Mimaw and Rekal

A few years ago, my maternal grandmother suffered a stroke that left her unable to walk, exacerbated her dementia, rendered her incapable of caring for herself, and thus landed her in a nursing home.  She still recognizes her family, she’s healthier and more lucid than most of the other residents, and she’s very aware of her surroundings.  When I visit her, she often tells me, “There’s some crazy people in here.”  However, at times, Mimaw has difficulty recognizing family members like me who live out of town (she’s in Marianna, Florida).  She also routinely mistakes other residents for long dead family members, and when she doesn’t see her dead loved ones in the faces of the other residents, she asks where they are.  Initially, my mom and her siblings would tell Mimaw that the people she was asking for were dead, but she would get very upset and start crying, so now they play along.  When Mimaw asks for her mother, father or anyone else who has died, they quickly make up an excuse for why they aren’t around and explain that they will stop by later.

In Mimaw’s mind the past now coexists with the present.  When I visited her a few days after Christmas, she had just returned from fishing in a nearby mill pond.  Her sister Annalois had baited the hooks, and Mimaw had reeled in 30 fish.  I had been with them, and Mimaw asked how many fish I had caught.  As we were talking, the catfish were being cleaned and cooked, and Mimaw asked me, “You reckon there’ll be any fish left for me and you when we get there?”  My great aunt Annalois has been dead at least ten years.  Mimaw was clearly reliving a pleasant moment from her childhood, and she wanted me there with her.

It’s devastating to see this.  Before the stroke, Mimaw was always healthy, her mind was sharp, she had an opinion about everything, and she wasn’t afraid to voice it.  She has been a Democrat her entire life, and she was an early supporter of President Obama, not a popular position in Marianna, which lies in the panhandle, a reliably Republican region.  During the 2008 Campaign, she expressed this support to her hairdresser who then asked her not to come back.  It’s hard to hold back the tears when this formerly vigorous woman points to the sleeping husk of another broken life in the bed next to her and tells me to hug my great grandmother’s neck and tell her I love her.  One thing that makes it possible is the consoling thought that she now lives in a world where she has the best of the past and the present.  She’s reunited with her loved ones who have passed away, and she still recognizes her family members who visit her on a daily basis.  In her old age, all she ever wanted was to be together with her family, and now she has it.

Mimaw is the clearest example I’ve encountered of the idea that reality exists only in one’s mind.  Just before visiting her, I had watched the 2012 version of Total Recall, and I recently reread “We Can Remember it for you Wholesale,” the Philp K. Dick story that inspired it.  The current state of my grandmother’s brain suggests that the story’s premise is much more plausible than I had ever realized. 

In the story, government clerk Douglas Quail visits the organization Rekal, Incoporated to purchase a virtual trip to Mars.  He can’t stop dreaming of Mars, and with his salary, he knows he’ll never be able to afford an actual trip to the planet.  Rekal promises that if Quail purchases its Mars package, his virtual trip will be indistinguishable from a real one.  Not only will Rekal implant memories of the trip; it will also provide him with physical artifacts such as photographs of Mars, souvenirs, Martian currency, and postcards with Martian postmarks to provide tangible proof of the trip.  As far as Quail’s brain is concerned, he will have been to Mars.

The only problem is that Quail has already been to Mars.  When the Rekal agents attempt to implant him with false memories, they uncover real memories that have been artificially suppressed.  Quail soon learns that he is an undercover government agent who had been sent to Mars on a mission so secret his handlers wanted to ensure that he couldn’t talk about it.  In addition to suppressing his memories of Mars, they  implanted false memories to give him a new identity.

 

Total Recall preserves this basic premise, but then moves beyond Dick and becomes lost in tedious action sequences and an underdeveloped story of rebellion.  Dick’s story is much more interesting as it concentrates on exploring the nature of reality, a theme that obsessed Dick throughout his career, and the malleability of memory, which he examined less often.  The story can be read as Dick’s way of examining the relationship between memory and reality.  It poses two related questions:  Does memory create reality? Does memory loss change reality?  Quail had no memory of his trip to Mars, and until his trip to Rekal, for him it was as if the trip had never happened.  His new memories created a new identity and thus a new reality for him.  The Mars Package from Rekal would have created yet another reality.  Dick’s answer to both questions is yes, at least for the individual remembering or forgetting the events in question.

No matter how bizarre Dick’s works get, I’m always willing to suspend disbelief and accept them on their own terms, but in many instances, his paranoid fantasies are so plausible that there’s no disbelief to suspend.  Until recently, this wasn’t the case for me with “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale.”  Although I liked the story, I resisted the idea that a virtual trip could seem just as real as an actual one, and I now realize that this was because I didn’t want to believe that the mind could be tricked by false memories.  Mimaw’s experience has convinced me that it can.

Her memories are real, but she’s lost the ability to distinguish between the past and the present.  They now coexist, and her brain has created a new reality.  If this can happen, there’s no reason to believe that one’s mind couldn’t be tricked into believing that a virtual trip to Mars was real.  This, of course, is assuming that memory implants are also plausible.  Recent neurological research on memory has suggested that in the near future it might be possible to erase particular memories with a pill.  If memories can be erased, it’s reasonable to expect that they can also be implanted, and if neurology becomes this advanced, it’s also not unrealistic to believe that it will devise more effective methods for treating dementia. 

I know that Mimaw, who turns 90 next month, will never benefit from them.  She is, however, acquiring at least some relief from her brain’s ability to create a new reality where she’s in the presence of everyone she ever loved.