Fall of the house

Lessons from Edgar Allan Poe

My father, to an unusual degree, was his house, a one-story ranch built in the 1960s. He and Mom bought it from the original owner in the late seventies, and since then he has installed, inspected, cleaned, repaired, or replaced every soffit, downspout, and mullion; every wall socket, quarter-round, and roof vent in it. With rare exceptions for travel, his quarter-century of retirement was entirely devoted to “doing things around the house,” which included single-handedly adding a boat shed, a kennel, and an extra room for his model circus, as well as his daily hours of “yard work.” We used to joke that he would deliberately plant weeds in the lawn just to have the the pleasure of re-seeding and tending a new patch.

These routines, with their sweetly minor variations, rewarded him with purpose. Until he fell and broke his hip, he could still tell you where, exactly, in the neatly organized garage he stored the can of touch-up paint the exact color of the paneling in the living room. That’s because automaticity, or System 1 in Daniel Kahneman’s classification of cognitive processing, continues to work quite well for people with dementia. What fails, what starts caving into the creek, is System 2: deliberative, complex thinking. (I’m tempted to pause here and pontificate about how this age of constant phone-attachment and short attention spans is fatally damaging everyone’s System 2, but draw your own conclusions.)

A life so deeply structured by routine may have saved Dad’s mood—he was pretty cheerful for an old guy—but it really hurt his ability to understand and navigate new situations, which is a System 2 function. Medical advice about how to stave off dementia includes cultivating neuroplasticity, or making new connections between nerve cells in the brain, by leaving our routines and actively seeking out new things, new challenges. That he definitely did not do. The years of Covid isolation may have worsened the brain-rut, brain-rot of many older folks who were already at risk. (Has anyone done a study on this?)

You probably know Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” or at least the not-bad, super-loose adaptation on Netflix. The story’s narrator goes to visit his childhood friend, Roderick Usher, who lives in the family’s old mansion on a lake. From the start, he notices a crack along its exterior roof. Roderick, who suffers from “a morbid acuteness of the senses,” is convinced the house is sentient: a being that can feel. “In his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization. I lack words to express the full extent, or the earnest abandon of his persuasion.”

Roderick’s “disordered fancy” reminds me of the hallucinations and wild stories that the diseased brain conjures in order to keep up the reassuring perception of normalcy. As the narrator discovers, no matter how many reasonable things you may say, it’s hard to dislodge this imagined reality. Declining further into “inorganization,” Roderick’s mind and body collapse—and so does the house itself, the crack widening into a fissure, sinking into the dark waters.

The day before he broke his hip, Dad walked a mile on the sand dunes with me and engaged in a complex conversation about finances. The past eight weeks of physical assaults on his flesh—surgeries, blood clots, trouble breathing, infections—have unquestionably taken out more of his brain’s capillaries and nerve cells. If the person you care about is not one of the select few whose dementia is being tracked by sophisticated diagnostic biomarkers, your only tool for assessing the progress of its cracking and disintegration is the seven-stage chart.

Impressionistically, I’d say the (literal) fall and its medical aftermath were a storm that dropped him precipitously from Stage 4 to Stage 6. But how much of this is physiological and how much psychological? I used to wonder, who would Dad even be if he couldn’t mow his lawn? (He won’t.) Disorders of the brain just laugh at our measly efforts to distinguish between mind and body.

As I re-read it today, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a survivor’s testimony. The narrator runs away from the ruin of his friend and his home—shaken and also, importantly, touched.

[Thanks for reading: it makes me feel less alone! Next post will be about Mom, and I will alternate.]