Jamie Brickhouse begins to notice some startling changes in his mother's behavior.
Jamie Brickhouse is performing his award-winning solo show Dangerous When Wet: Booze, Sex, and My Mother based on his critically-acclaimed memoir and directed by Obie Award-winning David Drake at Capital Fringe in DC in July, Minnesota Fringe in Minneapolis in August, and San Francisco Fringe in September. For show dates, visit www.jamiebrickhouse.com and follow Jamie on Instagram and Twitter @jamiebrickhouse.
This story originally aired on May 11, 2018 in an episode titled “In Honor of Mother's Day.”
Story Transcript
It was her hair that finally convinced me that things weren’t quite right with my mother, Mama Jean. She and my father were visiting me in New York in 2008 up from Beaumont, Texas where they lived and where I grew up.
I pulled my father aside and I said, “What’s wrong with her hair? It looks like she did it herself.”
He gave me this weary, exasperated look and he said, “Well, that’s because she did. She fired her last beauty operator. She said the gal kept screwing up her appointments. Your mother was the one who screwed up the appointments.”
I looked at her hair and it looked like a home perm that was left out in the rain instead of the usual raven mane coiffed into a perfect helmet which she had done once a week. Now, my mother, Mama Jean, hadn’t done her hair herself since she was in high school. She never left the house not being camera-ready. The face on, hair perfectly coiffed, nails perfectly manicured. So for her to leave Beaumont for a trip to New York City without getting her hair done was cataclysmic.
Mama Jean, you have to also know, was always in charge. She was always in the driver’s seat figuratively and literally behind the wheel of a red Cadillac. She made all the money, she called all the shots, and when she was onto me about something, she could scare the shit out of me.
So during that visit in 2008 I was a little bit worried that she might notice that things weren’t quite right with me either. When I was in the kitchen making brunch, she walked in and I almost jumped out of my own skin. I had a drink over on the counter in the corner which, thank God, she didn’t see.
I’m like, what’s the big deal? I’m having a drink while I’m making brunch. But the big deal was that I was supposed to be sober, because I had been to rehab about a year-and-a-half earlier at her expense. I had what we all call in the alcoholic world a low bottom. I had overdosed on a bottle of sleeping pills, the intentional kind.
When Mama Jean got news of that overdose, she slapped on her face and hopped on a plane, hair perfectly done, and she headed up to New York. When I came back from detox, she was waiting for me in my apartment and she pointed a perfectly sculpted red fingernail at me, “Your drinking days are over! And, by the way, suicide is a mortal sin, so it’s a good thing you didn’t succeed, otherwise you couldn’t spend eternity in heaven with me.”
Then she pulled out her checkbook and off I went to rehab, so I sure as hell was not going to tell her that I had been relapsing.
There had been other signs that things weren’t right with her that my father was noticing. At first he thought it might be early signs of Alzheimer’s. She was forgetting things, she was getting lost when she was driving, but he was old enough and he'd been around enough people with Alzheimer’s that it didn’t feel quite like that.
One morning, she glared at him and he said, “What? What’s wrong?”
And she said, “I can’t believe you let those women have sex with you in the lobby of the hotel while I’m up in the room.”
He just looked at her and said, “That didn’t happen.” And more of these kinds of things happened and that became a running gag with him: “It didn’t happen.”
It was like she just couldn’t let go that these were dreams or nightmares. She could not convince herself that they didn’t actually happen. After that visit in fall of 2008, the following summer in 2009 things really went haywire. She drove her red Cadillac to the beauty parlor and she drove it--backed into a line pole. But that wasn’t the worst part. She drove there sans pants. Her priorities were in order but the execution was misfiring.
Then about a week later, she called the cops and said that there were intruders in the living room and there was a little baby in the corner and a fuzzy animal under the dining room chair. The policemen showed up, no intruders, no baby, no fuzzy animal and she was just out of her head. My father had to hospitalize her in the local psych ward in Beaumont.
At that point, they had seen several doctors. He had seen her GP who specialized in geriatric patients. They had seen a psychiatrist a couple of times and now she was in the psych ward, which actually turned out to be like bad outtakes from American Horror Story Asylum.
So my father got her out of there and he got her to this fancy facility in Houston about eighty miles away, which was a geriatric facility. Then I hopped on a plane and I did what she had done for me. I flew down to Texas to be by her side.
