, family life and even a duplex unit across the hall, Riccardo-and-Murtz style. Also the only one single — and the only surviving male (and where’s that much-vaunted, supposed “male privilege” when you need it, I thought with a certain ruefulness: isn’t that supposed to be your compensation for the stress diseases and the pressure and all the rest of the script, the whole lonely mess of pottage men are taught to sell their birthright for?) But there it was, all the other volunteers had long since taken two steps backward. It was nursing home, or me. I knew what my dad would do, if he were alive and able, and his only beloved sister was in trouble. I talked it over with the kids, stepped on an airplane, and headed for Texas.
From my journal of summer 94, last visit to Texas [clarifications added in brackets]: with M and Chuck at the bank [where her dwindling capital was held in trust] — meeting with Ron [the Trust Officer]. No way this thing can be done without the bank’s agreement. We can give M a home and family life, kids and excursions, errands and dinners and all the rest of it. But I can’t give her my days, because I have to work — or my nights, for the same reason. Evenings after dinner I need to be with the kids, even have a date now and then. S & J [my sisters] each promise two weeks a year, for when I have to travel — J & E [cousins] another week apiece. But the rest of the time she has to have somebody with her, at least 20 hours a day, 150-plus hours a week, 7500 a year and counting (if she has another year, which looks highly unlikely). Home aides cost money — lots of money, and more in Boston than Texas, where you have all those over-qualified, underpaid Black women. All M has got is [Uncle Ernest’s] modest professor’s pension, plus the interest on their bonds, a whole lifetime of make-a-buck, put-a-nickel-away at interest, in those days they budgeted savings the way we budget vacations. And Invading Capital is a mortal sin. M is already commiting that one now, though she doesn’t know it, and will only commit it faster and faster every month, it’s the miracle of compound interest in reverse. If the bank isn’t completely on board, I can’t do it. Luckily M’s moral compass no longer maps the financial world.
Everything is fine till we get up to go. M in top form, radiant and funny, and either remembering the plan or else faking it on minimal cueing (you never can be quite sure, she’s so good at it). Then at the door she turns back to Ron, her voice dropping confidentially. “There’s just one thing,” — Chuck and I exchange a glance — “it’s my house. There are so many of them, have I told you? They’re all over town, well, all over the state really, there must be dozens of them now, they have one nearly everywhere I go. I think they think I don’t notice it, because every one of them is absolutely identical, you cannot tell the difference, from one to another, right down to the dishes on the table and the pictures on the wall! Now how do they do that? Can you explain it? Because I can’t for the life of me get to the bottom of it.”
Ron looks a bit taken aback, but recovers quickly — old ladies are his stock in trade. Well, he offers sagely, sometimes there are things we just don’t understand, and yet at the same time he’s confident it will all work out, in time. That’s it –time, it’s the great healer. All things do come clear in the end, and everything works out for the best, we have to hold onto that faith. And with Chuck and me on the job, why he’s just sure we’ll work it all out, and isn’t she a lucky woman to be in such good hands. Plus a good bit more in this vein, till he’s got us safely on the elevator.
But not at all. No sooner do we get back after lunch, than wouldn’t you know it, there it is all over again. An exact replica of her house, same crack in the driveway, same towering pecan tree — now how on earth do you replicate a 100-year-old pecan tree? — it’s even more amazing than the house! Inside too, it’s just as she predicted, complete accuracy of in every last detail. How do they do that, she demands again — there must be a score of them now, so many she’s lost all count.
At this point I squander maybe half an hour of all of our lives in a vain attempt to convince her differently, which is totally pointless, but somehow I can’t stop. Really, I try to insist, it’s all much, much simpler than she imagines, because don’t you see, this really is her house — that’s why everything looks so similar. It’s not really a copy at all — it really is the very same house we left this morning, right where we left it. Look there, I say, there’s Grandma’s rocker, and over there Uncle Ernest’s clock, and look, there are the candlesticks your papa gave you at your wedding, the ones he buried under the outhouse during the War as a boy, when the Yankees came through.
