She’s Up St Mary’s Again
POETRY: Fading. Dementia dissolving. Fog.
So many, many ways to go,
these pathways from life’s tour de force.
For her, the clapper is poised by the bell:
dementia is saddling its horse.
There’s a thickening fog,
it clogs, it binds,
it’s billowing into the roots of her mind.
It projects on magnolia hospital walls,
a woodland scene, children, waterfalls
and a soldier leading his mount to a hill
and she smiles:
it’s so peaceful, so funny and still.
But it’s tainted, black humour, a whispered aside:
she’s completely alone on the ride.
We wait at fate’s gate.
The timescale’s unfixed.
We’re all on a road,
where the route has been picked
by this thing that erases, removes and subtracts,
that has shifted her thoughts from dependable facts.
We’ll melt in her memory’s frosted glass,
each year of her life lost in a crevasse
where her spectrum’s hot brightness has faded to grey,
her language unflowing, her tongue turned to clay.
Her spark fizzles out, never seeing the day,
and if Jesus awaits, it will take him away.
AT THE TIME OF WRITING she is doing OK. That’s what you say, isn’t it: “she’s OK”? It’s a place-holder for “it’s complicated”… “it’s as good as you’d expect in the circumstances”… “let’s not get into the depressing details, you know the rails this train is on”… all with phrasing just-so, measured, no upbeat on the “OK”. In reality her OK-ness is in “the facility”, which is well-run and scrubbed clean and with cheerful, industrious staff. One of the good ones, but still under immense pressure. Each visit has much the same pattern: through its front door, past the security sentry that is nothing more than an iPad, along the corridor where a quiet but persistent alarm is endlessly bleep-bleeeeeeping and is ignored because “it always does that”, up the stairs past the nurse’s tiny office, past the rooms of paraphernalia for moving the immobile, lifting the prone and wheeling the anchored. And here we are, at her room. Always greeted by a relieved smile, sometimes cheerfully composed, but the sometimeses are getting further apart. More often now, a quiver of fear, trembling fingers, she’s been adrift for the hours since lunch, and in the fog of her memory the chasms are filling with paranoia: “They all hate me, don’t leave me alone with them!” And we chat and she calms and she asks again who is who in the family and she taps out the rhythm of an elusive snatch of music on the dinner-tray (William Tell – “Oh, the Lone Ranger!”), and… and… and… it is all and because it is all the same, day by day. The conversation swoops in circles, and each time lands on her mantra: “How old are you again? And how old am I? You do know how much I love you?”
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Illustration based on a photo by Brett Wharton on Unsplash.
Awweee she’s alone on the ride 🥲
We're living to greater and greater ages, but we're not doing it painlessly. This is so sad, grindingly so.