The Faraway Nearby (18 page)

I hoped she'd be able to see it if she held it. She attempted to try it on, I wrested it from her as gently as I could, and then we went through the same routine with a better shade of pink. Now it's obvious that it didn't matter what shade I bought; the goal was to have a lipstick because a lipstick signified something. But it seemed like respect to treat her like a woman who'd want to select her lipstick color with care. We ate our ravioli and salad without any further misadventures. Probably shortly thereafter the lipstick vanished. Not so long after that she forgot about lipstick.

My mother became different people, one after another, in the years after that apricot summer. She was a happy child for a couple of years. Then the precarious balance shifted, and she had more trouble with everything. It resembled in some ways the stages of childhood running in reverse, and as with a child, whatever arrangements suited her at a given stage didn't necessarily work when the next one arrived. How and when it would arrive was never clear in advance. Another thing to come to terms with was that there was no preventing or changing the course of events: the disease was a road she was going to go down no matter what. All we could do was help her travel it as gracefully as possible and locate what pleasures and comforts were available along the way.

There was an era in which my mother fell down regularly. Or at least the staff at the place where she lived thought she was falling down a lot. They would find her sitting or lying on the carpet and their protocol required calling an ambulance. They'd call one of us too. We'd rush over and try to ward off the emergency medical technicians' inclination to strap her to a bodyboard, to put her in an ambulance, to strip her and put her in hospital gowns, once even to catheterize her for a urine sample, to generally traumatize her when she had not been traumatized before they arrived.

A few times she had a minor bruise or scrape that might have been falling-related, but she was never seriously injured in this phase. I came to think that perhaps some of the time she was sitting or lying down. She was losing her ability to navigate, her balance, and her confidence. Her kind doctor proposed that her caregivers were negligent in not preventing her from falling down, but there was no way to do so without depriving her of her liberty.

There were pretty grounds at her residence, with a rose garden and lemon trees, a pomegranate tree, primroses in front of the administration building, and other greenery, and a series of paths that let us take a fifteen-minute-or-so walk at her slow pace in the phase after walking around the neighborhood was over, long after I stopped taking her out into the confusing world of restaurant meals and car trips. She couldn't smell the roses—the disease had stripped that away early—but there was a porch-style swing near them we sat on, and the fresh air and walks were good.

One time we went across the little central street as usual toward the sidewalk on the far side and I tried to steer her to a curb cut. She wanted to go straight toward the curb instead and I helped her step up to the grassy higher ground. On the grass she paused a moment, then lay down calmly, almost gracefully. She had managed the step but not the adjustment in balance afterward, and this voluntary crumple was apparently her way of eliminating the risk of falling. Once she was down she was a little upset to be lying on the grass. She cried out, however, when I pulled on her arms to try to lift her, and didn't have any capacity to get herself up.

This was in the era when the drugs seemed to be making her gain weight, before the era when I eliminated the no-longer-necessary drugs, which came a while before she lost her appetite and began to grow frail and thin. I tried a few things and then sat down on the grass to keep her company, took my cell phone out, and asked the dementia facility to send help. She lay and I sat on the grass, becalmed. After a few more minutes, the imposing woman in charge that day came out to help us, and so did two older men out on a stroll of their own. The three of them got her to her feet and she said to all of them or some of us or no one in particular, “I love you all.”

One Thanksgiving holiday during this phase my brothers persuaded and helped her up the short flight of stairs to my middle brother's house. During the afternoon, too many people tried to help her and talk to her at once, and she got upset and overwhelmed. When it was time for her to go, my patient younger brother walked her to the front door. There she balked at the tiny step up over the doorframe and down to the porch. Nothing would persuade her to do it. I tried to keep everyone else at bay while he tried over and over to get her out.

Then he asked us to back up farther and got her to sit down in a straight chair. Her two tall sons picked it up and carried it and her to the car that would take her back to the place where she could pretty nearly cope, or at least where her limits weren't taxed. It wasn't being carried out in a coffin, but the short procession had for me some sense of grave finality and of tragedy. Another door had shut. Not the last one, but an important one. She wasn't going to go up those stairs again.

My mother was a happy child. Then she was a lost child who fell or lay down regularly. Then she was a person who had trouble finding words and became more and more silent and harder and harder to understand. After that she became more and more tentative about walking and the point at which she would no longer be able to walk approached. I skipped a week because I had a cold and that next stage arrived while I was away. Her legs were fine as far as we could tell, but the panoply of skills and the confidence and will involved had eroded too far. I learned a lot in witnessing her travel steadily into the unknowns and unknowables and in contemplating what constitutes a self beyond possession of skills and facts, and the value of that self beyond functionality.

Time passed. She was being helped with everything: with getting out of bed, with dressing, with eating, with going to bed, with washing. For her eightieth birthday, early in her second year in the Alzheimer's residence, I'd baked her a cake and had a party at my home up three flights of stairs, but for her eighty-third birthday I brought her a tiny
tres leches
cake and a lunch of small salads and fed her and myself, though she picked up a few bits with her fingers. I lit three candles and one of the workers came over and sang to her with me, but my mother seemed confused by it all and was most definitely not going to blow out the candles. I blew them out and wasn't sure what to wish for on her behalf. But she didn't seem unhappy, even if the bright joy had flickered out a few years before. The road continued onward and downward. Both of us were at peace.

My friend Malcolm told me a story about pronghorns recently, the North American creatures sometimes confused with antelopes. They can run at speeds of nearly sixty miles an hour, much, much faster than any of their existing predators. Some biologists think they're still outrunning the dangerous species that went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene, specifically the cheetahs that existed on this continent. And then Malcolm asked what each of us is still outrunning and whether we can tell when our predator has been extinct for ten thousand years.

