Figment of My Cogitation

Easter 1968

One of my professors in college said that, of all our sources of information, memory is the least accurate.  This idea flies contrary to everything we believe about the truth of our recollections and the meaning we attach to them, but I’ve decided he was correct.  I’ve been a reluctant student of memory — more aptly, its slow dissolution — for the past several years, and I know it to be a liar.  Yet in the wake of my mother’s recent death, the half-truth of memory is all I have left.

On good days, it dogs me quietly. On bad ones, it grabs me by the hair and leaves me gasping for mercy. Memory is no friend of mine right now.  It’s more like one of those boors who corners you at a party and tells you story after story, thwarting all your efforts to escape gracefully so you can get another drink.  The only exit from this ongoing monolog is to let it out of my head, to allow memory to speak until it’s finished with me, however inaccurate a stenographer I may be.

I’ve thought a lot about memory, about how much to trust it and what happens when it leaves us.  For the past four years, I was the keeper of my mother’s memory.  I held her life’s stories, personal details and medical history in a box right next to my own as she slowly began to lose her grasp on all of it.

At first, it was the normal kind of age-related forgetfulness, the kind I have now in my 40s.  She might lose the name of someone she hadn’t seen for several years, or she’d need to write down her daily schedule so she didn’t forget an appointment.  I first sensed trouble when she couldn’t recall, even with prompting, that she’d given my father the same kind of candy every Christmas for 50 years in a row.  Then she couldn’t remember the house where she lived in Tucson for nearly 30 years.  Sometimes she would call me because she couldn’t picture an old friend who’d sent a card for her birthday.   At the end of her life, with the organic memory loss exacerbated by the effects of pain medications, she could remember her family, her daily routine, and perhaps the events of the previous couple of days.  Last week?  Nope.  My childhood?  Nothing.  Hers?  Gone.

In its initial stages, my mother never spoke about what this loss meant but changes in her behavior gave me some clues.  I noticed her growing sense of anxiety, an awareness that she couldn’t trust her mind anymore, so she called me several times a day to double-check herself.  I was the Keeper of the Information: what time she had a doctor’s appointment, how to set her clock radio, which medications needed to be taken and when.  I became her auxiliary brain and my phone number was her lifeline.  Last summer, so hopped up on morphine during a hospitalization that she literally couldn’t tell up from down, she still managed to reach the phone and dial my number.

She also became angry in a way I’d never seen before, a bad mix of neediness overlaid with resentment about being told what to do.  For most of my life, I’d felt sorry for women who had contentious relationships with their mothers.  I had no idea what that was like because Mom and I genuinely enjoyed each other’s company. But when she forgot her own past, she lost huge chunks of her personality too.  And when she forgot my history, she stopped being the mother I’d always known and we grated on each other like strangers forced into close contact often do.

Toward the end of her life, she said she’d come to accept that her mind didn’t work for her the way she wanted it to.  I’d like to say I came to accept it, too, but I never did.  The memory loss stole the mother I loved, leaving someone I didn’t like in her place, and I fought it as if I had some hope of winning.  I struggled to make her remember things.

“It’s like a messy drawer, Mom,” I’d say.  ”The stuff’s in your mind, but you just have to rummage around in there a little longer to find it.”  Sometimes it worked.  Many times it didn’t.

Or I’d try to fill in details, jog her recollection of a person or an event.  ”Don’t you remember…” I’d ask stupidly.  I was duty-bound to care for her, but I was starting to forget things, too.  I couldn’t think of the last time I’d heard her laugh.  I couldn’t remember her when she’d been herself. I forgot that I loved her.

Maybe you’re thinking that can’t be true.  Love remains after everything else fades away, the Hallmark cards promise us.  But the truth as I recollect it (which we’ve already established is unreliable) is that I did not love who my mother became.  I gritted my teeth when I talked to her, screamed my frustration alone in my car, and got caller i.d. so I could screen her calls after, say, the 5th one in a day.  I once threw a pair of scissors when she criticized the way I was changing the dressing on her infected leg, and I frequently responded to her more bizarre statements with, “What the hell are you talking about?”  I wouldn’t call it love.  I cared for her, made sure she was comfortable, kept up with her medical needs, did her shopping and saw her through several hospitalizations because I owed it to the woman who had raised me.  Duty, not love.

So grief for me is like this.  I don’t miss the last mom I had, the one who left me in December. But I ache for the mother of my first forty years, the one who left first.  And so far, I still cannot remember her.