Papa

My Papa passed away yesterday morning, peacefully, in his sleep.  The nightmare has ended for him, and for us too I suppose.  Hospice is a gift.  Rest in peace, Papa.

Nightmares and dreams.

My Papa is dying.  His room is down the hall, and I can hear the aria to some light opera, as soundtrack.  I'm working at marketing book 2, while Susan, a loving caregiver, holds his hands during the intermittent torments.  It will be my job to squeeze his frail hands later, as I held them earlier, letting him cling to this world even as the other stakes its claim.  Death waits in our house.  He's a nice chap, quick witted, polite, but his scythe is in everyones' way.

I am a mass of confusion, awhirl with self doubt, plagued with my own demons, and a life to continue.  Tick, life ebbs away in tiny increments, the light creeping ever closer, no matter how hard he tries to retreat from it into shadow.  Tock, his fear is palpable.  What secrets does he carry?  Or is it but the vast unknown that furrows his brows into channels of worry?  Is it the Lewy Body dementia which invaded his brain like an alien, spreading its web of lies and misrepresentations, making its world more real to him than the one in which he dwells.

He turned 95 yesterday.  96 according to social security, but I'd like to think he knows  best.  Happy birthday, Papa.

I've contracted whatever bronchial crud he has, symbiotically I suppose.  So now I croak to him, instead of singing, to keep the demons at bay, to soothe his savage beast.  Porgy and Bess, show tunes, slaves songs, children's rhymes, Amazing Grace, anything to distract him from the  nightmares he snarls, growls, and punches out at, while I see naught but air.

I wonder if it was inevitable, this way to end his life.  Was it destiny?  Were there other paths he might have walked?  A shorter life without the insanity which has plagued him as hallucinations for at least a decade.  Did they come on gradually?  Did he notice at first, or did he think what he saw was just part of the landscape?  I have a rich fantasy life, but it pales in comparison to the multilayered world in which my father has survived these last ten years.  A world which real life thieves exploited.  On how many others do they feed?

He hid his growing dementia well.  Anger the tool to keep the suspecting at a non-questioning distance, until the other body parts began to fail and full disclosure was inevitable.  The delusions had already plagued him for years.  He told no one.  Not doctors, friends, or family, but he took phone calls from con artists bullying him into sending them money orders, weekly, twice weekly, then daily.

After Papa goes I'm the last of the five who made up our nuclear family.  Mama, Tian, and Ria have already crossed over.  Mama in 2000, Tian in 2001, and Ria in 2003.  I miss them.  I wish I had someone with whom to make these decisions.  I'm doing the best I can.  I hope it's good enough.

No regrets.  That's the goal.  Say it all.  Hope his passage is an easy one, and if it's not, hold onto him tightly and let him know he's loved.   I can't wait till it's over, and I don't want it to end.  How can the two exist together?  something to process later.

Hospice is a miracle.  He came here to die with us, his exit strategy.  Now he's surrounded by people who care, music he likes,  his favorite foods on his tongue, and the comfort drugs are plentiful.  He suffers only in his mind.

Requiescat in pace, Papa.

Featured Novel: 'It's A Nightmare' by Nicole Quinn

http://www.fantascize.com/content.php?827-Featured-Novel-It-s-A-Nightmare-by-Nicole-Quinn

by 

Jake Vyper

Nicole Quinn's dystopian weird fantasy novel It's A Nightmare (Book 1 of The Gold Stone Girl series) tells the story of Mina, a rogue DreamWeaver who's born in the Off-grid of the Night Mare's Winkin City, a world, where human females are kept as cattle, and licensed as domestic pets. She's found inside a willow tree, alongside lygaeidae hibernating as larva. Mina lives the life of a human-breeder, who discovers that in order to survive, she must change everything.
Quinn believes that women need empowered role models; Mina's story was born at the Women's International Film Festival in Miami, Floida, 2008, where her group's film Racing Daylight won Best USA Feature.The trailer for the winning international documentary featured hundreds of colorful cloth bundles clogging a two river swirl, somewhere in India. The crawl on the screen informed the audience that the bundles weret he bodies of castoff baby girls. That was the moment that made her wonder how she might tell the story, so when the mother throws her bundled baby girl into the water, it's to save her life. Quinn wondered how she might use this story to begin a deeper conversation about the gender war escalating in the world everyday. 

