Shame, shit or get off…

Somewhere around three or four or five years old, we start to figure out that we shouldn't be naked, and that it's embarrassing to be naked—even when we're alone.  

Adults are never naked, so why should I be naked?  Everyone avoids it so anxiously, there has to be something very, very wrong or scary or broken about being naked.

But for a few years we have an edenic innocence.  We scamper in our birthday suits when we hear grandma pulling into the driveway, or wander unrestrained from the bathroom into a dinner party, much to the terror of our babysitter.

Then it's gone.  Never again.

Unless your mind and body degrades back into the mental space of early childhood—which is to say, you enter the later stages of Alzheimer's.

The disease, you quickly realize, has little to do with memory loss.  Or, more precisely, Alzheimer's leaves you forgetting not just memories—names and faces, pasts and places—but how to be.  

How do you speak?  How do you eat, sleep or breath?  Your brain thinks of these things for you.  But when it starts to die, bit by bit, you slip up on these cracks in your being.  All of a sudden you stare at the toilet, unsure of what to do, while going to the bathroom in your pants.

Will you die as a woman or a man or will it matter?

These big questions have big, nuanced and complex, unresolved philosophical, social and psychological answers.  They also have very simple and clear answers, too.

When we're afraid of something, we often try to hide it.  If you spill something on your shirt and the stain won't come out, what's the first thing you do?  Get a scarf, a sweater, anything—cover it up.

That's harder for you to do when you're splayed out on the ground but don't even know whether you're standing or sitting or concussively and convulsively screaming for help.

I have a very clear memory of trying to coax my mother into the bathroom at her nursing home.  Even with the door ajar, my standing with my back to her, every time she got close to the toilet she would start crying or yelling and accordingly sit on the floor or come charging at me.  What did do I deserve this?  she would scream.  Or something like it How could you? Why? Not me? Go away! all mixed together.

Just like a little child on the potty she needed me to hold her hand.  That would work.  Sometimes.

She could be naked, she could flirt with the janitor, with me, with the nurse, the doctor, her cat—it didn't matter much.

But pooping.  

That was too much.

Why?

We're all afraid of a mess.  And at some point, we realize our own crap smells, but we can deal with it in order to get the job done.  Light a candle.  Fabreeze.  Or enjoy the stink.

But when you forget what our own feces smells like?  And this horrendous, nasty, vomitus stuff just comes out of you, when people unappologetically demand that you keep making it and pushing it out of yourself?

What do you do?  What can you do?  

Not even God thought of such torture when he told Adam and Eve of their shame.

Holy shit.