Unfortunately, it turns out this only proves her point, not mine. She agrees the replica is perfect, that’s not the point. I can tell it pains her to have to speak to me in this emphatic, almost stern way, but what can she do, I’m just so dense. Don’t I see, she bears down slowly now, as to a slightly backward child. It can’t be the same house, because after all, we went out one way, and then came back another way. And they don’t move houses. Not brick houses like this one, they don’t. Now do I at least admit that much, or not?
She’s got me there. The thing is, Margaret has lost spatial memory, among other things, and with it, reversibility of direction, spatial conservation — and therefore mapping, that’s one of the first things to go. Thinking back now, I can reconstruct almost the exact moment it went, three or four years ago now, sometime in the six-week stretch between one visit and the next. We were to meet some friends at a favorite new restaurant, only suddenly she couldn’t find it anymore (or had they moved it, because it used to be right here, right on this corner). It had a Spanish name, which she couldn’t think of either, so eventually we had to give up and go back home. I didn’t think anything of it at the time; but of course I see now it was a harbinger.
And if you subtract just that one crucial bit, then her position is more logical than mine! It’s a better gestalt, out of the available data. Because they don’t move houses, there’s no arguing with that. She rests her case, triumphant if not yet reassured. Since Chuck and I are plainly no use on this one, she avows she’s just going to have to take it up with Uncle Ernest, as soon as he gets home from school.
Unfortunately, that consultation could never take place, in consensual reality anyway, Uncle Ernest having been dead now for about ten years. What comes back to me now, reading through my journal of those years, is just the sheer oddity of these juxtapositons, the creative sorcery of the self, only in the hands of the apprentice now, a meaning every minute but without the final, master spell that would hold them all in some kind of organized frame. Conservation of story, you might call it. It was life as a patchwork quilt, and every time you blink you’re in a different square. To be sure, each square has its own logic, but you can’t count on finding any master threads, the kind you can tug on to make the whole fabric bunch up at the far corners. The result was of course slightly discombobulating, which I assumed must be something like Margaret’s own felt experience.
Experiences that are disorienting tend to make you reach for metaphor, to steady yourself, and I remember my sister commenting after a visit that Margaret was still Margaret, still in the game, still playing out each hand she picked up, putting the cards in order, looking for bids and runs and sequences. Only each hand she picked up was from a slightly different set of cards, some of the old ones missing, and maybe some new ones in there nobody had ever seen before, the Jane of Emeralds, say, or the fourteen of Squares, so you might need to bend some of the old rules just a bit to play out the trick. Still in the game, as the saying goes, but not exactly playing with a full deck.
And what did that mean, being “still Margaret,” still so vividly, uniquely “herself,” no matter how the story shifted, the way a Picasso is still so unmistakeably a Picasso, even when it’s just two or three rapid lines scrawled on a scrap of paper? Self is the dancing, not the dancer, much less the dance, right? — or is it all the other way around? In any case, something slightly impersonal, our theory seems to be telling us, a force of our shared nature, certainly not to be confused with mere personality, which is only the signature on the canvas after the painting is done and dry. Margaret’s signature seemed to be more centrally there than that, like brushwork or handwriting, the part that was still consistent no matter how everything else shifted, not some residue or byproduct but the very essence of the process, unique, indelible, impossible to confuse with that of anyone else.
Meanwhile, gestalt process itself, the basic “wiring” of our bodymind, lurched and pitched on as always, misfirings and all, sometimes touchingly, sometimes comically — always creative, always struggling or else just coasting easily to synthesize some liveable whole out of the ever-shifting mix of elements at hand, just as we all must do. Thus the exact recall of every detail of her house, held firmly right alongside the plastic readiness to believe that “they” were somehow copying that memory in bricks and paint, and not just once but over and over. And not because that was at all likely, mind you — she wasn’t crazy! Quite the contrary, it was a giant improbability forced on her doubting mind by the situation, an unavoidable inference out of a whole raft of irrefutable perceptual data. In other words, what we generally call the “best available gestalt,” our natural self-process, that which by our nature we cannot not do. What could she do but try to work with it, as best she could? Thus she knew too that this was the kind of conundrum Uncle Ernest, as a theoretical mathematician, would naturally be intrigued by — while losing track of the detail (quite present at other moments) that her partner of 60 years had been gone now for a decade. (Later on, in Boston, she would often speak of her “three husbands,” all of whom had died: Fred (her first beau, who did die quite young, around 1920; this was the first we ever knew that they’d had an “understanding”); Ernest (who also died, but only after they had spent the next six decades together); — and Chuck, her daily driver, date, and lunchmate for the past ten years, whose dying wife had admonished him always to look after Margaret. Later on, Chuck never visited Boston as he had promised, because of health problems of his own. Therefore he must have died, which explained both his absence, otherwise unaccountable, and the deep ache in her heart. Not the bad Chuck, mind you — he was still living, he called just the other day: “the good one,” bad Chuck’s brother, her late third husband. You see, they were both named Chuck, she explained patiently, so really it was no wonder people sometimes got them mixed up . Indeed, some people didn’t know there were two, which of course led to much needless confusion (the three marriages story was a persistent one, lasting for several years, after which it faded as inexplicably as it had begun).
