The New Old Age - Caring and Coping
December 29, 2010, 8:00 am
The Caregiver’s Bookshelf: Memory’s Echo
By PAULA SPAN
David Burnett The novelist Walter Mosley.

Ptolemy Usher Grey, who’s 91 and living in confused isolation in Los Angeles, keeps radio and television news blaring all day long, partly to keep himself from drifting ever farther into the past, partly because he’s afraid that if he turns them off, he won’t remember how to turn them back on.

For two decades, in more than 30 works of fiction — including his celebrated, best-selling mysteries — the novelist Walter Mosley has been creating memorable characters. He dreams up Angelenos and Manhattanites, sets them in the present or in the postwar past, gives them sidekicks and adversaries, secrets to unearth and missions to fulfill.

But the protagonist of “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” Mr. Mosley’s most recent book, seems to have required a bit less invention. Mr. Mosley concocted Ptolemy’s boyhood in the segregated South, his squalid home, his avenging-hero actions. But he also gave Ptolemy the kind of scattered thoughts and flickering memory that afflicted Mr. Mosley’s own mother, Ella Mosley, who died two years ago. She was 88 and, like Ptolemy, had lived in the same Los Angeles house for 50 years, beset by intensifying dementia.

“I think it had been going on for a long time, 12 or 15 years, but the first eight I didn’t really recognize it, and neither did anyone else,” Mr. Mosley told me in an interview. After all, for a long time his mother still went to work every day. “At first, I was checking in on her maybe three times a week. After a while, I realized I had to call her three times a day.”

The real-life stories he tells are those many family caregivers will recognize. An only child who lives in Brooklyn, he first considered moving Mrs. Mosley to New York and brought her east to look at some residences. “She couldn’t do it,” he said. “She had her job, she had her friends, she had her house. She would have none of it.”

He showed her a facility in Los Angeles. “She was like, ‘I hate it.’ And it was a very nice place. But I would have hated it, too.” Eventually, he persuaded her to allow him to hire aides and drivers to care for her in her home.

Then there was the time he had to fly to Los Angeles and scour her house to find the long-term care insurance policy she’d bought decades earlier, then forgotten she had. When Mr. Mosley found it and called the insurance company, he learned that it was days away from canceling the policy, because his mother had stopped sending payments.

In the new novel, Ptolemy Grey shares her struggle to retrieve names and words, a process Mr. Mosley describes as having thoughts locked behind a door to which the key has been lost. “You know you know something, but you’ve forgotten it,” he said. “There’s a word for it, and you know the word; it’s in your head. And you send out this echo to try to get it.”

Ptolemy also shares his mother’s sense of simultaneously living in several time periods, most of them in the past. Mr. Mosley writes:

The sun was dazzling and he was a barefoot child walking along a dirt road, a young man in a Memphis back alley, a soldier walking down a French road with the bodies of dead soldiers stacked along the sides according to their nationality, race, and rank. He was a groom in his forties walking up the aisle with a bride so beautiful that he thought of her like a movie star or a queen that a man like him could only ever see from afar on the screen. He was an old man following her coffin to the grave, still amazed that he was even in her procession.

The novelist allows himself one bit of fantasy, “a very, very tiny moment of magical realism,” he said. He introduces a shady doctor who offers Ptolemy, physically still strong, an experimental drug that can fully restore his memory for a few months, but then will kill him. “Would you give up the next 10 years of living in a senile fog for three months of absolute clarity?” Mr. Mosley asked. “I’ve yet to find anybody who tells me they wouldn’t.”

His mother’s story ended differently, of course. No magic. But, Mr. Mosley said, “When my mother finally died, I felt we had tried our best, she and I.”

It’s not surprising, given soaring rates of dementia, that family members’ sense of incremental grief is beginning to percolate into the arts, via movies and poetry and music. But in recent years, Mr. Mosley is probably the most prominent novelist to turn to this theme.

He’s been startled, he said, by the response to what he thought was a smaller-scale literary novel. “The book has very broad appeal,” he said. “I don’t think my publisher or I anticipated that.”

He recently spoke at a National Kidney Foundation luncheon in Phoenix, for example. “Eleven hundred white, middle-aged, many of them Republican women — not my audience, as a rule,” he said. Yet a stream of audience members came up to him afterward.

“They said, ‘This is exactly what I experienced,’ ” he recalled. ” ‘This is exactly how I feel.’ Which is really kind of wonderful.”

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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