Merry Monroe #5

After Emilie's grandfather passed away from Alzheimer's, two years after her grandmother had passed from the same disease, talk at every Thanksgiving and Christmas after had always crept towards the same morose conclusion: "All of us, sitting at this table, have a pretty solid chance of getting Alzheimer's ourselves." The husbands and wives of the biological kids andgrand kids shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. "It's too premature to worry about that; you can't do anything, why worry?" they would think, but not dare to say. They couldn't even be sure they had the genes, science in the mid-1980s had just been starting to piece together all the biological and environmental components that might have caused her Nonno to sit blank-faced in a wheelchair at the nursing home for the last 6 years of his life.

This was a family that was obsessed with memory and forgetfulness; every lost key chain an omen from the future of their impending fate. Emilie was too young, in her mid-twenties to be particularly concerned with her forgetful habits; the disease wouldn't be hitting her yet. She spent those holidays sitting at the Adult Table nursing a glass of red - for the pleasant buzz it would give her by night's end - not the special chemicals that her Uncle Giorgio told his brothers and sisters were in red wine that would keep them from becoming like Nonno and Nonna. He walked in the front door that year for Christmas dinner, his arms straining from the weight of two brown bags filled with six bottles each. "To our health!" they toasted, while snacking on green olives and mozzarella balls before dinner, and again before the soup course, and the salad, and the pasta, and the fish, and then again before dessert - no one daring to skip the promise of possible prevention for the comfort of demitasse of espresso.

As the grandchildren, Emilie included, started getting married and starting families of their own, the huge holiday gatherings punctuated by hints for how to incorporate the latest antioxidants into their diets were less common. Emilie, her brother Carlo and their parents would have a calmer Christmas together, and each would spend Thanksgiving with their respective in-laws, Emilie's parents switching year-to-year as to which child's in-laws they would show up to. The talk of how to prevent the unpreventable disease quieted until the year Emilie turned 50. Two weeks before Christmas, after aparticularly bad fall off a ladder he had no business climbing, Emilie's father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

That Christmas, as Emilie, and her sister-in-law, Claire, helped her mother with measuring out heaping spoonfuls of cookie dough on greased sheets, her mother asked her if she was going to get "the test."

"What test?" Emilie feigned confusion; she knew precisely what her mother was referring to.

"You know, the DNA test, to see if you have the genes Dad and Nonna and Nonno have."

She sighed. "Maybe, I don't know, I haven't thought about it." She had, of course, but wanted terribly to change the subject. Her mother wouldn't let her:

"Well, I think you should. It's just better to know."

"Why? So I could do absolutely nothing about it? Drink extra coffee? Add pomegranates to my salads? What's the point?"

"Well, they might have a cure soon, and then you'd be first in line."

"You've been talking about this cure for years, Mom, I'll wait until - - if - - it ever happens."

Her mother quieted down. She didn't want to think about how her daughter was probably right - there wouldn't be a cure, at least in time for her sweet husband. But she wanted Emilie -and Carlo- to take the test so that maybe, just maybe, she could find out that it was her genes that passed to their kids; her genes that weren't all twisted and tangled in a helix of inevitable confusion and nursing homes and adult diapers.

January 2008, a few weeks after the conversation with her mom in the kitchen before Christmas, Emilie started Googling DNA testing services. "Just for research, I really don't want to know, I just wonder how expensive it would be, hypothetically," she told her husband Mark as her peered over her shoulder.

"Why wouldn't you want to know? I mean, even if you had the genes, it just means it's more likely, it doesn't mean you're absolutely going to get it."

"I don't know. I want to be able to live my life without thinking that every time I forget the eggs in the trunk of car it's not the sign of impending doom." Her keyboard strokes started getting a little louder, her knuckles getting a little tighter. "And it just seems weird, everyone praying that oh I hope I didn't get Dad's genes. It just doesn't seem right, like I shouldn't be hoping for that, I love him, you know?"

"Honey, do what you want to do, of course. But I think your Dad's hoping the same thing - he wouldn't be offended with you thinking that, you know that, right?"

"Yeah. I know." Emilie picked up a chocolate-covered coffee bean from the small blue dessert bowl resting on the table and ate it with a loud crunch.


A week after that, Emilie found herself in a doctor's office, flipping through the pages of an US Weekly. She hadn't planned this, but she had read every article and watched every news bulletin on the 5 o'clock news that had mentioned the words Alzheimer's or dementia. Every since her father's diagnosis, she was obsessed with finding out more, and the more she read, the more she realized that it would be foolish to avoid knowing for too much longer. She was probably too young to get it still, but the promise of drug trials keeping symptoms from ever even showing up in the first place was too promising.

That morning, when she found her car keys without any trouble, she thought "Maybe I don't even need to go today - my brain is on fire." She still went, though, wanting to avoid the inevitable phone call from her mother that night that would be asking about how it went. She regretted telling her mother that she had finally decided she wanted the test, knowing that with that declaration, there would be no turning back.

When her name was called by the pretty receptionist, she put her magazine down and walked into the doctor's office, and noisily crinkled the paper on the plastic table as she sat. She waited and stared at the door, knowing that the next person to walk through that door would tell her the truth she had spent so long trying to avoid.