Shards, scraps, snippets, scintillas, & shadows
About what has faded, fogged over, and been forgotten
This morning I woke up thinking:
Feels like an ending, but it’s really a beginning.
Which I knew was a lyric, but I was unable to locate the rest of the song, its title, its provenance, its tune, those were lost somewhere in the detritus formerly known as my mind. A few days ago I was asked the names of the parents of a friend, two people I’ve known for more than twenty years; I went to retrieve the information and discovered the bit or byte containing their names to be corrupted; I could see them, their faces, their histories, memories of times together, the rooms in their home, but their names? Gone. There was a space where they should have been, but it was blank.
And it was frightening.
Fifty years ago my grandmother had what was called “hardening of the arteries”, but, more likely, it was early onset dementia or Alzheimer’s. I didn’t know her before she’d become someone who committed bone-crushing hugs and bruising pinches, thinking them affection. Someone who repeatedly nearly burnt down the house by turning on the gas flame under a coffee carafe and walking away, never to return. Someone who could not, or would not, remember that my father had died and so would ask, “Where’s Joe?” or would think that I or my brother were our father. Someone for whom eating and going to the bathroom became too wearying and daunting, and so wasted away and wasted her undergarments.
Many decades later, my aunt, her daughter, would spend the last few years of her life in an assisted living facility, nearly blind, and, like her mother before her, living outside of “real” time, existing in a fugue-world where one minute she was in the 1940s and on her way to New York with her friend, Mary, and the next, she was in her twenties, telling her favorite brother, Joe, my father, not to marry Virginia, my mother.
Only it wasn’t Joe to whom she was talking, it was me. My aunt telling me not to marry my mother, who, fifteen years later, I would hold in my arms in that same facility, she and I alone together in her room, as she’d asked, having believed I could handle letting her go without being forever after haunted, the kind of goodbye she didn’t want the rest of my siblings to have to see, and so it was, one of the last of her wishes I could make come true, just she and I in the room as she breathed her last breath.
In the last year before she died, my mom didn’t lose track of time, but more and more often would lose words and names and song lyrics. Unlike my grandmother and my aunt, Mommy was aware each time she couldn’t find what she was searching for, and it made her angry, sad, and scared. We spent a lot of time together, and she in her 90s and I in my 50s became friends in addition to mother and child. It was a great honor to have her trust, but sometimes, too, a great sorrow. And as she began to forget and to lose words and names and songs, she felt increasingly alone, isolated in the shadows of a past in which she was unable any longer to navigate with confidence.
On a day as I was driving her to her weekly hair appointment, she could not remember the line that came after “Off we go into the wild blue yonder” and she started to cry. I didn’t know the line and I didn’t know how to comfort her. I had long made it a practice not to complete her sentences or fill in her blanks unless she asked me to, because doing so would mean I’d noticed she was missing pieces. So, I just said what was by then my go to: “I’m sorry, honey.”
She shook her head that way she did when she was embarrassed by surrendering to upset — and said, “I know it’s silly, but everyone’s gone; my father and mother, your father and Henry (her second husband) , all my brothers and sister, your sister, all my friends, there isn’t anyone left to ask about the things I can’t remember.”
I had never contemplated how lonely alone could be until she said that to me. And after she died, I felt lonely in a way I had never imagined, had not expected; as with lost lyrics, there were spaces and moments in my life she had filled, and after she died, when I’d get to those places and moments, like the names and tunes of songs I’ve lost, there was a scarily empty place, absence where once was something beautiful, silence where once was sung a glorious song.
It’s a kind of lonely in which I feel no longer whole. It’s not just having lost Mommy, it seems all is now declension, not just on a personal level but in the world, civility, intelligence, empathy, goodwill, all in decline, or, perhaps more accurately, dissipation. I don’t know how I got to the age where I am beginning to lose memories when I was still waiting for the best that was yet to come.
And, so far, it’s minor losses. Lyrics. A name here and there. I repeat myself. A lot. But, still, it’s not yet as intense as Mommy’s became, and thus far I am still aware it’s happening, so I’m not, it seems, becoming the same sort of hardening of the arteries confused as my grandmother and aunt. And, honestly, anyone who’s ever known me or had to listen to me babbling and pontificating and digressing could tell you, there’s plenty of useless information stored in my brain that could do with being forgotten.
But, here I am. Going. And so, I worry each time. Like this morning when the lyric came only in part.
And I know, the forgetting could be (and likely will be) far worse. In my life I have squandered much of my might have been, so the things I’m forgetting aren’t — for the most part — all that exciting anyway. I didn’t get rich. I didn’t make it to Broadway. I didn’t publish a novel. I didn’t manage with anything like success to do the romantic love thing. And worse, I’ve not grown wise enough to have convinced myself that those things are not important measures of my worth. Surprise, things aren’t what I thought they’d be. And in order not to go crazy, you have to find your way to a place where you’re letting go your illusions, not to be confused with dreams … That’s it. The lyric with which I woke today is from MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG, the song NOW YOU KNOW.
I should have known it was a Stephen Sondheim lyric. It almost always is.
You’re right, nothing’s fair
And it’s all a plot
And tomorrow doesn’t look too hot —
Right, you better look at what you got:
Over here, hello!
Now you know.
Yes, this feels like an ending … but maybe …