Thinking Out LoudMy mother started to forget a few years ago. She lost words, finding replacements, or used roundabout phrases. She picked her way through conversations, often baffled but coherent.
This visit she makes declarations I can only understand from her tone. The children are loud and she asks, in a pained voice, “Can someone speak for everyone at once?”
She’s further along a road that’s gradually shrinking into the woods. She managed a library for decades and now her home library is a repository of her fiction, noble and frivolous, both tidy and cluttered. She dusts and picks up books to read the title page and inscription, then puts them back. She reads her own annotations, repeating them without comprehension.
We’re literally surrounded by millions of words on pages. Words of real and imagined worlds. God made the world with words; Mum’s world is still built on words she has read and words she has written to document her understanding.
Later I call my husband, who from a distance finds it all unbearably sad. But her tone is joyful as she explores her library, wanting to show me everything. She always offered me books and, in a way, nothing has changed.
Her many books, trade paper, hardback, folio, paperback, bought and read and loaned and returned. In the front leaf is her name, in her beautiful handwriting. Her pleasure is undiminished and uncomplicated. She’s delighted that I asked to come and look at them with her.
“Amy, look at this,” she pleads; I look.
She just said my name, which I thought she had forgotten.
She reads out her name, tracing it with her fingers. “That’s you, Mum”, I say. “Yes”, she agrees. Her name, two words inscribed on every tome in her library, indelible marks testifying to her existence.
This Thinking Out Loud was first published on Facebook.