Sharon Kalet, my mother, died on Oct. 14. She was 82 and was living in a memory care facility. I wrote this over several days. If you like it, please make a donation in her name to the Alzheimer’s Association. And consider a paid subscription to this newsletter. It would help keep it afloat.
Lines in Mourning
“All loss is something we know we’re going to suffer and then life moves along… things seem OK… then, one day, you’re walking down the street and the pain of a loss that happened years earlier will come back at full capacity.”
Dried leaves gather like mourners at gravestones.
Pile into corners, fold into dead brambles and bare bushes.
Dance when the wind rousts them into the open.
It’s been a month. Almost to the hour.
And the November gusts cut into me and burrow deep, like a weevil, a tick.
Suck the strength from me.
I haven’t cried. Not really. Briefly when I told Annie, the first time I mouthed the words, “mom’s gone.” Again when we placed her in the ground next to her mother, next to where my dad will lie when that time comes.
I don’t cry. Never have.
I cried when watching a movie with Annie last night. Young husband dies of cancer. Leaves a wife and child. I think of my sister. Of Chuck. His pancreatic cancer. Palliative care. All the jargon we live with and die from, and derive hope from.
A month.
Alzheimer’s. Covid. Sheer exhaustion. She slept more and more until it was all she did, all she could do.
She stopped fighting, if in fact she fought. We can’t know. I can’t. Her language was gone. Had been for months. Years. No communication. No understanding. Connection.
They tell me she knew me, but it had been a long time since the glint of recognition flashed in her eyes.
They tell me she heard my voice the week before she died. When the nurse had my dad call. Had him place the phone to her ear.
I told her it was OK. Gave her permission.
The nurse said she heard me. Stirred a second. Eyes twitching. I hope she did. But she didn’t wake up.
Someone leans on his horn at the light. Green. I step on the gas. Turn left onto Louis, head to campus, to class.
I’ve been mourning her for almost a year, since I saw her in January, since she failed to recognize me and sat in the lobby of her assisted living grinding her teeth in an undercurrent of anger, as if she were ready to bite off the head of anyone who approached, as if I were a threat.
I saw her in August. With everyone. She didn’t know me. Any of us. Barely knew my dad.
I have old photos on my phone. From her high school graduation. From their engagement, their wedding.
I scroll through. Show them to her. Show her my grandfather. “My father,” she says. Her last language. The last thing she said to me.
It’s been a month.
Workers sip their coffee outside a bodega. A crossing guard walks young kids across the street.
A construction crew has Central blocked off. A new high-rise growing from the fenced-in pit.
I can hear an ambulance above the horn section. Turn up the volume. Let it fill the car.