I miss the days when Mom’s memory was slipping and she could almost catch it.
“Annie Duncan,” Mom said, pen mid-air over her checkbook, ready to write me a check for her groceries.
Duncan.
I’ve had three last names: born to Pease, married Neuberger (three plus years), married Gudger (thirty years and going). No Duncan. Duncan was my junior high/high school/college sweetheart. Annie Duncan, I penned in theme notebooks over and over when I was bored (a lot) in high school. When I was planning my wedding to my soccer playing, guitar strumming, Kurt Vonnegut loving first love. When I was fabricating a life with him.
“Gudger,” I course corrected before Mom wrote my name.
“That’s what I said,” she said, words laced with a bite. “I know who you are,” she said, and her plum eyes shrank to raisins.
She handed me a check: Pay to the Order of Annie Pease.
She slid from writing my birth name on checks to forgetting to take medication to not knowing where she lived. She’d call my sister, panic choking her words, “Where am I? Will you tell me where I am?”
When living alone became a danger, when mental and physical changes were more than my sisters or I could imagine managing, when we were lucky Mom wasn’t a flight risk so she could live without locked doors, my sister found her a group family home where she lives with five other seniors, where caregivers lavish tender care—from bathing to dressing to feeding to understanding that rage is part of dementia, that outbursts pass, that Mom’s afternoon moods are sweeter than her morning ones. I’m grateful for the tender-hearted women who care for her and the other residents. Grateful they live like family in a ranch-style home on a cul-de-sac in a suburban neighborhood, flanked by a family with elementary-aged kids next door, a retired couple on the other side. This home with soft blue walls and wide halls for walkers and wheelchairs. It smells like tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, Febreze, and compassion. This home with cedars in the backyard and a covered porch to sit outside when the weather is mild, when the daphne blooms its sticky sweetness.
As dementia nipped snipped her brain, as the colors of her brain turned dark, not yellow, not green, not red like an active brain shows when imaged, she’d snap between present and past, between making sense in the ways we think of as making sense and saying things I couldn’t track.
“It’s all treats and traps,” she said.
“What is, Mom?”
“Everything.”
While I was wondering about treats and traps, and thinking Absolutely. Life is full of treats and traps, Mom said, “sniggy, snaggy,” and “sixteen Canadians came in through the window.”
Breath caught at the dip of my throat where collarbones meet, and I wondered: where is she now? And who are these Canadians? And is she scared?
This woman who loved words, who read from her tower of books every day (novels, memoirs, self-help, art, art history), who carted sisters and me to the library, to our favorite bookstore—The Book Nook—who gave me Charlotte’s Web and The Wind in the Willows when I was early reading, who loved the sounds and meanings of words, who read with a dictionary close by. She fueled my love for reading and writing.
This artist woman who sketched since she was a girl. A portrait maestro. She studied faces, postures, to capture an image with a few pencil strokes. “I always liked men with that shape of a forehead,” she said while looking at a picture of J., her dead husband/my stepdad. They were married 42 years. “My boyfriends all had the same forehead.”
Artist artist who drew beautiful nudes when she went back to art school. Artist mom who sketched my sisters and me reading, sunning, in ballet class, on horseback. Artist artist who’d never been to Italy, who asked me before I left for Florence years ago to “take a picture of David’s ass because they don’t show it in art books.” Artist mom who taught me to hunt beauty. She was my art encyclopedia, taking us to art shows to experience beauty, not to tell us what she knew, to ask us what we saw.
“Is something wrong?” she asked while I was silently playing with sniggy snaggy since words are a love of mine too.
“Are you okay?” she asked because she saw something in my expression. Much as I practice a neutral face when she says the things dementia puts in her mouth, she read me, like she always has.
“I’m good,” I said. I wouldn’t say I’m fine because I wasn’t. I silently whispered I love you, I love you, I love you. Because I do, because it’s what I want her to feel, to see on my face.
“Isn’t he cute?” Mom said and nodded to the left of our feet, to where I saw only carpet, no cuteness. “I love that little dog,” she said. “Some days he wears a skirt. I mean a tutu.”
I love you, I love you, I love you.
I breathed to the bottom of my lung lobes, to stay in my body. I soaked her in, her Greek beauty, from both of her immigrant Greek parents: olive skin, plum-colored eyes, sculpted cheekbones I always longed for, her wavy hair that at 87 still had black streaks on her crown, a memory of hair so black she had blue highlights with a sun halo. She was always unsure of her beauty. “You’re so exotic,” people told her when she was a young woman, a young mom. “Where are you from?”
“I just wanted to look like the other girls,” she said for years. “You know, not so dark, with a little ski-jump nose.”
