Remembering
My dad forgot it all. Or a lot of it. He showed up at my aunt's house tonight with a yellow legal pad (the same kind he used to record my mom's daily drug intake) to ask my aunt what happened. Each day. Each moment relived. My aunt said they got to Friday and I wanted to ask, "The Friday before or the Friday after?" But the conversation went somewhere else before I had the chance to ask and then the question was gone.
My short term memory is shot. It has been for weeks now. I have this theory that my brain is trying so hard to retain and reflect on my old memories and my strong memories that there's just no space right now for the everyday. These small things that don't matter--they just float through the cracks. And so I don't remember why I opened the refrigerator sometimes. Or I don't remember how I managed to get from point A to point B when the sidewalk was closed. I'm certain I just walked beside the sidewalk, on the street. But it doesn't really matter.
I have glimpses of my mom. Close-ups. Beginning, middle, end. Her yellow eyes, opening. The foam that would spit from her nostrils. Her tongue, rubbing against her teeth, bleeding. Two times, toward the beginning, I walked away from her bed grumbling, "This is ridiculous." It was--the amount of pain she was in and how little I could do to help her. And then more morphine and I didn't leave her side except for trips to the bathroom and to the refrigerator, where we kept the morphine and liquid ativan. I held her left hand all night long, carefully replacing my right with my left, and then my left with my right, when one got tired or cramped. When I had to leave the room, I would slip my hand out of hers and my aunt would slip her hand in. We never wanted her to feel that she was alone. Though what I really hope, sometimes, is that she didn't feel a thing.
Something about the tip of the iceberg. You don't want to share these things because they make you feel guilty, responsible, embarrassed. And you share them because you know there's so much more to it than that. So much more. And you share them because that's what we do to keep going. So you can try to be here with me. And so I can lean on you.
And I wonder what my aunt is telling my dad. What details does she offer? What does she leave out? What does she remember?
