Reflections

I found the woven basket with its tight fitting lid on top of my mother’s desk. It had sat there for years and I’d never thought to open it during my visits, though I often slept on the spare bed in her office. How that was possible, when I have been a snoop for years, for I knew exactly what was in her desk drawer – a checkbook, the key to the Biedermeier cabinet and an old watch that once belonged to my Grandfather – I don’t know. But five years ago when my mother was diagnosed with mid-stage Alzheimer’s, I drove up to her house to pack up her belongings, and I finally opened that basket.

Inside, written in her elegant, looped script were rows of names. Five, ten or twenty times, she’d written the same name or phrase across the page. The names of friends, of their children, of books, The Human Stain, of authors, Peter Matthiessen whom she’d met at a dinner party, of the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and of stores, L.L. Bean and Sears, and finally the last thing she sought to remember to write down, the name of her pharmacy, Liggett Suburban Pharmacy in West Hartford, Connecticut.

They were written on loose slips of paper, foolscrap they used to call it, and indeed it looked to be written by a fool. I don’t mean her handwriting, which remained elegant and legible long after the names vanished from memory, but the jottings, phrases like cedar waxing, and brown recluse.

Sifting through the scraps, which were neatly piled from first lost to last forgotten, I could track the disappearance of my mother’s memory. Cultivation, she wrote that word ten times on April 4^th, 2002 at 1:10 p.m. Yes, she noted each slip with the date and time. Had I known, what would I have done? The point is she suspected and tried in vain to hold on.

My mother was a writer of short stories, a woman who kept journals, letters, even the carbon copies of her own letters. Over the years, she’d jotted down remarks that she liked, quotes from books, overhead playground chatter and cocktail party anecdotes. But it was not until her early 70s, when Alzheimer’s began its insidious progress that the basket of forgotten words first appeared on her desk.

But I ignored it or didn’t see it or didn’t want to see it. Maybe I forgot it was even there. When I finally opened it, my mother’s basket led me like Alice, through the mirror and hurtling down the tunnel of her erasing brain. Capital Gains, fifteen times on March 23, 2003, 10:35 a.m., the words flew out of the basket and into my brain. With a sinking feeling, I remembered her calling and asking me, “Darling, what does IRS mean?” I’d laughed and resolved to handle her taxes, but I hadn’t thought to look in her basket.

Since her diagnosis, I have become well-versed with the advice meted out by experts who want to help the brain retain its cognitive abilities. Crossword puzzles, scrabble, exercise, reading and yes, writing things down, these are the activities doctors and neurologist say we must do, the weapons we must pick up, to fight against forgetting. But the sad truth is that writing words and names down on slips of paper doesn’t keep them in our memories; it saves them in another place. Behind a door, in a basket or kitchen drawer, on the hard drive of our computers or on slips of foolscrap, as the human brain evolved, it learned that it needed to find additional space. Quite literally, an evolved brain is one that thinks outside the box.

What astounds me is that even as my mother’s brain atrophied it was able to fathom this fact. So Robert Olen Butler and Jeremy Irons went into the basket and by the wayside. Still, I quaked as I wondered what it felt like for my mother—a writer—not only to find herself stranded on a blank page of fading words, but also to slowly collect these ghosts, to name what was slowly disappearing into the abyss. Staring into her basket, I felt as if I were standing in front of an expanding hole that, having first swallowed her past, might soon devour my future. I’ve consoled myself with the hope that forgetfulness saves us from fear.

In the end, my mother retained what was essential as long as she could. I know this, I have the evidence, or lack thereof. Written on foolscrap are the names of things that were discardable to her. For a long time after she forgot the name of her pharmacy, “It’s on the tip of my tongue,” she’d say, “just give me a moment,” she knew the route there. And Ludwig Wiggtensttien? I held his name on a scrap of paper, like a ticket admitting me to the carnival of this disease, and sadly marveled at the irony of her squirreling away the name of the philosopher who wrote about unsayable things and language pointing beyond itself towards silence.

When name of the actress Monica Vitti was added to the basket, Vitti’s name was no longer necessary, though for some time afterwards, my mother retained a memory of a quote from one of her films. Monica Vitti had been a favorite of my mother’s, particularly in her portrayal as an anguished woman unraveling in an existential crisis in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, The Red Desert.

Now, a lot of my mother has fallen by the wayside: memory, certainty, motor skills, both fine and gross. She has expressive aphasia, the inability to retrieve language, though occasionally she still utters a word and recently a sentence or two.

We were sitting on the couch in my mother’s nursing home holding hands in silence. Outside it was spring; inside it was the same, old people were dying.

I thought my mother was asleep, her head hung towards her chest, but then she lifted it and her half closed lids opened. And there it was, a flicker, a force, knowledge.

“What, Mom?” I asked.

Nodding her head she said Vitti’s line. “Everything that happens to me, is my life.” She had a wry smile on her face, as if she were stating, not the tragedy of her own life, but the paradox.

Then she lowered her head to rest.