The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [33]
April 13. My mother’s French seems to have disappeared. She used to be fluent and now she speaks English when people speak French to her (including Dr. Vorta). And she used to watch Ultimatum, the French version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, but now she just gets angry. Tonight she told me to “Turn off that gibberish. What country are we living in? Gibberia?”
Had my recurring dream last night, the one in black-and-white, where I run along the squares of a mammoth crossword puzzle, looking for clues and numbers that aren’t there. So I run blind, and the squares turn into deserted alleyways, and the alleys turn into a labyrinth with towering hedges, except there’s no exit and I know there’s no exit but I keep running anyway, looking for signs, getting more and more lost and tired and terrified … But last night, for the first time, I thought I spotted a light in the distance—the exit?—but when I opened my eyes I saw it was the ray of my mother’s hunter’s lamp.
April 14. Mom has a rash of some kind on her left inner thigh, which she claims is from the “chemicals” I’ve been spraying her with. She then added that I was treating her like “some sort of weed.” I’ll have to get the Bath Lady (who Mom calls the Wife of Bath because she’s had several husbands) to have a closer look.
The Bath Lady—the Home Health Nurse I guess I should call her, a Portuguese woman named Sancha Ribeiro—has this breathy amber voice which is kind of nice. She’s also very warm, touching me on the arm with her multi-ringed hand when she talks. She wears next to nothing in the house— summer clothes, beach clothes—I guess because it’s so hot in the house.
April 16. “Alzheimer’s is the disease that kills two people”—that line is still haunting me. It’s from Iris Murdoch. Tonight Mom and I watched a video about her last days with her husband. I’d planned on watching it alone, and tried to in my bedroom, but Mom came in around midnight with her trusty power-lamp and asked me to rewind it. “When are we leaving?” was Murdoch’s repeatedly asked question. Mom’s is very similar: “What time does the train leave?”
April 17. Mom wandered all night long. At 3 a.m. I found her at the front door in her nightgown and yoga shoes, with a purse around her neck and plastic bags stuffed with photos and underclothes. “What time does the train leave?” she asked. Not sure what train she’s referring to. After my father died, we used to go back to Long Island every few weeks to visit friends and relatives. But when she was a young woman she also used to take a train from Aberdeen to Edinburgh, almost every weekend, to see her boyfriend (my father). In any case, I managed to get her back to bed without too much fuss.
April 19. Looked through a stash of old letters of my mom’s, some of which I read to her. Now, after midnight, with Mom sleeping, I’m feeling awful, thinking of all the letters Mom wrote to me after I moved out, travelled, then got my own apartment. I threw them all out, once after laughing with a friend at the banal summaries of her day. But that’s all life is! The everyday details that accrue to form a life. The problems with the vacuum cleaner, a plant that died, a pet that strayed, making gifts for friends … How I wish I had kept those letters, each one brimming with love and thoughtfulness. Or committed them to memory instead of some poem or story or chemical formula! I seldom finished the letters, I shudder to admit, let alone replied to them. And along with every letter she would enclose newspaper articles (“Thought you’d enjoy this,” she’d write on a yellow Post-it, “Thinking of you when I read this …”). How I wish I had those letters and articles now! How I wish I could hold them to my heart, thank her from the bottom of my heart for thinking of me when no one else was.
April 21. At breakfast, over a pot of her favourite tea (Yorkshire Gold), Mom said she was worried about “the mountain.” Which mountain, Mom? “You know very well which one.” Mount Royal? “Yes, it’s going to erupt, I heard it on the radio.” Your radio is broken, I