Chapter one

God Is a Murderer

September: About eleven months since we moved my mother to California to live with us, I wake at dawn from queasy dreams where I'm sliding down steep slimy banks of mucky pools or flying in a crowded flimsy airplane being pulled to earth by heavy gravity or searching for lost kittens in a dank primeval forest. The morning light is gray and hopeless; I hear my mother's feet outside shuffling like the Swamp Thing across the driveway to get her morning paper. Her presence pulls umbilically at my gut. I gulp a Valium and burrow under the blankets, my body stiff with fear and fatigue, head throbbing from too much wine the night before. Though the room is still, I can feel acceleration in my stomach, my bed a rollercoaster car just cresting and starting its plunge, but the acceleration is not of motion, it's of time, warp-speeding me into my own old age and decrepitude. The thoughts that seethe around in my brain are pornographically mortal. They shock even me.

Whoever said love is stronger than death was full of malarkey. There's no contest. Death is a sumo wrestler, and it slams love to the mat every time. When my mother's husband died twelve years ago, her own life was pretty much sucked out of her, though she still walks and talks. I loved Mike, too. Let me give you some advice: Unless you have deep religious faith (I have none at all) or objective detachment bordering on the abnormal, don't read the autopsy report of someone you loved. I peeked at a few pages of Mike's, and regret it. There are no euphemisms there. Bone saws and steel buckets will remind you just how strong death really is.

And death's warm-up act, Alzheimer's, is no less a brute. You'll never be the same once it's paid you a visit -- believe me. Just a short time ago, I was ignorant. I'd heard stories, of course, but like winning the lottery or going to prison or being abducted by aliens, you just can't know how it is until you've lived it. Now I know. Alzheimer's is death in slow motion, and it has the ability to kill love while the person you love still breathes.

My mother was always my favorite person. And a lot of other people's, too. Hip, cool, brilliant, funny, sane. A writer. My ultimate confidante and sympathizer. Not like the other mothers. My friends always came to my house to escape their regular boring (or crazy) parents. I have a picture of me and a bunch of teenaged friends one summer in the mid-sixties cavorting in the backyard of the house in Connecticut, my mother sitting in our midst in a canvas chair, slim elegant blue-jeaned legs crossed, laughing. We're all free and easy, horsing around, performing for her. She's in her early forties, beautiful, probably a year or so away from meeting Mike.

She was born in 1922. The first shadows fell around 1997 with blanks in her short-term retention and disquietingly uncharacteristic lapses in judgment. It's plain to us now that she struggled to hide it for a couple of years. She's graduated to delusions and disorientation and now some long-term memory loss, too.

My mother's been severely, profoundly depressed since Mike's death, and I believe that this was the cause of her mental deterioration. I don't have hard, irrefutable clinical evidence that this is so -- it's just what I know. I believe protracted despair weakened her, changed the physical structure of her brain, made her vulnerable to the disease. Chronic sorrow is a parasite. It eats your strength, appropriates your will, moves like toxic sludge through every system of the mind and body. And my theory is not so farfetched. Everyone knows that depression compromises the immune system. Look at the statistics on cancer survival and mental health. How often do we hear about couples dying within weeks or days of each other? Alzheimer's is still a mystery, but they're slowly finding things out. Recent research points to an autoimmune disorder -- an inflammation of the brain. So there it is. I think grief literally burned out the circuits of my mother's brain.

And it did it in a sly, self-serving way that points to itself as the culprit: It robbed her of her wit, intellect, judgment and competence, but it made sure its own pathways were sturdy and intact. She forgot everything, but she didn't forget her grief. It stayed vital, grew stronger, gathered momentum. If I'm completely wrong, and my mother was going to lose her memory even if Mike hadn't died, her illness would not have taken the form that it did, fueled by heartache and vodka, shaped by desolation. None of this would have happened.

But Mike did die. And it did happen.

In mid-November 1989, late in the afternoon, my mother and brother and I filed into the Intensive Care Unit of a major San Diego hospital. We stood in awe around Mike's bed. He was just coming out of the anesthesia after a major and radical six-hour operation where they'd opened up his chest and put him on a heart-lung machine. This had not been bypass surgery or anything else we've all heard of. This was such a rare, specialized and risky procedure that only two hospitals in the country performed it. I'd never seen an I.C.U. before. It was a temple of mystery with its hushed atmosphere, brilliant lights and stupefyingly sophisticated technology, Mike's bed the altar where human sacrifices were offered to a perverse deity with a jaded appetite.

Mike struggled to focus. He grasped at our hands. My mother kissed him and spoke in his ear. He'd made it. All of us, Mike included, thought that if he died it would be on the table. But he'd come through and opened his eyes. He was out of danger.

Wrong.