“You would think,” I said. “But you would be wrong.”
The shame I felt at hurting my mother could be another Words by Winter assignment: Write a letter to your mother, apologizing for that dark night. What would I say and how would I say it? What would she say back to me? We had never talked about what happened. Parts of the story were missing.
Is it possible that parts of the whole story are always missing? Like when I was buying fudge for my mother at the Hogback Mountain gift shop and the cashier sat behind the fudge counter, crocheting something—from the round, small look of the thing it was a baby hat like the kind Sunshine made—and she refused to look up from her crocheting. Hello, hello, fudge lady, I’m here, can you see me?
I coughed. I jingled my keys. I coughed again, louder. I said, “Excuse me,” but did she look up? She did not.
“HI.”
Both letters uppercase, and in boldface. At that she looked up, startled. “Oh my goodness, dear girl,” she said. “Have you been standing there a long time?”
That was when I saw the hearing aids, big ones. The on-a-budget hearing aids instead of the expensive, barely noticeable ones. For God’s sake, Clara, she’s deaf. The fudge lady was a kind old lady who was deaf, and she carefully cut and weighed and packed my half-pound of peanut butter fudge and then counted out my change, which I fed into the Donate to Vermont Food Shelves jar on the counter, one coin at a time, in penance, for which she smiled and thanked me.
It was so hard to know the whole story. Nigh on impossible. Remember that, Clara, I told myself.
* * *
Changes in the ability to communicate are unique to each person with Alzheimer’s. In the early stages of dementia, the person’s communication may not seem very different or he or she might repeat stories or not be able to find a word. As the disease progresses, a caregiver may recognize other changes such as:
Using familiar words repeatedly
Inventing new words to describe familiar objects
Easily losing his or her train of thought
Reverting back to a native language
Having difficulty organizing words logically
Speaking less often.
The Life Care Committee had printed out some guidelines for me, taken from the Alzheimer’s Association website. In the beginning I used to read them over and over. They were mostly memorized now but I still went through them sometimes. A ritual. Familiar words and phrases used repeatedly. She was always a strange child. She was a word girl. Inventing new words to describe familiar objects. “The iron claw.” That was the term my mother used for the hammered-metal hands that cupped the single book on her windowsill.
“You mean the bookends, Ma?”
She shook her head, annoyed, and pointed at them. “No. Them. The iron claw.”
“Yeah. The bookends. That’s what they’re called.”
She picked up the pillow next to her and threw it at me point-blank, a distance of twelve inches, because I was sitting right next to her on the couch. I caught it and laughed, a laugh of how strange, how surprising: my mother, throwing a pillow right at my face.
This was only two days after our last visit, but she was different yet again. That too was something they’d told me early on to expect. She will come and she will go, they said, and you must learn to meet her where she is.
“So,” she said, nodding, when I walked in next time.
“So,” I said.
She held out her hands, both hands, in a way she never had before, not now, not back then. Don’t think about back then, Clara. Meet your mother where she is. I took her hands in mine.
“I’m glad to see you, Ma.”
“I was looking for you,” she said. “I keep looking.”
“So they tell me. I had a bunch of work to do first, four one-day Words by Winter turnarounds—you know how it is.”
She nodded. She knew how it was. Did she have any idea how I made my living? Would she have cared if she did?
“And you know how it is up in the north woods”—I waved in a vaguely northern direction, there in the Plant Room with the orchids—“there was some road work on Route Eight.”
“Road work never ends,” she said. “Am I right or am I right?”
That wasn’t a Tamar remark. Never would she have said something like that in the olden days, which was how I was beginning to think of them. Shhh, Clara.
“You’re right,” I said. We sat down on the green couch together, she still holding both my hands in hers. She leaned toward me. Her eyes were bright.
“Is there enough wood?”
Follow her.
“There’s certainly a lot of wood,” I said, because there certainly was. There was a lot of wood in this world. All those trees, at least in upstate New York.
Enough wood was always something on my mother’s mind, back in the olden days. Fire-and ply-and more. She cut and hauled and split and then we both stacked—in the storage barn, in the unused garage, on the porch—all summer long and as far into the fall as the weather and light let us. Enough wood to get through the winter. Survival.
“There’s probably enough,” I said. “I think, anyway.”
We nodded, both of us. Enough wood was important. Enough to feed the stove all the way through the bitter cold of January, the bitter winds of February and the bitter snows of March. There could never be enough wood, in Tamar’s world. She squeezed my hands.
“Boyfriend.”
“I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Boyfriend.”
“Ma.”
There it was, that tone in my voice. Had it always been there? Was it only now that I saw its effect on her? Because look, she was shrinking. The air around her was drawing itself in and her shoulders were narrowing and her head tilted down. Choose your words with care, Clara. Don’t correct. Don’t criticize.
“I’ve been thinking about him lately,” was what I said. That was the right thing to say. She nodded.
“He died,” she said.
—–—–
—–—–
—–—–
That was me breathing. Making myself wait. Making myself be calm. Making myself not use the word remember. Because that was what she was doing, wasn’t it? Remembering Asa.
“He did die,” I said.
“It broke my daughter’s heart,” she said.
She nodded, and I was back in time sitting on a chair in the kitchen of the Treehouse in the Florida Panhandle, waiting for a pot of boiling water to turn the shrimp pink, listening to her voice on the other end of the phone. Clara. Clara, Asa died yesterday morning. He died in an explosion in Afghanistan. Those words had never left me. They came back to me sometimes, the sound of her voice over all those miles, the way I sat there with the phone clutched in my hands, the way the boiling water boiled itself dry, the shrimp turned to scorched rubber at the bottom of the ruined pot.
“Help her,” my mother said. Her hands were still pressed against her heart.
“Maybe nothing could have helped her,” I said. “Maybe she just had to get through it however she could.”