The first time I saw Sophia Loren when I was a girl, I shouted: “She looks like you! She could be your sister!” And Mom half-shrugged. Couldn’t she see it? Or did she just not want to stand out? Be a little less shiny?
Her hippocampus has dulled. Hippocampus, from Greek hippos meaning horse and kampos, meaning sea monster. Memory is largely served in our seahorse-shaped hippocampus that acts as a card catalog, directing us to the shelf where a memory is stored in our larger library. Or maybe it’s more like Google, where the right search gets us to what we’re looking for or sends us on a web of possibilities. Is Mom’s seahorse hippocampus more sea, less horse? Floating in dementia as it trots and gallops along?
“What dog?” she said in the great room of the adult family home when I asked the dog’s name, the one who some days wears a tutu. My heart skimmed my stomach. She was back in the moment. This flipping and flopping through time. I longed to follow her and her logic when it’s a matrix with its own invisible map. I do my best to Be With. Don’t correct. Correcting confuses her.
“I’m not having any more babies,” she said a few beats later.
True. She’s 87.
“I don’t think I can hold them,” she said while I wondered what year it was for her. Wondering if she was thinking about my sisters and me as babes or even my two grown kids she held so tenderly when they were tiny.
Early in the pandemic, taking Mom to doctor’s appointments became our in-person time since the senior community where she lived—before we moved her to the adult family home—shut down any visits. So we waited in waiting rooms. Muffled in masks.
“I hated spanking you girls,” she started like she did every time we talked those days, and I felt this knot, like polishing my own pearl in the gut of me.
“You know I hated it,” she went.
My brain felt like a blank scrabble board. And someone dumped all these letter tiles at my feet. My job was to make words, sentences. Words that say the right thing and I had no fucking idea what the right thing was.
Did she want me to say It’s okay? All those spankings and cruel words? It’s not.
Did she want me to say I forgive her? I have.
“What do you need?” I asked Mom one day when she was doing her life review, when she was running down her list of regrets: That she didn’t tell us how much she loved us. That she didn’t hold us enough. That she spanked us. That she didn’t talk to us about Dad and his drinking. Didn’t talk about their divorce. Childhood traumas I spent years in therapy running through the forgiveness mill. Seeing my parents as people with their own hurts. Knowing they did their good enough best. Knowing they loved my sisters and me.
“What do you mean?” she snapped in her fire scorching way.
“What do you need from me?” I tried again.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said.
“I was so much better than my mom,” she said.
I felt paralyzed in those waiting rooms, in those conversations where I both wanted to say what I remembered and also knew my mom’s rewriting of her narrative was what she needed. I imagined my giant Scrabble board and a pile of letter tiles. Extra vowels, too many U’s. Searching. Wanting to make sense of where I was at with my mom and where she was with herself. Do my memories get erased too when she erases hers?
I listened to my friends who miss their dead moms and my heart tugged. I longed for a missing like theirs that didn’t feel snarled with the past. I wanted. Maybe her revisions are what she needs as she polishes her soul, as she does the work to let go of this body, this lifetime.
I can fill my giant Scrabble board with love words. With forgiveness.
“Mia thought I’m married to Dad,” my grown daughter Maria said and scrunched up her face in yuck after a visit with Mom. “I think she thought I was Aunt Lisa too,” she said, twirling her wheat-colored ponytail around her index finger.
“Dementia’s an asshole,” I started like I start so many of these conversations. I hate that my mom’s memories are being stolen from her. She’s way past forgetting what was for breakfast or where she parked her car that we sold a few years ago. Her long-term memories nipped with moth holes too. Now she’s rearranging who we are for her, where we sit on the family tree. And wonderer me wonders: Who am I in this family soup? When daughter slides to wife am I daughter? When daughter slides to sister am I sister? At least I’m still on the tree. How will it be when Mom doesn’t know me?
And then I find out.
For all the times I’ve practiced saying: “It’s Annie. Your middle daughter,” there is no preparation for your mom not knowing you.
I’d been lucky to see a Diego Rivera exhibit recently. He was one of my mom’s favorite artists. She had a framed poster of his famous, “The Flower Vendor,” a back view of two indigenous females with their arms around an over-sized bundle of calla lilies, their dark braids down their backs, braid tips touching. I snapped a phone picture of that image in the art museum to share it with Mom.
“Is it you?” she asked when I showed her the small image I snuck away that day.
My heart pinched. This knot between ribs and muscles. I stared out the window at the naked trees to reclaim my breath, to switch from shallow breathing to belly breathing.
