Are you My Mother?
I love this book still. The search. The little bird fallen from his nest on a quest. He is fearless. He is not daunted. He is brave in the face of loss. His courage is inspiring.
At this moment, my mother has dementia. When people ask me, I say she is demented because that feels less concrete. It’s funny. Like she’s kooky. Less like a diagnosis. There is a medical diagnosis: Lewy Body Dementia. Truthfully, all the medical terms are meaningless. And none of them can stop the stranger who inhabits my mother from taking over completely. It’s like the eel thing that crawls into Chekhov’s ear in The Wrath of Khan. It takes control. Or it lets Khan take control. Dementia is the Ceti Eel in Mommy’s ear. It has control. It has taken her from me. And it will, I fear, take me.
I fear for my own mental health. Every forgotten fact, every word I search for and cannot find is a harbinger of my future. And as I watch with a kind of horror and sometimes revulsion at what dementia can do, I feel more and more the need to prepare myself. There is no way to Heisman hand this future. What am I to make of “foods that fight dementia”? How much turmeric or ginko biloba or ashwagandga can a person swallow? Sleep allows the brain to cleanse itself. Yet, I toss and turn b/c I can’t fall asleep b/c I am afraid that I won’t get enough sleep. And the thing is, I won’t know I have dementia until I have dementia.
Resolved: I am writing a series of letters to myself because I am afraid. I am afraid the dementia that has stolen my mother will take me. I am watching what the disease does, and good student that I have always been, I am learning. I am taking notes. I am converting those notes into instructions. How to be a demented person. I am writing these letters while I am still all-together. When my body and mind are fit.
“In a man’s letters you know, Madam, his soul lies naked..." - Dr. Johnson
Letters are a less painful way to deliver bad news or to tell an unpleasant story. There is room for explanation, space for context, a chance to ease into things. The world has moved from words to pictures. To quick hit videos. Even when there are words, they are more like snippets--tweets that are shorter than postcards. And one could count on postcards to deliver good news, or at the very least not-bad news. Even if one delivers bad news in the spirit of the quick-rip bandage, the sentence is swaddled in before and after. No longer. Messages come with no time to process. No opportunity to put down the paper and come back. No pause for reflection.
By writing letters to myself I am doing what I have done for decades as an English professor. Writing has always been easy for me. I was never a diary writer or a journal keeper. I have a day-planner where I keep appointments and note what needs doing, but daily reflections or creative scrawls were never my jam. Writing was my work. Books and articles to secure tenure. Talks and presentations to the organizations and associations to which I belonged. Lessons on American literature or pedagogy. Reports to accrediting agencies.
In class, I would tell my students, "we learn to write and write to learn." You have to write yourself into an idea, I'd explain. Put pen to paper and suddenly doors open and thoughts take shape. Drafting and revising--I love that shit. A frequent comment in the margins of student papers went something like: “you have taken the first 4 and ½ pages of your rambling essay to write yourself into a solid argument on this, your last page. Now, you can begin to write your next draft."
By writing these letters I am learning. I am teaching myself how to be a demented person. How to be, so I don’t become the worst that dementia can make us. I am writing these letters b/c all my life I have seen the best and worst of my mother in me. But this person who is not Mommy—except in those moments when she is—terrifies me.
This is not my mother.
You are not my nother.
Where are you Mommy?
Where have you gone.?
