Sitting with Louis II

The Other Side

One of the problems with my earlier piece about talking and sitting zazen with my autistic brother in law is that I sound so kind, compassionate, magnanimous, and patient.  A true Bodhisattva.  Actually, I’m no better than anyone else, but it isn’t too surprising that I sound that way.  I wrote the piece, didn’t I?  Looking back, I should have given some sense of how tired, exasperated, and hemmed in I sometimes feel, trapped in a looney bin with a giant 68-year-old child.  I mean, in the midst of a global pandemic, who in the hell is worried about seeing the Adventures of Tinkerbell?  (Especially because Tinkerbell lives on inside us.[1])  And no sooner do we get the perfect streaming service for his every weird wish than he suddenly decides to watch network television again.  Hey, NBC isn’t so bad after all.[2]

It’s like my reaction to the pandemic in general.  If I keep concentrating on my day by day, moment by moment life—sitting, eating, writing, taking walks, doing yoga, fixing meals or cleaning up afterwards, reading—it seems perfectly fine.  It’s a lot like the way I want to live.  But if for a moment I step back and start to think about things—will I ever swim laps again? Go to the Y?  Have coffee with a friend?  See my son and my grandchildren?  Go to a ballgame?  See a movie?  Go to an opera broadcast?—I get a little crazy.  And if you really want to be nuts, say to yourself: when will this all be over?  And what exactly do you mean by over?

Things went south shortly after I wrote the piece.  My wife and I returned to Durham for four days to check on our house and go to a few doctor’s appointments.  We left Louis with plenty of food (leftover risotto from the night before we left, plus a large meat eater’s pizza; eight boxes of cereal at least and plenty of chocolate Soy milk, bread and sliced turkey and mayo), and he had his usual chores, along with a couple of days of cutting the grass.  Even pre-pandemic, Louis had been down to three days of work per week.  He was used to having time on his own.

We called constantly, checking to make sure he was keeping to his schedule and had plenty to eat.  He more or less kept to the schedule and got things done.  Even when he worked at the supermarket, we used to notice that he would leave the house eight or ten minutes late; at one point my wife called them, and they said he was such a good worker they weren’t going to worry about his marginal lateness.  He took two days on the lawn; he loves using the riding mower.

The first sign of trouble was when he told my wife about a lunch he’d had one day: leftover risotto, two turkey sandwiches, and a slice of pizza.  That sounded a little hefty.[3]  But he said he was so full from the lunch that he didn’t want any dinner.  If you regarded that one meal as two, it didn’t sound too bad.

The real alarms went off when we found out that, for the first three days, he hadn’t taken a shower.[4]

I think that in some ways, in the years that he lived alone with his father, the two of them lived like a couple of bachelors in a man cave.  Who needs to bathe and shave, what the hell are table manners, why buy food when you can go out to McDonalds?[5]  But I also think that his extreme overeating was a result of rage at the way he was being treated by his father, also the way life in general had treated him.  And I think he didn’t take care of himself because he almost literally didn’t think he was worth taking care of.  Nobody paid any attention to him anyway.  So what’s the use of showering, shaving, brushing your teeth[6], any of the things normal people do.  It’s more fun to live like a cave man.  One with cable TV, of course.[7]

It’s taken a monumental effort, mostly carried out by his sister—the only person to ever really take care of him—to convince him that life is worth living, that it’s worth trying to have a good life, that he’s a basically handsome person (which he is), that he lives in a beautiful place and can have a clean and beautiful house and a good life (if the other supermarket employees on his pay scale ever drove over here and saw where he lives, they’d faint dead away).  She works and works to convince him of these things, but it’s like the myth of Sisiphus: she keeps pushing this giant boulder up the hill and pushing and struggling and finally gets it to the top, then she turns around for a moment and it plummets back down.  She’s been at this for fifty or sixty years.  We spent weeks and months convincing him to have a moderate lunch and a moderate dinner, to space his eating out over the day, then one day after he mowed the lawn he walked back and ate four huge turkey sandwiches slathered in mayonnaise.  When he eats that way he’s not enjoying his food.  He’s just stuffing it in.  He’s giving himself pain.

The straw that broke the camel’s back came two days after our return, a Monday.  My wife had noticed two huge piles of laundry, both clothes and bed sheets, sitting in his bedroom.  One of his chores is to wash his bed sheets every week, and of course to keep up with his dirty clothes.  Sunday had been his day off, and on Monday it poured rain right at 11:00, so he couldn’t do his walking.  We had gotten caught in the rain in our walk, so we had a lot of cleaning up to do.  I therefore called off our meditation, and told him that, in addition to changing the bed—his usual Monday chore—he needed to get all the sheets washed and the clothes.  This had to be a big laundry day, laundry all day long.  He said okay.