“Oh, did you see my mom?” she asked when I didn’t answer her Is it you question. She pointed past me. “Mom was just there. Do you know her?”
I resisted saying, Yes, of course I know your mom. She was my favorite. This grand of mine who used to lay in the grass with me and call out cloud shapes: angel, dragon, Snoopy, elephant. Who taught me how to dig in the dirt and plant flowers and vegetables. Who encouraged my listening to garden fairies. But I didn’t say those things.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
Mom stared hard at me. Then cocked her head and I knew she was trying to figure out who I was. One of the females in the Rivera painting? A caregiver? Some nice lady who brought coffee and a piece of pumpkin loaf?
My throat felt like I swallowed a peach pit. I willed myself not to cry because that confuses her. Cry later, I told myself, like I’ve told myself before.
Then I heard a knowing. Something I hadn’t considered.
When Mom’s in her childhood, of course I’m not there. I don’t exist yet. I haven’t swum through the stars to her and Dad and big sis. I’m not Annie Pease yet. She’s not a woman with a husband and three girls who becomes a single mom who becomes coupled again who later becomes a grandma called Mia. When I realize I’m not in her life yet, instead of feeling pierced by her unknowing me, I feel this sense of peace, and I hope she’s remembering the good parts of her hard childhood.
This is what I know to be true: If time is a construct, and I’m pretty sure it is, Mom shows me how all the Thens and Nows and Whens are happening at once. This moment. This moment. It’s what we have.
“Let’s try something,” Mama said to little me, at five, six, seven.
“I’ll stay here in my bedroom and you go in yours. I’ll think of someone and when you think of someone too, come and tell me who it is.”
I’d sit on my bed with my lion pillow. Sit crisscross applesauce. I’d pet my chocolate-colored braids, fingering the crisp red ribbons at their tails. I remember scrunching my brow, my I’m thinking look.
Then Aunt Dar popped in my head. That couldn’t be who Mama was thinking of. I knew she didn’t like Aunt Dar even though she said she did.
“Aunt Dar!” I said as I raced back into her bedroom. I’m pretty sure I shouted the name like that would make it true.
“You’re right!” Mama said and added: “I wasn’t sure you’d get that one.”
Our ESP game. We played it with people. With objects. I remember guessing hairbrushes and paint brushes. I remember guessing colors with my artist mom who taught me to look, to see. Who showed me all the blues from sky to ocean and everything in between. Who showed me how robin egg blue and indigo and burnt sienna make up the earth.
One of my friends said to me recently she regrets she didn’t just hold hands with her mom while they sat together, while her mom’s mind took junkets. I’m so grateful she said those words. Mom and I hold hands each visit. If it’s all I do for her, I hold her hands. I send her love through our mom/daughter ocean.
I held her hand and wished I could reach her like I did when I was a girl. I wished for the magic between us, silent words, me feeling her thoughts, that ESP game between a mom and a daughter. I wished I could reach through her dementia forest. Wished the dense forest would let the light slice a sliver like it does in the woods where sunlight cuts the canopy and rays stream to earth. My holy place. My cathedral in the woods. I wished the dementia forest could thin and Mom and I could feel the sun on our faces together.
I didn’t know if she knew it was me, her daughter, and it didn’t matter. I rubbed her knuckles with my thumb, felt the crinkle of loose skin over bone, her arthritis fingers, that one that points west, not north. Her hands. The map of her. Then she cupped my hand between her two tender hands and rubbed the bony-ness of the top of my hand where my veins copy her veins. Where what rivers through her, rivers through me.
She lifts my hand she’s been cradling and kisses it. Palm side up. Kisses it with the tenderness of kissing a sleeping baby’s head. Tears had been floating on my top ribs, treading water, stalling out, waiting to fountain up my throat or drift to the shores of my heart. Those tears wet my eyes, my face.
Then my mom does the most beautiful something.
She presses my kissed palm to her forehead. Presses it to her like making a memory. Making a print of me to her and her to me so she’ll have it for later. So I’ll have it for later.
Anne Gudger is an essay/memoir writer who writes hard and loves harder. She's been published in The Rumpus, Real Simple Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, PANK, Citron Review, Sweet Lit, Sunday Short Reads, Cutthroat, CutBank, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. She's won four essay contests and has been a Best of the Net Nominee twice. Her debut memoir is forthcoming with Jaded Ibis Press September 2023. At the start of the pandemic, with her beloved daughter, she co-founded Coffee and Grief: a community that includes a monthly reading series focused on grief in its many outfits. Everybody grieves and when we share grief we feel less alone. More at annegudger.com, Anne Gudger on IG and FB. Coffee and Grief Community on FB.
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