Interview with Nicole Quinn

What do you think is the most powerful message you're sending through your works? And how do you portray it in "It's a Nightmare"?

That apathy is complicit. That women have better things to do than fight for their rights to be human, but if you drag us into this fray, expect a battle like you've never imagined. Ecology has been feminized and legislated, reproduction has been feminized and legislated, women's labor has been trivialized, and everyday advertising, which turns women's bodies into products, has set us on a dangerous path to dehumanization. I want humans to know that we're walking it. 


Mina is a reluctant hero, but she also cannot believe herself worthless, no matter how much society tells her otherwise. Mina has a strong female role model in Dee-Dee, who, like Mina, had a non-traditional way of finding home.

Why do you describe your novel as "Feminist"?

The dictionary definition of "feminism" is: the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic quality to men.

But I think I've become more of a humanist, as it seems to be the ultimate goal of feminism, by definition. No, maybe a planet-ist, that might be the more accurate aspiration. As Earth's mega-fauna of the moment, we humans, collectively, are heedless of the rights of the planet's other species, living, and maybe living in a way that we cannot yet quantify.

My work is inherently feminist, a female protagonist on a hero's journey. All of my writing passes the Bechdel test, more than two women who talk to each other, about something other than a man.The Gold Stone Girl series is a cautionary tale about how easy it has become to trivialize women, asbitches and whores, as commodities in popular culture. A slippery slope to reclassification as abominations, as witches, as happened in the witch atrocities 1484-1750 a.d., an era which codified the rape culture in which we currently live. How small a step it is to breeder, no longer human, but 3/5 human, as the American slaves were classified, in an effort to rationalize that horror.


How do you portray the "gender war" in your story? 

Human females are owned by the Night Mare's government-church. They are leased and licensed as domestic pets, or as sex workers in the Public Herd, or as bait for the Night Mare's monster shows. Throughout the series the Night Mare explains why she chose to demean her own gender, and exactly how she accomplished this subjugation, all of it just a whisper away from our present day.

Here's the trailer of the documentary film that inspired Quinn's book:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISme5-9orR0

cover of book 2

Were you influenced by Jane Austen's works in some way? 

Absolutely. She wrote about women confined by the parameters of a restrictive world,and its laws. She understood that she was not property, and that she was. All of her heroines marry in the end, but with the radical notion thatthey did it on their own terms. She was dreaming a different world, aworld of partnerships, between acknowledged equals, radical, feminist.

It sounds like the world you developed is surreal, and you said that you've established rules that we might consider "outlandish". Could you tell us some of those rules? 

All fantasy is outlandish, and yet if we make a world where the rules make sense inside that world, anything is possible.

In Winkin City everyone travels by screen, portals of energy that deliver information, and act as teleportation units. The screen feed is gathered by Paps, named for the ancient paparazzi, originally a character in a Fellini film. The Night Mare's Paps are random boy babies selected at birth to have camera lenses implanted where their eyes once were. Their tongues are removed to improve their focus.

In Blinkin all girls are circumcised and branded, rules that may seem outlandish, until Boko Haram kidnaps 200 girls and gets away with, until they kidnap 100 more women and children and no body cares. Outlandish, is really in-landish, just nudged slightly to the extreme.

What exactly are Dreamweavers and Dream Drifters? And how are they significant to the plot of your novel? 
In the 27th century the rulers, an oil baron and the pharma kings, blow a hole in the side of the planet which precipitates the Great Collapse of Earth's seven continents. When the waters ebbed the half planet continent of Blinkin was what remained, and with it came a new polarity, the Night Mare and the Dream Weaver. The Night Mare co-opted her opposite and she now rules the day and the night.

