I watched for five years as my mother’s dementia slowly stripped her of her world. Another two years after finding a separate place for her, I am stubbornly mourning her… and she is still with us.
But she is also – not with us. I say she is time traveling but it is I who is thinking about the past - my own childhood and its losses.
As a moderately awake adult woman, I find this embarrassing. I tell myself to “Get over it! Lord knows, I have the credentials to do it, if it were possible. I am offspring of three generations of authentic Prairie woman”.
We just don’t heal that way. I cannot “bootstrap’ myself out of grief.
I say this to the nowhere chorus of critics and supporters in my head, many of which are the disembodied voices of my matriarchal line.
In fact, they are looking at me right now.
I look up from my desk to the triptych on the wall I have painted. They are portraits – one per canvas - of my memories of my grandmother, and my mother. The third is a self portrait. It is of a woman who is somewhat re-arranged from who I feel like now. However, I know with a bone certainty that I am becoming. She/I am stronger and more prone to bursts of laughter. My “pictured-self” is steady – in both joyful and sad moments. That face is ready eat the world whole and spit it out holy.
My grandmother’s face is kind – a sort of warm cookie face; content with the way things are: accepting and sweet. My mother’s face is strong, flawless and ambitious yet there is a vulnerable quality of “Please love me” behind it. They left these breadcrumbs of themselves behind that I have incorporated into my own skin. My triptych is like three trees growing so close together that they become one trunk.
Mothers and daughters are like that. My mother, now in her late dementia, asks about her mother frequently.
“How is Annie? Have you seen her? I think she is mad at me.”
I always assure her when she asks, skirting the facts of death for more important memories of love. “Annie loves you; she thinks you are wonderful”
“Did she say that?”
Once, I showed her a scrapbook of her baby-self. It had been lovingly pieced together by her mother, Annie, when she was a new mother – early in the last century. That scrapbook was adulation; it was pure; she was loved by so many - as the first grandchild and the gifted child she was.
My mother was born in 1922 - two years after women got the right to vote; they were tough times, but heady too. The “roaring twenties” happened on the dusty Nebraska plains too. They saw new and wonderful possibilities for this world – and themselves.
I showed my mother those pages of Annie’s old scrapbook and she smiled all the way up to the crinkles of her eyes. It was beautiful. I believe she felt the love of her mothers, there.
Shortly, she forgot that feeling and reset like a computer returning to its base protocol:
“How is Annie? Have you seen her? I think she is mad at me.”
But I can sooth this.
“Annie is good; she loves love you and sends these kisses”
I barrage my mother with kisses.
She thanks me, settles back, puts on her glasses and busies herself with the same paragraph she has been reading for the last couple of days.
This is taking care in real time. This is all we can do. I can’t fix anything. There are some knots that can only be untied from the inside. It is not always possible.
There is still some deep restlessness in her– something that animated a life that she no longer lives. It is some infinite loop of doing and having that still follows her like a shadow – a sadness, or maybe a thirst.
Maybe it is the weight of the thwarted dreams of her mother and her formidable grandmother. I feel my mother’s expectations for me – the doing and the having.
My mother has forgotten her expectations for me and I am trying to let them die. It is a great gift. Why has she not forgotten those that her mothers had for her? It is a weight that she does not need to carry.
These are pools are far too deep to be replenished with a shower of kisses.
“SOME FILL WITH EACH GOOD RAIN
There are different wells within your heart.
Some fill with each good rain,
Others are far too deep for that.
In one well
You have just a few precious cups of water,
That “love” is literally something of yourself,
It can grow as slow as a diamond
If it is lost.
Your love
Should never be offered to the mouth of a
Stranger,
Only to someone
Who has the valor and daring
To cut pieces of their soul off with a knife
Then weave them into a blanket
To protect you.
There are different wells within us.
Some fill with each good rain,
Others are far, far too deep
For that”
‘
– Ladinsky exerpt from The Gift poems by Hafiz the great Sufi Master
