An Unusual Experience

Kate and I went to Panera after the sitter left yesterday. As always, she worked puzzles on her iPad while I worked on my laptop. About 5:30, I asked if she might be ready for dinner. She held her hand up as if to say, “Wait a minute.” She was working intensely on her iPad. She looked very serious as though she had run into a problem. I couldn’t see the screen but had to assume she was working a puzzle. That is all she does on it unless she accidentally opens another app. When that happens, she asks for my help getting back to her puzzles. This doesn’t involve the same seriousness I was witnessing.

I let her continue without interfering. About ten minutes passed. She was still engrossed with her iPad. I offered to help her. Once again she held up her hand to stop me. She finally closed her iPad, something she does when she gives up on solving a problem she encounters. She was disturbed. Tears were beginning to form in her eyes although she didn’t cry. I asked her to tell me what was bothering her. She tried to speak, but she couldn’t say anything that I could understand. At first, I thought she might be worried about her inability to work her puzzles. I did finally grasp that she was trying to tell me about something horrible that she had read.

Yesterday’s speaker at Rotary was the daughter of Holocaust survivors. I had told Kate what an emotional experience it had been for the entire club. I began to suspect that she had been thinking about the Holocaust. When I asked if that was what was bothering her, she said it was. She didn’t mean my telling her about the speaker. I am sure she didn’t remember I had done that, but somewhere in her brain the memory of the Holocaust had disturbed her. This is one of those events that will always be a bit of a mystery. Here is the only explanation that I can offer, and it sounds strange.

Kate is an emotionally sensitive person. That has been especially so since Alzheimer’s came into her life. As a school librarian, she became quite familiar with the Holocaust. Many students worked on research projects on the topic. Kate read a lot on the subject and has always taken an interest in WWII movies that deal with it. Perhaps my telling her about our speaker sparked her latent memories. That itself is not hard to imagine. The question is, “What kind of experience did she have for ten to fifteen minutes?” It looked like she was working on a puzzle, but she was too intent and emotionally involved for that. She conveyed that she had been looking at something about the Holocaust on her iPad. I don’t believe that could have occurred. She wouldn’t have known how to locate that kind of information. My only thought is that she was having an hallucinatory experience. She has had them before, but they were different. They have always involved her telling me about something that someone has said or done that I know didn’t occur. This time I was watching her as she was having an hallucination, BUT I’ll never know if that is really what happened.