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As psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, we sometimes have the experience of listening to the words of an elderly patient who is dying and has Alzheimer's. The words gain extra power through their intensity and brevity and the shared understanding, observation, and mourning for a mind that is dying (Sinason, 1992). The work is profoundly painful for the psychoanalyst.
Let us take it to a different level. Sometimes the clinician is working with another elderly patient who is dying and has Alzheimer's and whose words, too, are charged and powerful. However, this patient's family is traumatized by his words because, in telegraphic fashion, they refer to events of enormous horror in childhood. Everyone concerned is dead. There can be no corroboration. The family does not know what to do. They wish their father could die in peace and feel there is something he needs to disclose first, but there is no answer as to what has happened. The psychoanalyst struggles with the meaning of helplessness, of the way old age can bring back memories and feelings of childhood helplessness and cause further post traumatic triggers. The psychoanalyst struggles with the frailty of memory, Alzheimer's cognitive impairments, psychic reality, screen memories, and external possibilities. But what is the family finally left with? Some of us have carried out clinical work in such circumstances, but very rarely is there an account of the parallel familial journey,
But now there is. Reverend John Richard Schad was a dedicated minister in the Church of England. From 1992-1996, as his mind unravelled, his wife dutifully wrote down the words her husband uttered. They were not the kind of words she expected. The choice of words are, however, all too familiar to any who work in the field of ritual trauma.
Axe, cup, upside down, Satan, not to tell, please please burns, police, kills cats, incantations, I couldn't drink anything, poor lad, tried to tell … terrible, no no, they're whipping him, a coffin, he h