tell the story of my grandfather as if he urged me on my way. But I don’t think it’s so. More likely, it is one of those memories we find to create patterns and connections in our lives where none exists. In the sixth grade, I wrote a poem about George Washington saying goodbye to his troops. This was not in response to an assignment. I simply was moved to do it. And I wrote things for the school literary magazine, only one of which I recall—a monologue spoken by a lawyer who had deliberately given little effort to his defense of a black kid from the streets, because his client represented a lower social class. Pretty obvious stuff.
But actually becoming a writer? I think I was more impressed by the idea of a person who worked alone and did what he liked. I relished stories about writers, movies about writers, as I did about detectives. The very word thrilled me—writer, one who imagines all of experience and creates it again. All the world sits in awe of writers, I believed, the storytellers of the race. Best of all, a writer is invisible. He tracks you down without your knowing he’s there. And he’s not there. A book is published. The writer does not have to accompany it. Go, litel bok.
From the Unpublished Memoir Unaccompanied Minor
My mother teaches me to read. I am two and a half. We sit together at the dinette table with a book between us. I remember nothing of that book, or of any of the others we read, but I still can feel her closeness, the fresh-roses smell of her clothing, and our intense conspiracy over words. In her early seventies until her death from Alzheimer’s years later, my mother will show only the look of fear. She will appear anxious even in death. But when I am little and she is in her mid-thirties, she is the face of serene competence. There is nothing she can’t do.
We make eggnog. She teaches me to stir the eggs and to pour in the vanilla. We sew on a button. We run the vacuum cleaner. We go shopping in the neighborhood. People acknowledge her and wave. She buys a baker’s dozen of cupcakes at the Gramercy Bakery and explains that a baker’s dozen mean thirteen. She takes me with her to the milliner. The shop is dead quiet, and the proprietor snooty. How do you like this one? my mother asks me, dramatically tilting what looks like a huge gray stuffed owl over her eyes. I giggle. We’ll take a baker’s dozen, she tells the milliner, who is unamused.
The Disease That Takes Your Breath Away
My mother died last week, seventeen years too late, of Alzheimer’s disease—though not technically, of course. Technically, Alzheimer’s victims usually die of heart failure, pneumonia, or perhaps a stroke, since the symptoms of the disease and a series of strokes are indistinguishable. My mother died of some respiratory thing, technically. It might be said that she died because she stopped breathing. Now, I would like to start breathing again myself, having held my breath for seventeen years.
Yet, oddly, I am wondering what to do with spring this year—oddly, because I had been thinking about my mother less and less as her condition deteriorated, and as she grew less and less herself. A mighty impressive disease, Alzheimer’s. It takes your breath away: first as it inflicts progressive shocks on the victim’s system, and then, in the victim’s relatives and loved ones, as it deadens feeling altogether.
Such fascinating stages. Initially there is a kind of troubled yet sweet awareness that the clock of the patient’s mind is a few seconds off. Then an encroaching recognition of loss of function becomes less recognition and greater loss. Soon words and phrases are looped, like mad lines from a postmodern play; then Tourette’s-like bursts, frags, some incomprehensible, some vile; then less of that, less of everything, until the mind is concentrated down to a curious stare. Even in death, my mother’s face looked worried.
A junior high school English teacher, she lived for words. She gave me words. When dementia struck, what happened to the words in her head? Did a civilization become a mob? Did the words take a bow and exit one by one, like players in a stage performance, until just one word was left? What was that word, Mom? Tell me. I’ll write it.
Dead now, dead for years. I ought not to think about her. I should be thinking of China and the returned air crew of the spy plane. I should be thinking about the Cincinnati riots. There is Tiger Woods to think about, and the start of the baseball season; Pedro vs. Clemens up in Boston the weekend of my mother’s death; I watched, half watched.
I should be thinking of spring and April: T. S. Eliot, Columbine, Hitler, Shakespeare, Waco, taxes, Oklahoma City, Jesus, Moses, Al Jolson singing “April Showers.” My mother used to sing that. She was born on April 1st, no fooling.
But I am not really thinking about her either. I am thinking about not thinking about her, and feeling neither guilt nor responsibility. Now, here’s a feat for Alzheimer’s: it takes guilt away from a Jew! If I converted to Catholicism, would I get some back?
I do not feel guilty about my mother. I did my filial duties, lovingly, for the most part. I do not feel responsible. Alzheimer’s drops in from nowhere, like a mistimed curtain. You don’t catch it because you went outside in winter without a hat.
The trouble is, I don’t feel anything, save the shadows of memories, and even they have to be reconstructed willfully.
One day, when the disease was new, I took my mother to lunch and remarked over coffee that we should do this again very soon. “Yes,” said my mother. “But the next time we have lunch, we should invite Joseph Cotten.” She spoke with great earnestness. “Why, Mom?” I asked, since neither of us knew the actor personally. “Because Joseph Cotten is remarkable,” she said. “He can listen to your dialect and know exactly what part of the country you come from.”
Getting into the spirit of things, I realized that she was thinking of Leslie Howard or Rex Harrison, both of whom played Shaw’s Professor Higgins, and I suggested as much to her. She considered for a moment, then smiled in a kind of gentle acknowledgment of the correction and of the craziness of the thought in the first place. “Yes, that’s right,” she said. “I was thinking of Rex Harrison. But as long as we’ve already invited Joseph Cotten, I don’t think we should renege.” The story used to amuse me.
The thing about Alzheimer’s is that if it lasts long enough, it takes away everything, not only by erasing the person you once knew but by erasing the you you knew, too, leaving two carcasses. When the disease started getting bad, I used to tell myself that while I could make neither head nor tail of my mother’s ravings, still she might have been clear as daylight to herself. When she caved in to silence, I told myself she might be harboring pleasant, unexpressed thoughts. Eventually I stopped kidding myself. What I saw of her was what I got: a blank stone in a wall eaten away by rain.
Which is very much the way I am now. The people around Alzheimer’s victims suffer from secondhand smoke, and the worst of their secondary disease is that, after the long years, the one thought, the one plea that overtakes all others—all the resurrected laughter, the walks along the beach in Chatham on Cape Cod, the brassy imitation of Mae West’s strut, the home-sewn Dracula costume at Halloween, the bewildered attendance at basketball games, the singing of “April Showers”—is: die.
And so she did. And it is spring. And because hope breathes eternal, even if nothing else does, I am wondering if my mother is somewhere up and about, breathing again, where the words are restored and the air and mind are clear.
{ essay in Time magazine }
From the Novel Thomas Murphy
Noiseless, I have drawn up my straw pallet so that I might lie on the floor beside my dad’s bed. Above me, he breathes like the polar sea. He floats in his sleep. I would like to ride the current with him—the two of us on a mare heading to deep waters, under the sea’s sun. But he is alone in his dying, as I am alone in my living. I lie on my makeshift bed, my arms behind my head like angel wings. Every so often, I look up. He begins to appear as glass, as a glass ink bottle into which I may dip my pen. I dip my pen in my father and write what he tells me. And now I am reborn, a new child again, learning to make my way in the new world. What is a rock? What is a daisy? Hours pass and I crawl around the poem I write of him and me. Soon I pull