When he came to dinner that night, he had washed one set of sheets, but none of the clothes.  He’d been free from 11:00 until 5:30.  He didn’t seem to have done much of anything.[8]

Sitting zazen isn’t a cure for all this.  He’s not going to get up from his bench one day and suddenly be Ramana Maharshi, or even Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, who at least had a quirky personality.  He would like that, as we all would, but it ain’t gonna happen.  It’s also true that when he meets with me regularly, and I remind him of how to eat, and to be sure to do his chores, and not to stay up too late, and when we spend fifteen minutes sitting together (I don’t underestimate the value of that, though its value is mysterious and the Soto Zen party line is that zazen is good for nothing), he’s able to live a decent life.  (I had told him when we left for Durham that he could sit on his own, but I didn’t really expect him to do it.)  If he lives in a way in which he takes care of himself, perhaps he’ll begin to believe he’s worth taking care of.

It’s impossible to decide how much of the problem is autism and how much is the result of his upbringing and decades of living in a man cave.  Does he forget things because of short term memory loss that is sometimes characteristic of autism or because, at age 68, he’s beginning to get dementia?  Even if we knew the answer to that, what difference would it make?  The weird thing about autism—as my friend Levi used to tell me—is that some people on the spectrum want to stay away from others and avoid life, watch Mickey Mouse and the Adventures of Tinkerbell and forget about the problems of the real world, act almost as if they’re children, yet they also crave being around people, having a more normal life.  They need human interaction.  Being the shopping cart guy at the supermarket was in some ways perfect for Louis.  He was around people but didn’t really interact with them.  He was doing a simple repetitive task that he knew he could accomplish.  Then he could go home and watch cartoons.  He could spend the evening in Never Never Land.

One day before Louis came over I was looking through my journal and saw a sentence that I found inspirational, by a Sioux spiritual teacher named Charles Alexander Eastman.  I read it to him before we began sitting.  “Each soul must meet the morning sun, the new sweet earth, and the great silence alone.”  I thought he would find it heartening, as I do.  That was our task, and we were taking it on.

“I know,” he said.  “The loneliness is terrible.  Terrible.”

[1]Years ago Louis used to have therapy sessions with my friend Levi.  One of the great mysteries about Louis that my wife and I were always trying to penetrate was how he spent his time.  What, for instance, was he doing in the bathroom for two (or more) hours at a stretch.  I asked Levi one time and he said, “Talking to Tinkerbell.”

[2] Gimme a gun.  I wanna blow my brains out.

[3] This is a man who in his prime ate two baconaters (double cheeseburgers with six slices of bacon), a large order of fries, and two large drinks).

[4] We found out in an odd way.  When we got back my wife was noticing an odd dank smell over in his house, as if maybe he’d left wet clothes in the washing machine too long.  She was worried, though, that water might be seeping into the house somewhere.  She asked Louis about it, and he said the smell might just be his body odor, left over from his three days of not showering.

[5] One time we asked him what his favorite breakfast was and he said, a Whopper.

[6] I don’t really understand why Louis has a tooth in his head.  We’ve never been sure when he stopped brushing his teeth, but it had been years, probably many years, maybe thirty years, since he had.  Our Durham dentist, hearing of that situation, told us we should just forget about it, but my wife persevered.  The first time he went to the periodontist to get his teeth cleaned, they had to sedate him and work for four hours.  Even now he goes to both a regular dentist and periodontist to get his teeth cleaned.  We still have the feeling that, given the chance, he’d once again stop forever.

[7] Louis’ father was an extreme night owl; Louis claims that when they went to McDonalds at about 4:00 his father would get two cups of coffee and proceed to stay up most of the night.  He slept little, and when he did it was the early hours of the morning.  Louis’s schedule wasn’t quite that extreme, but he was largely nocturnal.  And sometimes when he had a job he would stay up late and still try to go to work.

[8] When Louis is alone for such a long stretch of time with nothing to do, what he says he does is “take a few catnaps.”  He sits in a chair more or less upright, then dozes off, then, apparently, sleeps.  This is a person who had slept well the night before, maybe even taken some cat naps before he went to bed, then, at least according to him, slept for much of the day.  I can’t imagine how anyone can do that.  I don’t think it’s that he “needs” sleep.  I think it’s just another way of avoiding life.