Thus too the experiential sense of loss was woven back and forward into a meaningful story. Even more remarkable was the way she might not know, in one part of her brain, so to speak, what the script was that we were in at the moment, or who we were in it — and yet at the same time, in some other part, she knew she didn’t know, and could strat-egize and temporize with great finesse and cunning to cover it up, and not get caught at it:
from my journal of 1996 — phone call from California, me to M: Hope [M’s companion] hands her the phone — It’s for you, Margaret — it’s Gordon —
M – Well hello there, stranger — you’re just the voice I want to hear! (“stranger” of course in a teasing tone, in case I was either to a daily companion, too long away — or else she hadn’t seen me in years)
G – Well same here. What did you want to tell me?
M – Why (hesitates, I can see her looking about the room for a useful clue) — why, just that it’s a beautiful day here, the sun is just streaming in — oh, I don’t say we haven’t had some rain, at times, and there may have been times that the weather has kept us in. You have to expect that, the rain and the sunshine (all in a philosophical tone now, in case it’s not true on a literal, meteorological level). But at the moment, it’s just beautiful. Outside my window there are flowers — I forget the name (rhododendrons) — as big as my hand. I wish you were here to see them — (this is what you might call tactical boilerplate, biding her time — and at the same time heartfelt, quintessentially, recognizably Margaret)
G – Well I soon will be, just a few more days now —
M – Well, that’s the best thing I’ve heard all day! And when do you steer next in our direction, exactly? (now she’s fishing, so she can get more specific)
G – I’ll be back (helping her out here) in four more days —
M – well, you know we’ll be counting them. It’s been too long. (a slight risk, but she knows how to pull it in, as the next exchange will show)
G – Now, I’ve only been out here for three days now —
M – Well yes, I do know that, but it seems longer. No matter how much we see of you, it’s never enough. (a cagey move — we’re sparring just a bit now, but not to worry, we both know I’ll never lay a glove on her)
G – Remember, we live together now, right side by side, I’m right next door to you, every day —
M – Well that’s what I know — that’s what makes it seem longer! (gotcha) It just doesn’t seem like home, without you here. (now that it’s established what episode we’re in, she can be bolder)
G – Well, I love you too. How are the kids — have you seen them?
M – (a direct challenge; tiny pause, while she considers her options) Well, yes and no, that is, not nearly as much as we would like. (there, that works) You know young people today, always in motion. But they do look in when they can, and we’re always so, so glad to see them when they do. (this again is plainly heartfelt — she’s remembering the feeling anyway, if not the actual kids themselves) Tell me now, where are you this time? — California? (bulls-eye! because I gave her “out here,” or did that actually just click in? and then, in case that’s completely ridiculous for some reason that hasn’t manifested yet in the clues) — or is it Timbucktoo?!!
G – (laughing) No, no, just California this time —
M – Well, it’s just wonderful, there are so many interesting places to go in the world. (ie, probably I travel widely, she’s pretty sure I do, from the “this time,” but still not to the point of putting all her chips on that square) I just hope you’re finding some time to relax this time, and not working all the time.
G – well no, this one is pretty much just teaching —
M – well now I know they do need you, and they appreciate you, just the same as we do, but still you mustn’t overtax yourself, you’ll do too much (all quite safe, since a teacher is by definition needed, and if not appreciated, then all the more in need of it. But now that subject is exhausted. How to open up a new one?): What kind of course is it this time — your…. your….?
