I’ve never been around someone on acid or mushrooms, but I can imagine it would be similar to being around my great-aunt Ada this week. Every now and then, she hallucinates very vividly. This time her ‘trip’ lasted three whole days.
“Oh! Someone else is here!” She exclaimed looking at the blanc space in front of the the door.
“Who?” we asked.
“There is somebody here!” she insisted, and then turned to the left and started clawing at something in the air beside her. “What is this? What is it?” she kept saying.
It didn’t bother me. I felt like it was just her brain giving these messages to her eyes. But her night nurse T gave me a knowing look, and said “She’s been calling out for the dead, you know. Looking for her Mother, her sister and her husband, and seeing a little girl,” which is apparently common for the elderly to do.
“They are coming for her, you know.”
“They are coming for her, you know.”
All of Ada’s Caribbean aids believe in, and have a bit of an unexplained psychic ability. Jean, her day nurse sometimes tells me how she was at home in Brooklyn when she knew something bad had happened to Ada so came around early – it turned out Ada had had a stroke. T’s sister (a more specific psychic) will call and tell her when people they know of have died - before anyone else knows.
During the rare occasions that Ada hallucinates, she doesn’t sleep. Her eyes may roll back, or dart back and forth when she rests, but she continues to move and babble in a mixture of Polish and English, cycling through different moods and emotions. It’s like she is possessed.
One night she got up and shuffled out whaling and sobbing “No! Don’t, please! No! They are coming. Ahhh!” It was very dramatic, like she was in a stage play doing a torture scene. On the third night, she finally collapsed in into sleep, one arm hanging off the edge of the bed, like she had passed out drunk, her body occasionally twitching with nervous impulses. We dared not move her, lest we wake her up again.
It seems the kinder thing to do when she gets like this, would be to give her a couple of valium after the first day. Id’ asked her psychiatrist previously about this, but she had wanted to increase the amount of anti-psychotic pills she takes, which only seem to take effect after a few days – and then they turn Ada into a dopey, sleepy mess who forgets how to walk and talk.
It feels like the process of growing old and dying in her case, is a long drawn out and laborious one. A natural phenomena that is not entirely unlike the process of being borne into the world. I do sometimes wonder though, if Ada should have had that heart surgery years earlier, or if the tens of pills we give her every day are prolonging her life against natures will.
