Blur

"Well that should be good."

My dad is making my mom pizza for dinner tonight.

"That should be gorilla. Gorilla?"
"Good ... or gorilla."
"Oh good. Gorilla. Yes, you ate gorilla, remember?"
"Oh not gorilla. I think you mean ... giraffe?"
"No, that makes sense that you ate gorilla. That's why there aren't too many left anymore."
"I don't think I'm the one causing that."
"You shouldn't feel bad."
"But the pizza sounds like it will be good."
"Yes, that should be good. There are two sizes. One is 13.5 ounces and the other is 17.5 ounces."

Before I got on the phone with my mom, my dad told me that she seems to be doing okay. Her temperature is stable and she has enough strength to climb up and down the stairs. He started telling me, though, that her memory and her mind aren't working ... properly? Was "properly" the word he used? Before I had a chance to find out what he meant, my mom announced her presence on the line. I don't think that she heard what my dad was telling me ... or if she did, she chose not to talk about it. Instead, we talked about pizza, and gorillas, and an argument she had earlier about 4 mg or 6 mg and her wanting more.

When I spoke with her yesterday, she was completely lucid, so this conversation ... well, it's not that it threw me. It didn't. I spoke with her as if the conversation made sense ... or, rather, as if what she said wasn't too unusual. And when I asked her questions, they weren't about what she did today, but about what she was doing now. Even asking her how her pain was, though, became difficult. When she finally got that I was saying the word "pain," she started making fun of the word's long vowel sounds: "aiiii. aiiiii." I laughed with her.

Her words. Her thoughts. Her memories. They all blur together it seems. And she depends on us to find her by reading between the lines. And I see her, in the care she takes in talking to me, and in the subject matter she chooses ... like our trip to Africa, years ago, when we all tasted giraffe (hey, at least we didn't have gorilla). She would always bring up that trip: "We had such a good time." And we did.

So it doesn't throw me. But it does break me.