G – Psychology –
M – That’s it, I knew that, I just couldn’t call the word. Well, you better come here and use some of it on me! — but then I know just what you’re thinking: no, she’s just a hopeless case! (laughing) Honestly, I try, I really do try, but things get so confused around here sometimes, with all of the comings and goings, I do my best to stay on top of everything, and help them all as best I can, you know, all the young people, with their studies and things. Two of them are here with me now — (in Margaret’s story, her main job now is the care and oversight of her three young live-in student/aides, supervising their schoolwork, giving them each a dollar or two in the morning for lunch money, and generally listening and talking them through their various problems, and their squabbles with each other, with her anodyne, yet somehow moving reflections about how we’re just each one of us different, and none of us is perfect, and we just have to try to do our best, and go along and get along together, and always, always remembering to try to make something of our lives. And in a funny way her story is true — she does hold them all, and they do feel it. I have to keep her provisioned with one dollar bills, so she can take care of “her young people” [but no larger bills, Hope tells me, because she just hides them all over the house. “In case the Yankees come,” she’ll say, if they catch her at it — only laughingly, in case that’s just a historical joke now])….
M – well, now don’t you be a stranger — (a tiny slip, forgetting that she’s already used the word. bringing up the students has sidetracked her, now she’ll pull back and just troll for awhile for more clues, till she finds out again what the main current was, that we were following together) —
And so it goes, a mind in ruins, somehow alongside or superimposed on a self in full glory — itself astonishingly creative, yet lacking some crucial ingredient that would take that creativity and ground it somewhere beyond the present moment, some extra- or atemporal realm of accumulating self-capacity. Contact without context, you might say– self without story, yet still playing “the crucial role of finding and making… meanings.” Only without an ongoing story, without a meaningful ground of relational context and that distributive hierarchy of identifications and long-term goals that we call, sometimes dismissively, “personality,” those meanings “made and found” don’t seem to be ones we can “grow by.” The result, self in its “pure form” you might say, turned out to look not so much like some free-spirited ideal of pure being, and more like something stunted, even monstrous, a fun-house caricature of Perls meeting a diabolized Sartre, no meaning and no exit. “You must not confuse contact with relationship,” Isadore From used to admonish to me (and others he thought in need of it). “Gestalt Therapy is the therapy of contact. It has nothing to do with relationship. Relationship is very important in life, but it doesn’t come into Gestalt Therapy.” (luckily for his clients, I don’t think Isadore practiced what he preached). But does this distinction mean anything — in our Gestalt sense of the word meaning? Does it contribute, that is, to a usable, holistic picture that can enhance real satisfaction in living — ie, to the constitution of meanings “we can grow by?” “The majority of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” observed Thoreau, by which he meant to refer to the way we throw away our birthright, in moral thralldom to deadening forms of social evil — the very kind of gestalt rigidity Goodman and Perls devoted their lives to destructuring. No doubt that’s true, but Margaret was living a desperation of another kind; sometimes you could see it just behind her kind eyes, for all her nimble skipping and creative covering, as she cast about hopelessly to find a place in some story she could recognize and belong to. I sometimes imagined I could hear her quietly screaming,“Help me, I’m imprisoned here, in a self that looks like home but isn’t my real home.” Only the scream was held in, more perhaps for our sakes than hers, out of not wanting to distress us, a final act of love.
And so she flew back with me to Boston, where slowly and steadily, and also strangely and against all expectations, Margaret was getting better. Gone were the falls and fractures, the crises and the constant infections. Cast aside was the hated walker, in favor of her old cane, which she mostly forgot to use. In place of the weeks or even days we’d imagined she had left to live (or at any rate live in a home setting), those first weeks gave way to months, the months eventually to years (ultimately, four years, till the hard times began again) with no hospitalizations, few doctor’s visits, and few complications of any kind (other than the constant issues of personnel — but that’s another story). Each day she seemed stronger, steadier, less on the verge of dipping below that line of no return. I know it sounds odd to say it this way, but nobody had warned me this might happen. If anything, my sisters were much concerned about the effect on me and especially the kids if Margaret were to die pretty immediately after we brought her up — in which case we mustn’t feel it had been a mistake, they cautioned. On the contrary, they both said, it might be the very thing she was waiting for, and the greatest gift. And so I’d concentrated on preparing myself — and the kids — for that probability.