She was so many people on the long road downhill. When I read my own old letters in which I talk about her, I see someone I hope I no longer am, someone who didn't see the earliest stages of Alzheimer's as anything more than a new phase of a capricious, demanding personality, though I think I was kinder in person than in the venting letters written after I'd done my best. I read those old e-mails and letters and remember the person who wrote them who no longer seems to be me. I blush, but to look at them is to recognize that I've also metamorphosed.

Sometimes I get mail for people who lived in my home before I did, and sometimes my own body seems like a home through which successive people have passed like tenants, leaving behind memories, habits, scars, skills, and other souvenirs. Even much later, my heart lagged behind, for I was still sometimes struggling against the extinct mothers of bygone years, working out the past, or working over the past, when the present was something else entirely. It didn't interfere with tending the person who had been pared back to essentials and still had that to teach me. Toward that person I could be entirely solicitous and unguarded.

Neither of those people exist any longer, and they called each other into existence in a peculiar way. My sister-in-law once said I was like an electrical ground; my mother sparked and her current ran into me when I entered the room, and I realized that someone else existed when I wasn't around, someone I never met. I was perhaps also someone she never met. I was obdurate, stern, heavily armored for survival when she was around in those years. I survived, and then everything changed.

When I look back at those decades that she was furious that I was different from her and I was terrified of being like her and trying hard not to be, I see how much alike we were, how much she shaped some of my most essential tastes, interests, and values. She was preoccupied all her life with moral questions and principles, and thought one's life had to be justified by achievement and contribution, and that I inherited. More ethereal things came too, a pleasure in flowers and the bare branches of trees, in books, a certain kind of restlessness and uncertainty. And of course I look a great deal like her.

The ancient Greeks used a word,
sungnômé,
that means to understand, to sympathize, to forgive, to pardon, a word that refuses to distinguish between thinking and feeling. It proposes that understanding is the beginning of forgiveness or the thing itself. The scope of this word implies that it takes empathy to try to understand and understanding to reach the empathy that is forgiveness—that they proceed together, helping each other along the way. Or that they were never separate in the first place. We use the word
understanding
that way in English, and a request for forgiveness often asks for understanding (which can veer into peddling excuses).

When I was younger, I studied the men I was involved with so carefully that I saw or thought I saw what pain or limitation lay behind their sometimes crummy behavior. I found it too easy to forgive them, or rather to regard them with sympathy at my own expense. It was as though I saw the depths but not the surface, the causes but not the effect. Or them and not myself. I think we call that overidentification, and it's common among women. But gods and saints and boddhisattvas must see the sources of all beings' actions and see their consequences, so that there is no self, no separation, just a grand circulatory system of being and becoming and extinguishing. To understand deeply enough is a kind of forgiveness or love that is not the same as whitewashing, if you apply it to everyone, and not just the parade through your bed.

Now I see my mother in her prime as a woman driven by unseen forces, unclear on the consequences of her actions, unclear on her own desires and contradictions, hemmed in by the unexamined, suffering and occasionally celebrating: an intricate landscape whose various parts were not acquainted with one another, a labyrinth in which she was lost. It was always clear that her reaction to me came out of misery that flowed through her as a set of conventional stories, commands, values, and standards. We were the worthless gender together.

Vengeance and forgiveness, two of the principal methods of resolution we're offered, seem to me to come out of accounting (and we even say
accountable
to mean responsible and say
forgiven
about monetary debts). It's as though a wrong is a debt, and vengeance collects it. You did something terrible; I do something terrible as payback; the score is settled (in theory, though cycles of revenge have a tendency to be endless). Or I forgive you, and your debt is canceled because of my magnanimity.

Maybe the word
forgive
points in the wrong direction, since it's something you mostly give yourself, not anyone else: you put down the ugly weight of old suffering, untie yourself from the awful, and walk away from it. Forgiveness is otherwise a public act or a reconciliation between two parties, but what goes on in the heart is a more uncertain process; suddenly or gradually something no longer matters, as though you have traveled out of range or outlived it. Then sometimes it returns just as you congratulate yourself on its absence.

My mother regretted not going to college, but she did take classes for free for a while when she was a clerical worker at New York University in her early twenties. She took bookkeeping classes because it seemed more practical than whatever transformation she yearned for, whatever elevation the word
college
conjured for her. And it was practical; for a decade after her divorce, she was the bookkeeper for a theatrical and modeling agency, keeping accounts in order as beautiful people rushed in and out. She was a bookkeeper in other things as well, in that she expected the accounts to all come out even, and brooded over the old imbalances in the ledgers of life.

She had wanted recompense, fairness, columns of numbers that added up, credit that could be cashed in. Catholicism's economy of sin, virtue, repentance, punishment, and reward still oriented her long after she left the church, but forgiveness is also a powerful force in Christianity. Finally, all that reckoning and accounting faded away, the sense of poverty, the conviction she was owed, the chessboard war. Vengeance and forgiveness are about reconciling the accounts, but accounting is an ugly description of the tangled ways we're connected. I sometimes think everything comes out even in the end, but an end that arches beyond the horizon, beyond our capacity to perceive or measure, and that in many cases those who trespass against you do so out of a misery that means the punishment preceded and even precipitated the crime. Maybe that's acceptance.

One branch of medieval Chinese Buddhists focused on filial piety toward mothers, rather than the fathers at the center of Confucianism. David Graeber describes this perspective in his book
Debt:
“A mother's kindness is unlimited, her selflessness absolute; this was seen to be embodied above all in the act of breastfeeding, the fact that mothers transform their very flesh and blood into milk. . . . In doing so, however, they allow unlimited love to be precisely measured.