We’ve moved house recently. We’re on the cusp of a larger transition, but for the winter, we’ve been perching with my parents. Which is both as wonderful and as tough as being a teenager all over again. My three-and-a-half year old (we called her Beangirl) is resilient about the move for the most part, but over the last week or so, she’s become concerned that she can’t remember her old bedroom. It’s becoming really important to her. So I pull her up on my lap, and describe it in minute details. The red hippo curtains hung over the two windows, and how she could sit on her bed and look down across the street to where the construction workers were building a large new condo tower. The sign on the door that she coloured before her brother was born, her name clearly marked and his added later. And the light in the cupboard at the end of her bed that she liked to keep on while she slept, even though it shone right in her eyes. She wants to be told again what home used to look like. She doesn’t want to forget. So I remember for her. One of the jobs of a mum.
This is the first Mothers’ Day that my own mother is the oldest mother in our family. My Gran died last December. It wasn’t sudden, and it wasn’t tragic. My Gran was a spirited, independent lady, sharp as a tack and formidable at Scrabble, and she lived healthily into her 90s. Over the past few years, however, she had been dealing with advancing dementia. She got confused and stopped speaking, and she needed to live in a full support care home. So when she died on her 94th birthday, it was a relief in a sense. She didn’t have to deal with remembering and forgetting anymore. But we still do.
Memory loss is everywhere these days. Culturally, we seem fascinated with it. It’s like a Rubik’s cube that we keep picking up, not really expecting to solve it but playing with it nonetheless because it’s so intriguing. It crops up in movies and television shows, literary novels, memoirs and popular fiction. Sometimes the stories of memory loss are poetic or tragically beautiful. Others—they’re just quirky or comedic. But it’s a facet of human life that seems to resonate with us. Maybe it’s because, with our aging population, so many people are watching their parents and grandparents living through memory loss. But I think that it is also because today the fragility of memory is particularly frightening. We can walk around with all the songs we’ve ever heard tucked in our pockets. We can reconnect with our grade three crushes on Facebook. Nothing needs to slip away. So we are terrified by the idea that we still might sit in a chair someday and have no idea where we are or who we’ve been. Who are we when we can’t remember our lives?
One of the interesting things about dementia is that it erases memories backwards. My Gran forgot her old age and got younger and younger. And she would forget who other people really were and would recast them as people she knew as a child. I remember a walk I took with my Gran a few years ago, near the beginning of her confusion. She lived on the east coast of Scotland, and it was one of those winter days when everything was so bright and crisp and deceptively cold. I was bundled up in about a hundred woolly layers, but I was worried that my Gran would be cold out in the wind. She, being fiercely determined as always, would not put her gloves on. Stubborn as I am. So I tucked them in her pockets, telling her that they would be there if her hands got chilly later. We’d been walking for maybe 20 minutes when she pulled them out, and looked down at them with serious eyes.
“You know,” she said, “my mother was right to put these in my pocket. It is cold out here.”
And she put them on and we kept walking together.
A couple of years later, my mother was visiting with her. By then, my Gran was saying very little. My mother spent the time with her mum holding hands and telling stories. She told her about walks they took when she was a little girl and my Gran was the young mum. My mother sang her the songs that they’d shared.
She said later that it was like talking to a young child, telling the stories of things that took place before their own memories had started to form. She needed to do the remembering for her mother now. It was her turn to hold the pieces.
In our church, when someone dies and the death is announced to the congregation, the congregation is asked to remember the family and support them with the hope of the resurrection. And maybe that’s part of what resurrection means—that God, as our loving parent, holds all the bits of memories for us when we can’t anymore. All the different ages and stages of our lives are known by God, loved by God and, in God, nothing is lost. There’s life after things fall apart. Jesus compared God to a mother hen, sheltering her chicks under her wings. I love that image of God, especially when the scattering chicks are all the people I’ve been trying to be all my life. There is safety in God’s parental love for all of us.
Happy Mothers’ Day.
