I am worried about my grandfather. My father's father. He is depressed and undergoing the "last resort" of electroconvulsive therapy. I see myself in him and imagine myself as him. I wonder if I may be in his position in sixty years--or less. He took medicine. Dozens of pills. He became too confused to read the labels and I had to show him which bottle was which. One of the pills made him stiff and more confused. He couldn't open the bottles. I had to lay out each pill for him. He was paranoid that I had chosen the wrong one. I had to match each pill to a little box on a printed medicine schedule I drew up specifically for the purpose. Each drug's name listed in bold-type down the left of the page. A space wide enough for the prescription bottle to sit next to its printed name. A space in which I could set the pill. See, Grandpa? They're right. See? Too many pills and he only got worse. ECT. Ok. Now he's getting the "therapy." No one tells me how he's doing. Either they don't know or they don't care. Both possibilities disturb me tremendously.

My mother says "He was only ever happy when everything was going perfectly. And how often does that happen?" She is speaking of my grandfather. She is speaking in the past tense. She is divorced from my father. Maybe everyone connected to my father is in the past tense now. Maybe it has nothing to do with my grandfather being in the hospital, getting his soul shocked back into him. I wonder, Am I in the past tense too?

I am more comfortable in the past tense. The future is ok, too. I am most uncomfortable now. I am anxious. I am mulling over what has happened, and imaging what will. Why did he say that? Why did I go there? How will I act tomorrow? Who will I see on the way? Now. I have no road for now in my mind. The traffic on other paths is always heavy and rushing.

He is getting his soul shocked back into him. This is what I understand to be happening. They sedate you. They shock you. The send electric current through your brain. Really. You do not shake or convulse like Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. You lie still. Of course you do, you have been sedated. They shock you. You wake, and are somehow improved. Maybe. Probably not the first few times. But you'll get the idea sooner or later. After three or four. Oh, no, sometimes as many as a dozen, one doctor tells us. Well, after some amount of shocking, you improve. And then it has been worth it. I do not say this sarcastically. If you improve, it has been worth it. And after all, you were sedated.

I picture my grandfather underwater. He is at the bottom of a sea. It is deep, but in my image the light filters through to where he is. I see him as though I am looking into a great fish tank. He is weighted down by two cement blocks. I think of the references in mob movies to "cement shoes." This is how I picture him. In my grandfather's illness, in his depression, he is weighted down there at the bottom of a sea in cement shoes. The pills he has taken have not helped. They have simply changed the quality of the seawater. It is a slightly different shade of bluegreen. It is thinner. It is less salty. They have had no affect on my grandfather's cement-retarded buoyancy.

This image in my mind is not based on science. In the voice used at the beginning of a docudrama I tell you, Any similarity to actual medical fact is purely unintentional and coincidental. Then the show begins and maybe you'll believe it anyway.

It is clear for anyone to see that it is the cement shoes which keep him stuck to the floor of the sea. It's obvious. It is ignored. Let us move the water, instead! The doctors excitedly suggest. My grandfather's children, tired and uneducated in matters of medicine, concur. Yes, yes, I see them nodding, we will move the sea. How preposterous! Now I picture the scene in the Ten Commandments when Moses parts the Red Sea. Now I remove all the characters and leave the parted waters frozen in my sight. Now I imagine my grandfather standing in the middle of the part. He looks around and breathes freely. The doctors point and say See? He's in the air, he's breathing. We've solved the problem. But I jump up and down like a spoiled brat child and shout But he is still standing in cement! Where can he go?! He is still stuck there on the floor of the sea!

It is the ECT that has parted the waters. It is the ECT that allows him to breathe. But now the waters flow back, covering him again. No matter, another shock and they will re-part. They flood back. They shock again. It is a pattern, you see? It is medicine at work. And I am still pointing at the cement with astonishment. I know they all can see it as well as I. Oh, they don't want to chip it away.

Of what is this cement made? I think of the circumstances in my grandfather's life which could have held him down underwater. I list them to myself while sitting in the backseat of my mother's car. Happy meaningless pop music is playing: "the home," (an orphanage!), the War, a brother's death, a marriage, the divorce, a child's death. And those are only what I can think of in tune with Britney Spear's latest single.

Grace