Caregiver's Permanent Respite: Untrapping Memories

Road Trip to Liberate A Past

Michael Sedano

 

My wife died a year ago, five years after we were hit with the diagnosis, Dementia of the Alzheimer's type. 

 

February fourth marked the one year commemoration of Barbara's life and our fifty-five years together. I had lived in a numb kind of ongoing mourning through our five years. With Barbara gone I was flooded by memories and I was drowning in them.

 

I took a trip to make sense of those 55 years, to put the memories to rest by visiting where they happened. The process would complete the "after Alzheimer's" part of the rest of my life. In these spaces, I would release the mourning of all we lost when the disease struck, and liberate myself from remembering those five years of fearful progression from diagnosis to the last moment together.

 

It was just the worst time of year for such a journey. Pa'lla, threatening horizons swallow all the light, but rain holds back as I drive into the great central valley down the Grapevine. A few hours on, Pacheco Pass, a special wonder of wildflowers, lies fallow, its naked contours covered with newgrown grasses, how promising for Spring.

Pacheco Pass hillside soon to be covered with wildflowers

 

A planned detour takes me into Hollister. Years ago, I picked fruit in Hollister and Morgan Hill, but I am not here to remember my primos and their bracero step-father. I visit an Army friend, the fire-control operator on Mae Bong whom I shared many an hour with. It is good some friendships don't change very much despite fifty years' separation.

 

I expect the rest of the trip to disclose change. I want to find those changes in those places to discard the memories they hold. The towns, particular lodgings, a big bowl of cioppino on the wharf, cheese and wine overlooking Big Sur, elegant food at local fine dining eateries, I want to repeat most of these experiences, but I want to free myself of having to remember everything that happened before. Caregivers deserve permanent respite from those years of responsibility and mourning, in my case, fifty-five years bounded by five years prolonged and painful separating.

 

Barbara and I traveled not much. The California coast was a favored place since 1968 when we took our honeymoon along the coast. Repeated trips over the years invested special places with memories that compelled us to feel no urgency to find different locations. "Remember that time..." became a conversation starter as we drove to a longed-for destination.

Pt. Lobos iconic vista

Those places define my itinerary. Highway 1 along the California coast. Up the Central Valley up to Pacheco Pass. On through Steinbeck country to Monterey. A day at Pt. Lobos and the drive to Big Sur, Nepenthe, and Cambria. A few miles down Highway 1, Morro Bay. Then Isla Vista and Santa Barbara. 

 

Nothing's the same. We met in Isla Vista. Our apartments still stand. The house I got drafted out of, on Ortega Street in town, is a grassy field. UCSB eliminated the Speech Department, remodeled the department offices into a box office.

 

I am glad everything changed, nothing remains what it had been. I am refreshed by all these changes, reminded how fragile is the past no matter the weight of memory.

 

Ft. Ord is gone and our rental shack on the old highway might be a shopping mall now; I can't figure out where Cypress Knolls was amid today's acres of ticky-tacky. 

Cambria's finest dining

 

Some memories are denied me by natural forces. 

 

Pt. Lobos got ravaged by years of waves eating away pathways. The sea has forbidden my revisiting scenes of treasured memories. The atmospheric river closes down Highway1 at Big Sur and my route must backtrack inland to the Paso Robles cut-off to Morro Bay. The road trip plan turns chaotic.

 

I had infused these places with memories. Revisiting a favorite place evokes memories, brings things back all at once. Now I don't want them to do that to me, evoke painful reminders. 

 

These spaces become haunting reminders of joy and the last five years all at once. Joyful places overflow with regret.  I love these places for themselves and they deserve liberation from trapped and sequestered memories. As I begin the road trip, I feel urgency to free these places from those memories. I shall put a crack in the wall of time to let the light out, to let new eyes see what's there. I want to return to places with new friends and I want to visit them as if for the first time, fill them with new memories.

 

I took my sorrow on a road trip and left pieces of it behind in now-unfamiliar places that held once-favored memories. Those memories, like living with Alzheimer's dementia, need to be put away. This is how, after Alzheimer's, a new beginning can happen. 

 

Fiat lux. Adelante.

 

I have often walked on this street before. And the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before. Until I saw Barbara for the first time in the foreground building. I lived down at the end of the street.
Madrid Road is just another street in Isla Vista, to me.