Short-term memory didn’t of course come back, but it did show some improvement (or was it that the cueing was better now, with more contact and context?) Medium-term, on the other hand, had definitely stabilized: Uncle Ernest stayed peaceably dead these days (along with the other two husbands, to be sure…), and in general the events up to about the third quarter or so of the past century pretty much settled down into their proper order, no longer jumping from orbit to orbit like superactivated electrons (which was probably more or less what they were). Most of all, the relationship between short, medium, and long began to make sense and work mostly together again, so that her mental process, such as it was, began to be more a support than a source of new anxieties. Memory, when it’s working, shows a distributive, nested quality, the kind of active relationship we speak of in Gestalt as figure-ground, a model now being confirmed more and more every day, by the new research using magnetic resonance and positron emissions measures. The former, active memory or figure, is central and high-burn, the latter background and supportive/corrective, but both work together in a continuously recursive, dynamic interplay. Front burner and back burner, the expression goes, and in terms of energy that turns out to be quite literally true. Thus activating figure is efficiently and effectively supported and constrained by a kind of set of concentric rings or levels of successively lower activation, each level in nested relationship to the others, yet all of them still available for calling up if needed (the remoter ones often with some time lag, some greater or lesser difficulty or delay). In cases of close discrimination and hard judgment calls, we activate and scan the background nests or rings, alternately or in series, trying to trigger past patterns to support or disconfirm a present choice (or else the activation is spontaneous, triggered by some conflicting or conflictual pattern association). If all those different levels are equally salient (or random), equally likely to fire in any pattern, then it becomes impossible either to file new memory or to think anything through — and impossible to relax the level of emotional activation that is naturally brought up by engagement with figure, only now hyperactivated, as in post-trauma, and no way to find the off button. All this too is our natural gestalt process, our evolved holistic capacity and nature, which can work for us or against us, as we know in therapy and in our own lives. With Margaret, the elements of this natural sequence were all laid out separately, process without structure, giving me to understand it in new ways.
And so life went on. The weeks lengthened out into months, the months into years, in a kind of comfortable routine. Most mornings were bright, as I dropped over to check on things, in between clients or deskwork:
“Oh there you are, I’ve been wanting to see you. I’ve been sitting here figuring things out. Now you know I was born in the 19th Century. And this is, let me see, 19 and 90–…. what year is it, exactly? (96, I tell her). That’s it — 19 and 96, that’s what I thought. So that means if I live just five more years, I will have lived in three different centuries — the 19th, the 20th, and the 21st! (not for Margaret the lamentable media notion that the millennium will turn on December 31, 1999. She was born in 1900, before the turn of the 20th Century, and she’s not counting the next one till it gets here. But there’s more:
“Now I know, some wag will try to say — one of these smart kids, probably that rascally Alex — ‘look there, there goes my old, old aunt, she’s three hundred years old!’ Well, just let them, I say, don’t scold them, they’re only having fun, and if they can get some fun out of this old, old, lady, why, that’s just fine with me –”
— and then “Well, have you got the buggy hitched up? I’ve got my going clothes on, in case we’re going anywhere!”
In the late afternoons we generally did go somewhere, doing errands and picking up kids — Margaret’s favorite hour of the day. Those were our best times, that hour or so shared excursions out into the city, often the same route yet ever-fresh to Margaret. When I had time I urged her to come in the shops with me, where she had her favorites (or rather, they had her, and she took her cue from them). A prairie girl, she was ever impressed anew with the height of the trees (“As tall as a, one-two-three-four…eight-story building!”), the sea of brick (“Why didn’t somebody tell us to invest in a brickyard here, when we were little?”). Some days she recognized Harvard, which would trigger a chain of memories of her brother’s doctoral study there right after the Great War — quite the feat for a boy from a little market town in the Southwest in those days.
