It is 90-hell-degrees outside and both air conditioners are going. I know it’s bad for the planet. You can sue me if you survive the apocalypse on the horizon: Trump, martial law, police violence, pandemics, epidemics, hurricanes, murder hornets, racism, violence, anti-semitism, Islamophobia, more violence.
I don’t mean to be a bummer, this is a special Sunday.
Thursday, July 23, was my navel birthday, sixty-three years on the planet.
Tomorrow will be another anniversary – Big E and me – living together for the last two years. Both still alive, older and tireder than when we started.
If you haven’t read Fitzgerald’s short story, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” stop what you’re doing, read it, and come back to me. If a short story, even one by Fitzgerald is too much for your TikTok/SnapChat/WhatEverHappenedToVine attention span, you can scoot to section 11 to have your heart broken and have some idea what it’s like to live with dementia.
There are photographs of me and Big Edie on pro-choice marches in Washington. Climbing mountains. Rollerskating together. She ran our family business, hung wallpaper, retiled the kitchen floor, and despite being poor, always managed to be dressed to the nines. There were two pairs of pants, three tops and multiple scarves in her closet, out of which she could make a thousand outfits. She traveled. Went back to school. Fought against injustice, for civil rights, and when she was something that looked like 40, she beat the neighborhood boys (who were something that looked like 12) in footraces. Big E was the class mother on all the school trips. She managed the family finances, which were never good, and she parlayed their mediocre income into a very secure financial picture for her old age. That was my Ma, then.
She can’t tell time anymore on a regular big hand/little hand watch; she holds it up for me to see. She doesn’t remember my name a good deal of the time, that she has a daughter, or that I am that daughter. She needs to be shown her bedroom several times in one day to know she lives here, and the moment she turns around she can forget all over again. It hurts to stand and to walk. It hurts not to remember, to know she had a life, and to not know any of it. She has more difficulty counting by tens or fives each day, yet she is in the kitchen playing cards for “money” with her new aide.. Ma’s idea. My pennies.
Sentences can get stuck, words struggle to come. Clothing catalogs have replaced novels, magazines and newspapers. There are forty-nine jackets, innumerable turtlenecks, blouses, vests, shirts and pants for every season in a walk-in closet, upright cabinet, bureau. That is my Ma, now, still well-dressed, and wearing socks with sandals, the thing we used to laugh at my father for, but she doesn’t remember him at all, so I don’t expect her to remember his sartorial faux pas.
We spent the late morning in her bed watching “Little House on the Prairie.” She likes that they speak slowly, with no discernible accent. I like it as prep for a post-pandemic, post-apocalyptic return to basics.
I say: we watched. I mean: Ma slept on my shoulder, occasionally responding to something someone in Walnut Grove said and falling back to sleep.
In the afternoon we sit at the kitchen table and play cards. “Everyone in the building has a little table like this, and the same this (holding up a round, bright yellow placemat).”
I nod, even though of course they don’t, and of course she has never been in anyone else’s kitchen in the last two years, but aides, neighbors, doctors, social workers, family and friends have sat with her at this same table, so it feels like that. We listen to George M Cohan and John Philip Sousa, chair-dancing (Ma) and head banging (me) until I am dizzy. I cheat & miscount madly at cards. The smile when she wins, “I feel comfortable when I win,” gives me all the feels. A white lie that hurts no on.
Back in her bed watching “Law and Order, SVU,” exhausted from head-banging, chair-dancing, gin rummy, and 24-piece puzzles of cats and princesses, we fall asleep holding hands, a cat named Crackbaby curled up between us.
Then breakfast for dinner, her recipe, corn fritters and breakfast sausage.
Back to her bed, holding hands, a cat and Celebrity Family Feud.
“I don’t know what we did, but it was a really nice day.”
“Yeah, Ma, it was.”
❤️