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Introduction Prologue Purchase The Bad Daughter |
The Bad Daughter: Prologue A NORMAL BRAIN's network of neurons is a beautiful thing: like a graceful willow tree of white electricity coming from the brain stem. Or like a photograph of a firework exploding in a dark sky, its lines of light curving upward and then bending down until, at the ends, they disappear. It is as orderly as the thought it contains. By contrast, a brain with Alzheimer's disease is marked by clotted plaques and tangles of neurons — physical symptoms of dead spots in thought, of lost memory and confusion, disorientation and fear. In each of the cells in my body, there is a genetic message that determines whether my brain, having been the first type, will inexorably become the second by the time I am fifty or fifty-five. The message is fixed yet inscrutable, immanent yet invisible. It indicates whether my brain will die as my mother's did, in the same process of decay. As I age, time will burn the message into clarity, as if the friction of its wear had worked the message clear. This would be the more terrible way to learn, the slower. It was the way my mother learned she had the disease, by beginning to die. Or I may be tested and know in a moment what my fate will be. Early-onset Alzheimer's disease, unlike the late-onset kind, is strongly genetically linked. There is a significant chance that I have my mother's gene for the disease, but also a good chance that I have my father's harmless gene instead. It seems so strange to me that I am alive just at the time in history when the test that will tell me whose gene I have is being devised. I will likely know the test's result before the disease comes to me — if it does — and before I decide whether to have children. The doctor who tells me the result will be one of the first empowered to do so — with a power something like fortune-telling, a scrutiny not of the lines on my hand but of its smallest cells. A power coupled with a helplessness, because no one believes the cure will come with the test. It might come much later, so people say. I have looked for the message in myself. At twenty-nine, I look for any sign of aging. I am waiting to notice a difference, a signal, a line in my skin. If I do have the disease, I wonder whether there will be a moment when it changes into a concrete malignity in me, the thing itself and not its plan or promise. I often wonder: Can I somehow feel in myself, in my body, what the test's results will be? I remember the story that God creates the indentation on the upper lip by laying a finger on it to silence each child in the moment before light, so that the child cannot tell the secrets learned before birth. It is as if my body knows its destiny, and is silent. For me, this test, which will show what inherited genes will determine my fate, is the ultimate demonstration of whether the past will always find me, whether it is a real thing that lives inside me, waiting to take me back. In life, I have learned in other ways that even as I try to re-create myself, the past recaptures me. When I was twenty-one, I did not go to my mother when I learned she was dying, and I believed then that I could stay away, that I would never be punished for abandoning her. I believed that I could lie casually about what I had done, and the world would never take notice, and that I could live my life separately from hers, and not suffer. I found instead that I was punished in many subtle ways for leaving, and that my lying cost me more than I knew. This book is the story of my leaving and what it took from me, and of how I learned I might someday experience the very death I once thought that I could escape, that I had escaped — my mother's. |