Other days were more or clouded: from my journal of 1998 — Margaret had been feeling low lately, mornings long and empty, evenings she was often too tired to come over for dinner, and too slow to be in the conversation if she did come. “Hopeless, worthless, and useless,” she replied more and more these days, to my morning question. On this day I took her some little present, the journal doesn’t say what it was — perhaps a necklace or scarf. I kept a drawer of them now, as you might for a sick child, so we’d have something to talk about during the visit:
M – this is for me? (opens the package, exclaims, puts it on, calls for a mirror, exclaims again) But why? — it’s not my birthday! It’s like — well, you know, like — like those boxes —
me – ?? boxes?? —
M – you know, the boxes. they give you those boxes, like this, with things in them. all pretty things, such pretty things…. what do they call them? you know — (M is insistent, almost agitated, desperate to connect, with me and through me to this memory, which seems to be flitting from tree to tree just ahead of her net –)
me – uh…
M – (frantic now, trying to get out of her chair) — THEY ALL GET THEM – PRETTY PRETTY THINGS — BOXES — … and all the love, it’s all about the love — (falls back into the chair, subsiding) —
me – (a wild stab, the freest association I can summon to the word boxes) — you mean Valentine’s?? (in my childhood we all had to decorate shoeboxes in school, all festooned with red tissue or hearts, which we then used as Valentine’s mailboxes. Each person was then to go around and put a card in each other person’s box — in theory anyway, though it did seem to me that some kids got more than others. They must have come 36 in a box, because I remember adding the extra ones to the least popular kids’ boxes, signed “from a friend.” I didn’t know this dated back to Margaret’s day — )
M – That’s it!! (slumps all the way back in chair, eyes glistening now with the triumph, and the memory). Valentine’s. I couldn’t call the word. This is like Valentine’s — and all the love —
She could even be quite clear and connected, on occasion, anyway, though more and more rarely now. Journal of early 1999, visit from my old college roommate Jim, Ben’s godfather. Jim’s father, once a prominent federal judge and some fifteen years younger than Margaret, was in a nursing home in Ohio, in the late stages of Alzheimer’s —
At dinner, M regales a table of 12, not two of whom she could have named, with her fond, hilarious tales of the early years of the century, her first automobile ride, circa 1904, her first year teaching in a country schoolhouse in 1918, with just her high school diploma (still possible in rural Texas in those days). The War was still on, her brother George off in the army, the family were all panicky about the epidemic. Of course I’m helping her, feeding her the questions I know will trigger the stories she can still tell. then later — “So glad to have the chance to spend this time with you,” she presses Jim’s hand warmly as she leaves for bed — craftily leaving open all possibilities: never seen him before in her life, known him for years, saw him just last week, he lives in the house, he’s a close relative, he’s a childhood friend, etc., etc.
Jim turned to me when she was gone: “Maybe this was just a good night, but I have to say, she’s a lot more in this world than my father. And something else — he grew thoughtful: you know, I remember your aunt from thirty years ago, when I came home with you that summer vacation. Of course we were just kids and wrapped up in ourselves and everything, but I do remember she was a warm, kind person, always making sure everybody was okay, nobody was left out. And the thing is, she’s still exactly like that today. She may be a bit foggy, but that part hasn’t changed at all —
“And Gordon,” he went on, “you remember my father, thirty years ago. A great man politically and all that, but let’s face it, he was self-centered, self-righteous, a little bit pompous, always expecting everybody to just listen to him — you remember. Well, I tell you, he’s exactly the same today. He doesn’t know his own name, and he certainly doesn’t know mine, but otherwise he’s the same, he hasn’t changed a bit —
“That’s the only thing that doesn’t change. I tell you, Gordon — you lose everything, except who you are.”
Who you are. The signature on the painting — that unique, ineffable something that makes Mozart Mozart — or Margaret Margaret. Isn’t that more or less what we ordinarily mean when we talk about self, in everyday language? As in “that wasn’t like him — he was not himself.” Something indelibly you, that makes you recognizable, to yourself as well as to others. Where does that fit, in our traditional Gestalt discourse of self: id, ego, personality — impulse, choice, and identity or self-narrative? The “animal, psychological, and social factors,” as Goodman said, with Gestalt therapy focusing, particularly in From’s emphasis, on the central term, the “identifying and alienating” dynamic. Ego chooses, in this view — but doesn’t integrate, that’s somehow the function of the self as a whole; — much less narratize about the choice, weaving the self into story, current figure and ongoing identity alike into some continuous narrative thread. That would be the personality function — again, in some readings, not a part of Gestalt therapy per se, which remains judgment-free, beyond the “process criteria” of “clear, bright figure against an empty ground,” as Goodman sometimes expressed it (self-contradictorily, it seems to me; italics added).
