Forgetting

Forgetting

    Sometimes things happen or things arrive that are totally unexpected...a box of chocolates waiting at your doorstep (not kidding, this was sent as a welcome home gift out of the blue), a last-minute invitation to dinner, even an impromptu talk with a group of care managers.  Just as with a bend in the road, these tiny events can change your direction ever so slightly, perhaps imperceptibly to you but a change nonetheless.  What might seem inconsequential at the time, can prove so much more meaningful as it reinforces or changes friendships and relationships, often for the better.  So it was with the arrival of the May issue of Esquire, a hit & miss magazine (in my opinion) of writing and fashion and a search for a crowd that no longer seemed to include me.  But this particular issue, although meant to be more of an editorialized political statement, had an introduction (the magazine's opening statement, not so common in today's world and something usually left to an editor's opening comments...which this magazine has as well) that resonated with me, and it all dealt with "forgetting."

     Writer Charles P. Pierce wrote: Twenty-odd years ago, at the urging of a great editor, I wrote a long piece at another magazine about my family's experience with Alzheimer's disease, which eventually took my father and all of his siblings.  It is a terrifying disease for a writer because it attacks those aspects of the individual that are so crucial to the act of writing--namely memory and language.  Without memory, there can be no connection with the world, nothing salvaged or brought forward.  Without language, memory is orphaned.  Without both of them, history is mute...That story, and the experience of writing it, has bled into parts of my work in a hundred different ways, but the main points remain the same.  Language and memory must work together not only to preserve the past but to illustrate the present and to build a future.  The disease robbed my father of both language and memory, and thus it robbed him of his past, his present, and his future.  He spent his last years as a kind of vagabond, a stranger to himself, a permanent refugee in an unmoored life.

     It made me think that perhaps somewhere among those words sat my mother, her words so clear on the phone and yet at times so distant.  Every few days, a care manager will quietly call me over when I visit my mother and talk with me about a something my mother had said or had done...wanting another shower, or not getting her pain pill, or something that she felt had been stolen from her room (such as a hairnet or a box of paperclips).  The care managers are varied, and sometimes we meet in a group so that I can hear stories from several of them at once, each seemingly very patient and appearing to just want to learn a bit more about my mother and her actions (for they work with many people in these situations, the facility being an assisted living care center meant to handle those family members who perhaps need 24/7 watching with medications and such).  And often, their stories are of a mother who is in many ways quite different from the mother who I am familiar with.  Certain traits are the same, and the staff seem to appreciate my feedback and background of her; but at other times, I wonder just how much my mother might be changing into a different person, perhaps a person similar to the type of person the writer Pierce described above.

    It must be scary for her, for anyone really, to be given a choice to lose one's entire memory or to lose all of one's physical ability.  Perhaps in negotiating the grand bargain, a settlement is reached to maintain a little of both which means that you would also lose a little of both.  Lose a little memory, lose a little physical ability.  Trying to picture myself at such a negotiation, it would indeed be odd to know that right around the corner my loss of memory would begin.  I would still be able to walk, but with pain, pain that would gradually get worse.  Then I would get a pill for my pain...or would I?  I wouldn't be able to remember, at least regarding last night or when I wasn't quite awake.  They told me that I had had a pill, but my leg still hurts.  Same with the shower. I want one.  We gave you one, they tell me.  They're lying.  I need a shower!  This scenario is what I hear about my mom, at least it's what she tells me about how much it hurts sometimes, and how she's not getting a pill or a shower.  Mom, I say, they said that you had one last night.  No, she says, I didn't, I would know if I had a shower.  But they said that you asked for a shower again last night, around midnight.  Midnight?, she almost screams, why would I ask for a shower at midnight?  I don't know, I say...even for me it doesn't make sense.  Then, almost exasperated, my mother looks at me and says in a quiet voice, "I can't remember."

    At those times, I leave with a leaden heart, for what if I were there in her place and wondering when and if I had indeed made such a bargain with the devil, so to speak.  I would likely feel that the pain was getting worse, but I was also getting quite old now; my memory was going but it was all to be expected wasn't it?  The reality was likely that things would not get better.  So I would then be entering a land of the unknown, a land where my memory would slowly dissolve as quickly as waking from a dream only I would know that this nightmare had only one probable scenario, that one day the dream would simply continue and that I would not return or at least not return to the world that I knew today.  It would be frightening...frightening to know and to watch as it approached, its coming as clear and as fearful as a tsunami.

   And then, my mom is back, clear as day and talking as if all is right in the world and life is good.  This is the mom that appears to those who call, people such as friends and other relatives.  And it's much the same with me when I am the outsider to someone else and only visit or talk to every now and then.  Why, I say, she sounds fine; why on earth would they think something was wrong with her?  Being in the middle of the maelstrom gives one a different perspective...giving birth, having a son or daughter with cancer, having cancer yourself, being let go from your company.  You seek solace somewhere and if you're lucky, you find some.  But often, you simply have to rely on those close to you, each hug or conversation flaking off just a bit more of buildup, as in a clogged artery, hoping against hope that enough chips away that you will get through this unscathed.  But it is not likely...it is a part of growing, of learning, of relating and of empathizing.  It is a time of giving back and discovering just what you are made of...and although it may not seem so at the time, it is good.