Witnessing the unexplainable: Remen excerpt #11

For the last ten years of his life, Tim’s father had Alzheimer’s disease. Despite the devoted care of Tim’s mother, he had slowly deteriorated until he had become a sort of walking vegetable. He was unable to speak and was fed, clothed, and cared for as if he were a very young child. As Tim and his brother grew older, they would stay with their father for brief periods of time while their mother took care of the needs of the household. 

One Sunday, while she was out doing the shopping, the boys, then fifteen and seventeen, watched football as their father sat nearby in a chair. Suddenly, he slumped forward and fell to the floor. Both sons realized immediately that something was terribly wrong. His color was gray and his breath uneven and rasping. Frightened, Tim’s older brother told him to call 911. Before he could respond, a voice he had not heard in ten year, a voice he could barely remember, interrupted, ‘Don’t call 911, son. Tell your mother that I love her. Tell her that I am all right.’ And Tim’s father died.

Tim, a cardiologist, looked around the room at the group of doctors mesmerized by this story. ‘Because he died unexpectedly at home, the law required that we have an autopsy,’ he told us quietly. ‘My father’s brain was almost entirely destroyed by this disease. For many years, I have asked myself, ‘Who spoke?’ I have never found even the slightest help from any medical textbook. I am no close to knowing this now than I was then but carrying this question with me reminds me of something important, something I do not want to forget. Much of life can never be explained but only witnessed.”

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), pages 300-301.