1:11 p.m. - 2010-07-23
This year, my mother didn't know my birthday ...
Beautiful Stranger, This year my mother did not know my birthday. Sometimes she calls me Nancy. Sometimes she thinks I am HER mother. Sometimes her sister. There is no real place for me in her life, since she has regressed to way before I was born. She reaches for her mother in fitful sleep. She awaits a bus that doesn't come. Nightly. She sees people somewhere in the ceiling that she somehow cannot join. She is lonesome, surrounded by love she cannot recognize. The shreds of a mother I sort of knew, who sort of knew me around the edges, have evaporated. Her face is anguish. Her eyes, ringed red, see what we cannot. She is so scared. So scared. She is afraid of dying, but terrified of living with choice. Of volition. Sometimes she is funny. Offhand, like before. But it is strained, contrived. Wit escaping suddenly from a fissure in an abandoned shell. She has regressed, in quick increments, to a time before my Dad, her husband of sixty one years, who died in 2003. I never hear reference to him. Never hear her speak his name. Always, it is "Mama!" from a place primitive and dark. Her face becomes a mask of psychic pain. The apparent result of some pod experiment that replaced her completely in less than three months. I sit, bewildered, at her bedside. Where the woman who conquered daily crosswords? Who quoted Henny Youngman? Who sang with me, "I love you ... yes, I do ... I love you. It's a sin to tell a lie ..."? So recent, I would not be surprised to see her shadow, there beside her kitchen chair. She is disappearing by inches and minutes. I watch her wither like a time-elaped rose. I miss her already, as I mark her breath and wonder that she is still breathing. Such a complicated story, ours. So much, forever unresolved. In her delirium, she has told me some things I have waited all my life to hear. Now that has stopped. She is an infant, crying without the words to articulate why. Reaching. Grasping. Pulling impotently at the covers. Senseless movement. Refusing her medicine. Refusing to sit up. Refusing to give up. How long before she is altogether gone? Before the story is closed, no revision request. I feel myself withdrawing, by inches and minutes. Weaving a soft cocoon about me, protection from a loss that already happened.
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