DEMENTIA & ALZHEIMERS :  FEARLESS APPROACH  Linda Mary Montano  2022

DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT have Dementia. I occasionally forget words and names. Who doesn’t at 80? This essay is an invitation to embrace/transform/let go of Dementia fear because maybe it’s a good thing to have a Demented empty mind?  Who wants to sit for centuries on a hard cushion in a meditation center to obtain coveted spaciousness when the mind itself can produce the Big Emptying all by itself? So fear begone! If Alzheimers is to be my fate, I dance the fearless dance of BRING IT ON!!!  

    
.THOUGHTS ON DEMENTIA/ ALZHEIMERS. Linda Mary Montano May 2022.               After over 100 performers sang, danced and magically performed art about life at my incredibly ecstatic 80th 21 HOUR BIRTHDAYARAM ZOOM party, organized by loving curator friends and now archived at Franklin Furnace, I realized that it was probably time for me to begin thinking about my personal ENDGAME and so for months at the 3 and 4am insomnia hours I heard myself ask myself, “Oh no, how will I die”!!! Convincing myself that this thinking was appropriate for my new age, I went down the shopping list of possibilities and wondered if it would be the big C? an accident? Heart? or Taa Daah the scariest for me: DEMENTIA/ALZHEIMERS?
Always the art fixer, the aesthetic medicine applier, the self taught art therapist, the one who thrived on creatively addressing her shadow, the one who could video the pain away( thanks to Tobe Carey&Jim Barbaro), the one who could write a beginners Haiku and feel better once it was saved in her Haiku Book, the one who sang the monsters away, I wondered if I could address this possible new challenge of “Oh no, I’m losing my mind”!!! Every forgotten name, address, phone number egged me onto my new project which is to make dementia not such a bad thing. My task was fixing it using the only skill I have which is ART. Having begun my research after taking care of Dad for three years, I made myself livable with the idea of mind-losing by making a video thanks to Tobe, Jim, Laura Kopczak and Josepha Gutelius which was dedicated to CNA’s and as a difficult forgetting person in the video, I posited that an Angelic Divineness could appear and rescue difficult, performer me from making the CNA’s life Hell. See PRAY FOR MY CNA. YouTube.
That was then, this is now and i’m 80. And I’m thinking about not the overworked/underpaid nursing home CNA this time, instead i’m considering my fear and trembling at the embarrassment of possibly running nude down John Street in Saugerties, the possibility of my addled dementiaed-self driving to Woodstock and forgetting how to get back home, the possibility of sending in my Central Hudson bill and inserting a blank check in the return envelope. And i’m thinking worse than these possibilities and in good self therapy fashion, warning myself that I’m actually planting some real interesting internal disaster,  screenplay possibilities for the time when friends text each other and agree that, “Wow, Linda has really lost it. There’s zilch life in her eyes and she is not only zig zag walking, but did you notice when she.......” Fill in the blank. There are tons of options. You’ve got the picture, right? And we haven’t even mentioned diapers yet.
So here is my current DEUS EX MACHINA, my HAPPY PLACE when I consider, think about, terrorize myself with ghoulish thoughts about my newest fear, early onset Alzheimers. It goes like this. I say to myself:
1. Linda, how many years have you been involved in the “spiritual” game, path, community, practice. I answer myself with, “Many.”
2. Linda, you are devoted to the possibility of your changing/adjusting/expanding/understanding/forgiving/enlightening this mind via all of the 8654 practices you impose on it, right? I answer myself with, “I guess maybe you are right.”
3. Linda,so let’s suppose that if you do “catch” Alzheimers, you will be on the fast track to an EMPTY, CLEAR, UNIMPEDED MIND.  Isn’t that a good thing? That’s what you have wanted all along: to become ONE with the Mystical Body of Christ, to finally be judgment free and expansive, to graduate to Nondual awareness, to be ENLIGHTENED! I answer this with, “ I guess you are right.”
.4. Linda, plus think of the practical pluses of no-mind: no more having to call the heater company when the furnace goes off in the winter, no more wondering who is right Johnny or Amber, no more so so much. I answer this with, “ You’re probably right.”
5. Linda, here is the clincher, I promise you if you de-fear Alzheimers, take the Monster out of it, if you courage up and face it/her/she whatever it is appropriate to call this mind taking condition, if you promise to laugh hard and loud with and at it, if you draw it, shout with it, DANCE with it then it will be just another luck of the draw. No matter what, you’re LEAVING DODGE. Why not go out dancing with and by yourself and hopefully with anyone else in the NURSING HOME willing to join. I answer with, “ Why do you think I practice daily Chicken Dances.”