What Makes Us Us?

I have several parishioners who are losing their minds.  I know that may not be the politically correct way to put it, but I can’t think of a more apt description.  They are mentally not who they were when I met them.  They’re forgetful or confused or angry or lost.  They are all in their eighties, although I know plenty of people that age or older who are fine.  I am troubled by the changes or even loss of personality in these people who have become so dear to me over the almost 11 years that I have known them.

There is one woman who is so afraid of what her memory loss means that she has pushed everyone in her family away.  She needs to be in control of everything – to the point that she wouldn't let them take her out to lunch on Mother’s Day but insisted that she follow her routine and have a sandwich at the kitchen table while they weren't allowed to vacuum or do anything that might make her home cleaner or more livable. 

There is another woman who is always delighted to have me visit, but is unable to carry on a conversation beyond expressing her delight that I am there.  We've had numerous fascinating talks over the years about the development of the local area in her lifetime and I had hoped to someday film or record her telling them, but she is no longer able to string coherent thoughts together, much less share them in any meaningful way.

Then there’s the sweetest gentleman who is also happy to see me, but wonders what method of transportation I took to get to him – train, bus, or plane – as he’s convinced he’s in his summer cabin three states away.

There are others in my congregation who are also struggling with memory issues; these are just three examples of people who once were vibrant and productive in the church, in their workplaces, in their family lives, who now are bare shadows of who they once were.  It really makes me wonder what it is that makes us who we are, what makes us us?  

We have lots of conversations in the church about the soul: who has one, who owns it, what happens to it when we die.  But I am wondering what happens to it while we’re alive.  If we are no longer able to remember who we are, are we ourselves?

This question has been raised in several ways, one of the most compelling of which was in the short-lived television show “Dollhouse.”  The crux of the philosophical debate in that fictional context was in the technological ability to strip an individual’s personality and save it to a hard drive, then download other personalities into the brain pan for corporate gain.  People in the show who've been “wiped” do have a vestigial personality, but it is simple and malleable.  One of the taglines for the show was “you can wipe away a memory, but can you wipe away a soul?”

Boyd (Harry Lennix) is Echo's (Eliza Dushku) handler, while

Topher (Fran Kranz) is the brilliant mind who makes stripping

hers possible. (Photo credit: IMDb)

What exactly is the soul?  If it is the essence of what makes us who we are, is what we remember important?  I first pondered this about 10 years ago as I watched the documentary “Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter.”  That Oscar-nominated film by Deborah Hoffman shows her struggle with the loss of relationship with her mother, Doris.  Not because she and her mother have had a falling out, but because Alzheimer’s takes Doris’s memory away.  She no longer recognizes Deborah, and even though Doris is mostly happy in her minimized condition, Deborah is – understandably – not.

I have no answer for these questions, only sadness.  As I watch person after person that I know become something not less but definitely other than what he or she has been to me, I wonder whether a long life without the connections that make that life meaningful is worth living.  Do I wish to exist beyond my ability to remember those I love and the experiences that have given my life purpose and direction?  All I know is that I will continue to love these people as they are now, as well as how they have been, in hopes that it is enough.