A Dream Weaver has the ability to make her dreams come true, to travel into them, and to dream for others. A dream is possibility free floating, anyone might catch them, which is why they are outlawed in the Night Mare's Blinkin.

Dream Drifters are heron headed thugs, imported from off-planet to rid the Night Mare's Winkin City of dreams. They're as tall as three men standing on each other's shoulders. Drifters have four foot splintered beaks, scrawny arms, and bird claw hands. They wear sunshades to hide their dream addict eyes, and smelly wool overcoats that drag on the ground. Dream Drifters smell like wet towels left to mildew in the dank and dark. Drifters are the personal guard of the Night Mare herself. Allergic to the the fruit of the planet, Dream Drifters are outlawed from its consumption, to prevent them from growing to ginormous size and rampaging, but that doesn't stop it from happening, because most things in Blinkin are a nightmare. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Editing and proofing audio files, the last slog to the finish.  

Lewy Body dementia - It's a Nightmare

My papa has Lewy Body dementia.  Hallucinations, Rem sleep disorder, Parkinsons disease symptoms, and vascular blindness.  This is what Robin Williams had to look forward to, and he may have already been experiencing some of the indicators.

Maybe he'd already injured someone, a loved one, while acting out dramatic and/or violent dreams while asleep.  Maybe his hallucinations were occupying more and more of his waking life.  Many with Lewy Body are drug intolerant, experiencing every side effect on the label, and those drugs that normally help with psychotic behavior can push someone with Lewy Body even further into psychosis.

I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that my father put a hospital nurse in the e.r. He's punched, bitten, and hurled himself out of his wheel chair, crept along the floor on all fours to escape a war zone, climbed onto night tables to signal incoming planes, all to escape and/or combat the villains in his dreams, who are in reality caregivers and family members.  What I envisioned as shepherding my father to the end of days has become a daily prayer for release.

Knowing what I know now about Lewy Body dementia and its impact on the entire family, I think that Robin Williams may have taken the graceful way out, for more than just himself.

*Lewy body dementia, Parkinsons dementia, and Vascular dementia are cousins.  The difference is in the way they present -  physical first then dementia, dementia and physical onset simultaneously, etc.

About 20% of all diagnosed dementias are Lewy Body.

Autopsy: Robin Williams had Lewy body dementia

The hallucination-causing disease may have contributed to his decision to commit suicide

http://www.salon.com/2014/11/13/autopsy_robin_williams_had_lewy_body_dementia/

Robin Williams (Credit: AP/Dan Steinberg)

According to his official autopsy, actor and comedian Robin Williams had a disease calledLewy body dementia (LBD), which may have contributed to his decision to kill himself.

People with LBD have dementia and often appear disoriented. According to ABC News, Williams had displayed odd behavior in his final days — notably, he kept several watches in a sock and was “concerned about keeping the watches safe.”

“The dementia usually leads to significant cognitive impairment that interferes with everyday life,” said Angela Taylor, programming director of the Lewy Body Dementia Association in an interview with ABC News. Still, symptoms are hard to spot. “If you didn’t know them you may not realize anything is wrong.”

LBD is fairly common, with 1.3 million people suffering from the illness in the United States, although it largely remains undiagnosed since it shares symptoms with better-known diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Biologically, the disease stems from abnormal protein deposits in the brain stem where they stop the production of dopamine. In LBD, the deposits spread throughout the brain, including to the cerebral cortex (responsible for problem solving and perception). The main symptom is progressive dementia, although people with the disease may also experience complicated visual hallucinations that could include smells and sounds, trouble sleeping, changes in attention and symptoms generally associated with Parkinson’s disease (which Williams also had).

Typically, patients are diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease first, and then LBD symptoms begin to appear. An examination of Williams’ brain revealed that it had undergone changes associated with Alzheimer’s, in addition to Parkinson’s and LBD.

“Though his death is terribly sad,” Taylor said, “it’s a good opportunity to inform people about this disease and the importance of early diagnosis.”

Joanna Rothkopf is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on science, health and society. Follow @JoannaRothkopf or email jrothkopf@salon.com.