This would seem to be Gestalt therapy as a kind of ego psychology, only with ego more restrictively bounded than in the familiar ego psychology of the times, of Anna Freud and Hartmann and others, where the realm of “ego” would include relatively more of what Gestalt has sometimes assigned to the domain of “personality,” in Goodman’s redistricting of the classical Freudian “three-power” political geography of the mind. There would also seem to be no theoretical place, in this particular, traditional reading of Goodman and Perls, for who Margaret was, that radiant beam that made people stop and talk to her on the street, her particular way of crinkling up her eyes and making some joke, exactly nuanced and to the point when she couldn’t have told you what the point was at the moment, but she could still read it off the people, whoever they were exactly, and the feel of the situation. The way, as my friend Jim said, she scanned and reached to make sure everybody in the room was included, nobody felt left out. Who she was.
And still life went on, as it always does, even amidst and around an ongoing affliction like Alzheimer’s (except in the case of those legions of caretakers who don’t belong to a privileged, and thus can’t hire out the nights — or else who slip out of that status through the long years of financial and physical drain). The kids grew, began to go off to high school, college, graduate school, love and marriage. I too fell in love and remarried, a bicoastal arrangement, since neither of us was free to move to the other side of the continent. At 98, Margaret fell and broke a hip (or her hip crumbled, causing her to fall), despaired in rehab (“Just take me and chuck me out that window, I’m no good to anybody anymore”), then rallied and came home (against medical advice), still very much “herself,” still spinning an organizing story every day, even if her narrative line did wander more and more from its old gravitational orbits (some themes remained — most days this was a school, and she was responsible for everybody’s lessons, and general behavior and life planning, but they weren’t really listening, and things were not going according to plan). She simply could not organize her bodymind, it seemed, to coordinate the seven steps up from street level, so I put in one of those stair-chair lifts. One horrified look at it, and a massive effort of concentration crossed her face, she grasped the railing with both hands — and learned again to climb stairs (so the investment did pay off). In Africa a reader of cowry shells told me there was “another woman” in my life — only quite old, not well, and I was looking after her — but she would “not be dying soon,” she said, as indeed Margaret didn’t. At home, an old friend called out of the blue to tell me she’d had a sort of vision, unbidden, that my aunt (whom she didn’t know) was ready to die but couldn’t, because she was worried I still needed her. This was a bit outside my area of expertise; still, it seemed too like Margaret to ignore, and I began to take pains to tell her when I dropped over that I might have had a hard time as a boy, but she’d always been there for me, so I was really fine now, and all the kids were doing well too.
At 99 she broke another hip and became wheelchair-bound — at which point her live-in student helpers could no longer cope, nor did we have handicap bathroom and tub-lift facilities. Since she now seemed about as happy and occupied at the nursing home as at home (one school where she was much needed if seldom heeded being much like another), I yielded to the doctors this time and let her stay there. At last we could sell the big place and downsize, moving a short distance away where there happened to be a nursing home around the corner, so it was easy for me to look in a couple of times a day. She always knew me (though not always my name), and often had news of her Papa, or Grandma, or some other long-dead relation with whom she’d just been spending the day (but never her beloved Mama, whom she hadn’t actually known). Then one noontime I found her in an exceptional state of great agitation. from my journal, spring 2000 (also 1918, as it turned out) —
M – Oh there you are, I’ve just been sitting here so worried I don’t know what to do — (me – ??) — it’s all these exams, I’m just afraid I won’t be able to get it all done…
me – exams…? (I’m thinking she’s teaching school again, but that’s not it –)
M – you know, the high school exams, for my diploma. I have to get it — I can’t disappoint Aint Lizzie and Uncle Allen, after all they’ve done for me — (so apparently we’re in her senior year in high school now, sometime back during World War I)
me – well now, I think you’re going to do just fine. In fact, I’m sure of it (especially as I happen to know, which she doesn’t yet, that she’s going to take first honors at her graduation) —
M – oh do you really think so!? Well, you’ve certainly brightened my day —
me – well I’m glad. Now what do you think you’ll do, after you graduate?