During that first visit, it was like she was tripping on acid. She couldn’t follow her train of thought and she was seeing things that weren’t there and afraid that her worst nightmares were coming true. Now, I don't think she's ever done acid but I have and I know what it looks like.
Then at one point she looked at me and she said, “With your pretty red hair, you almost remind me of…” and then she trailed off. Everything she said that day lacked the one thing she never lacked, conviction.
But if you’ve ever been around someone who has dementia or some kind of disease where they're slipping away, there are those moments when flashes of their real personality pop out. One of those moments happened during that visit, which I'll get back to you in a minute.
So we still weren’t getting any answers. This geriatric facility. . . they weren’t telling us anything. They were happy to take her insurance money and take good care of her. And none of those doctors that we had seen before were coming up with anything. It wasn’t until a friend of the family reached out to my father and she said that she heard what was going on with Jean (this was a small town) and it sounded like she had what her husband had had, which was Lewy Body Dementia.
Lewy what? We’d never heard of it. Then we quickly looked into it and turns out it’s not a rare disease, even though no one’s ever heard of it. An estimated 1.4 million people in America alone are affected by it and yet none of those doctors, geriatric specialists had even heard of it or even mentioned the name to us.
It’s a neurological condition, a type of progressive dementia that causes deterioration in critical and analytical thinking and motor movements and memory. Lewy bodies are proteins in the brain that when they accumulate as neurons that’s when the craziness starts to happen. They're named after the doctor who discovered them, Dr. Frederic Lewy, a German neurologist who discovered them in 1912.
When we started going through the symptoms, our hearts started to sink because we were checking each one of them. There was wild hallucinations, delusions, memory loss, aphasia. She had that. She was having problems finding words. I remember one time she was saying, “What’s that stuff you put on your face to make yourself look pretty?” Makeup. Our hearts just really kind of plummeted.
Then we hustled and we found a really good neurologist in Houston. We took her to that first appointment with him and there was another flash of pure Mama Jean. When he tested her reflexes and he pulled out that little rubber hammer and he hit her knee, she screamed, “God dammit,” and punched him.
The doctor reared back and looked at my father and he said, “I've never had a patient do that to me before,” and my father said proudly, “Well, you've never met Jean Brickhouse.”
And he took a brain scan and when he got it back, and when we saw it, it looked like. . . you remember those round glass plasma balls that when you touched them their electricity in there they go crazy like a Texas electrical storm? That’s what her brain scan looked like. And the answer was, yes, she had Lewy body dementia.
There is no cure for Lewy body dementia. It’s a progressive disease, as I said earlier. Like alcoholism, it’s a progressive disease. But unlike alcoholism, it can’t be arrested and a lot of people can live with it for a very long time, and not live well.
Fortunately for her, although we didn’t see it that way at the time, her decline was rapid fire. From the time she got that diagnosis in September she was already on her deathbed in December. She had stopped responding, she had stopped talking, she had stopped opening her eyes, she stopped eating and then her body kind of curved into this arthritic ball near the end.
When I was down there in Beaumont standing by her deathbed I thought about that first visit when I saw her in that geriatric facility in Houston. Remember I said there was that moment, that flash of Mama Jean?
I was about to say goodbye to her and my mind was trying to erase what I had just seen, a mad woman in my mother’s body, wearing a nightgown that needed changing, no makeup and a crushed bouffant. Then she grabbed my arm in a vise grip and turned around and she was pointing a red fingernail at me and she said, “You've been drinking!”
The nail polish was chipped. “No, I haven't.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
And I wasn’t. I said I'd been relapsing, as I told you before, but I wasn’t at that moment. I had seven months sober and was trying to finally get a year. But how could she know that?
“You better not be lying.”
“Remember, Mama, that’s all behind us. You took care of that. I have you to thank.”
And I thought to myself who would blame me if I drank over my mother losing her mind? But there was another way to look at it. If you can’t stay sober for yourself, do it for her.
I looked her in the eye, “You don’t have to worry anymore.”
“Okay. But promise me. Promise.”
“I promise.”
And then I saw her as I knew her best, dressed for a party, face on, nails manicured, hair perfectly coiffed. It was the last time she was Mama Jean.
She died December 14. Two weeks later, I finally got a year sober. I've been sober ever since. So she died having known that I was sober with her help but never knowing that she saved me one last time.
Thank you.