This week, CBC Radio is running a five-part series on memory called The Once and Future Past. I caught part of last night's show, which was apparently devoted to the moment you recall something. The interviews touched on false "recovered" memories, the reliability of eyewitness testimony, and the general suggestibility of memory. The program also mentioned post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), mostly to distinguish it from the other topics it was covering last night. Of course, that's the part that was the most interesting to me.
From what I understand of PTSD, it's very different from being haunted by memories of something. It's more like being unable to distinguish between "now" and "then." Instead of remembering something, you re-live it.
I doubt I've had experiences traumatic enough to "count," on some cosmic counter, as PTSD. But I think a lot of what we slap labels on is actually just an experience that's at one end of a spectrum of experiences. Perhaps PTSD is an extreme form of an experience that some of us more boring people also have in a milder form.
Here's why it's on my mind.
When my father was sick in Tucson last spring, my sister and I drove regularly from her house to the hospital and the rehab facility and finally, once, to the hospice facility, all in the same campus of buildings. We did it for nearly a month before he died. We got really good at it. We learned what to carry with us (bottles of water, address/phone books, pads of paper, extra pens, cell phone chargers). We learned how to find the ER, the 400s, the surgery waiting room which doubled as the waiting room for the CCU, the place with the bad espresso, the in-cafeteria Starbucks, the Schlotzky's. We learned visiting hours and how to get in after visiting hours.
We learned to cope with myriad new realities at a moment's notice: my father was sick enough to be hospitalized, then suddenly critical, then slowly mending, then definitely recuperating, then experiencing setbacks, then holding his own, then suddenly dying. It was an intense experience, and a rewarding experience, and one I hated but wouldn't trade for anything.
This past weekend, my sister hosted our elderly aunt for a weekend's visit. They went to a fancy wedding, and my aunt tripped and, as it turned out, broke her nose. An ambulance came and took her to the same ER where my father had been. My sister called me in the wee hours, understandably distraught at packing her bag again with address/phone books, pads of paper and pens, water, cell phone charger. She didn't want to get into the car and make that drive again, to park in the lot again, to sit in the same ER again, to see the same hospitalists, to listen to a patient under sedation ramble incoherently, to be across the hall from a dying patient, to hurry up and wait, to wait some more while our aunt was admitted.
Was she re-living our March/April trauma? It sure felt like it to her. Yes, she knew that what she was experiencing was "now," and that her experience with my father was "then." She knew in her head that she wasn't back there in that time, but that logic didn't really register. It didn't feel like it. It felt to her as if the line between present and past trauma blurred. Whether that "counts," on that cosmic counter, as PTSD is immaterial. There are degrees and degrees of flashbacks, and she was having one. I was sorry not to be there to support her, but I wasn't sorry to miss out on the experience.
Her experience has made me more aware of how much of my life I spend in some other time--whether it's whining about the previous value of the loonie and running mental calculations on what I would get for this U.S. check if I'd had it a year ago, or worrying about whether I'll be able to cover for a receptionist on Tuesday without seriously screwing up. Obviously, those experiences aren't PTSD. But my own lesson from the experience is that I could stand to live more in the "now," and less in the "then," whether present or future.
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P.S. I could say that our aunt's story ends more happily than our father's. But I'm not so sure.
Our aunt is safe at her home, where she still lives alone. Her daughter, son, and daughter-in-law are conferring about her general health and future care. Their journey is just getting started. At the very least, they'll need keys to her house, plus permission to attend her medical appointments and know her medications. What they could use is a good dose of courage to ask the tough questions about her mental status. And then they'll need a backbone of steel for the road ahead.
Meanwhile, my father died in April, firm in his faith and surrounded by love and laughter. Perhaps that's the best ending to his story, if his story had to end at all.