M – Well, I’m thinking I may try to take the state teacher’s exams, and go out here and get a job in one of these little schools, out from town (as indeed she did).
me – well, that sounds like a good plan. In fact, I just know you’ll do it and be good at it too. But then don’t you think you want to go to college?
M – well yes, I’d like to, if I can save some money. I thought I might go over to Denton Normal (ie, the teacher training institute) in the summer —
me – excellent plan! In fact, you’ll make at least $75 a month, and full room and board won’t be more than $25, so with Grandma making your clothes, you ought to be able to save all right. But what about the University? (back in past years, when Margaret used to spend her time in the future relative to where she was now, she was quite proud of her University Degree, “four-year,” not just the 2-year teacher’s college, a rare achievement for a country girl in Texas in her day)
M – (shyly confessing) well, it’s my dream. but we’ll have to see —
me – well, let me just tell you, I just feel certain that you’re going to accomplish all that. And won’t Grandma and your Papa be proud —
M – I’m so glad you came in! — I haven’t felt this good in, well, I don’t know when — (which is true, she doesn’t, especially now that the river of time eddies and flows so freely outside its accustomed banks anyway, for M-)
me – (pressing on with the story) And then do you think you’ll get married?
M – oh, I don’t know about that. I’d like to, I think, but I can’t say I’ve met anybody I could feel that way about, not yet. And frankly (she lowers her voice and starts to twinkle, sign of a joke to come), you know, they’re not exactly beating down the door —
(I tell her I feel sure she will meet the man she can feel this way about, maybe more than one, and she will definitely marry one of them, and be happy together for many, many years. It’s a spooky feeling, being clairvoyant, I can see the appeal of it, to psychics and other intuitives, curiously powerful and benevolent at the same time, especially as long as you stick to the triumphs, avoiding the heartaches and the losses to come. M for her part is enormously comforted).
Margaret died in late spring of 2000, just before her hundredth birthday. I wasn’t with her when she died, having left town on a teaching gig after making sure her firm wishes were not going to be countermanded, about not being transferred to the hospital if this latest infection didn’t clear with oral meds. Increasingly these last few weeks I’d found her just slumped in her chair, some days feverish, often unable to do much more than just hold my hand and manage a weak smile, maybe stammer out a few words. I said goodbye to her more than once that last week, sensing I wouldn’t see her again. Then on one of the last visits, a couple of days before I left town, I found her a bit brighter, “more herself” — which is to say, able to chat and give me the latest news of “Aint” Lizzie, whom it seemed I had just missed —
M – and now what about you? are you sure everything is all right with you, and all the family? Does anybody need anything?
me – well, I need to tell you I’m going to be away again, teaching. I’ll be gone ten days this time (I’ve told her this every day for a week, but it’s always news) —
M – ten days! — that’s an awfully long time! (this startles me – in all the years, she’s never failed to say something like “now don’t feel you have to rush back, just on account of me. Take a few more days, relax, don’t work all the time.” For the first time she’s plaintive, almost a bit panicky). When will we see each other again? —
me – well, it may be a long, long time. But you know I’ll always be thinking about you, and all you’ve done for all the family. And then while I’m away, Sarah is going to look in on you —
M – Say-rah? do I know her? I don’t think I know a Say-rah —
me – well, you know her when you see her all right. She’s one of mine, and she loves you very much, and you love her too — (from there we go on to talk of other things, other people she’s loved over the years, mostly, most of them dead now for half a century and more. Finally, when she’s too tired to speak any more, she just holds onto my hand, looking hard as if memorizing my face. Eventually she slumps a bit more, loosens her grip, and I get up to go) —
M – Oh – (she gives a little start, as if waking from some other state). Oh now wait — (I turn back, lean over her. She takes my hand again). I have to tell you something. What was it? (she struggles to remember) Oh yes — you won’t say anything to Say-rah, will you? Be sure now — about my not remembering her?
Later, at home that evening, I’m recounting this moment to Nancy and the kids in the kitchen as we prepare dinner. There’s a little silence when I finish.
“Well, what do you know,” Nancy speaks softly, looking up from the sink, “– Margaret’s back.”
