This is the ending of a story – a memoir –  that I wrote about my mother, who died five years go of Alzheimer’s disease. 

Your dementia.  I’ve opened the parts of this wry gift for nearly eight years.  It keeps arriving like pieces of a silver set from some cruel bride’s registry.  The fork and spoon sets are complete, the knives a continuing sharp rain.  In these last years, though, the gifts have become more tender.  Losing your mind has let us come close to you without fear.  I stroke you, feed you, rub fragrant oils on your feet and hands.  Your body is our meeting ground.  Nothing holds us apart.  I love you boundlessly.

These are the things you never told me.  Your deepest sorrows and hopes.  You never told me your dreams or how you saw the sky.  You hung opinions round me like a house of mirrors, and I was always turning, twisting, spinning, trying to glimpse you behind the skimming shadows.  You never told me you were leaving.  That leaving would happen with startling, irregular cadence, an evaporation of being from body, an unsnapping of essential self from the edges of a shrinking world.  You never told me that you would leave and stay, all at once.  You never told me that heaven lies nestled in the exact center of the present moment.

I listen to the song on the Oh Brother, Where Art Thou CD.  “Oh Sisters, let’s go down, down to the river and pray.  Oh Brothers, let’s go down, down to the river . . .”  I sing along, loving the thrill of voices, the invocation of family.  Then, “Oh Fathers, let’s go down . . . ”  Gears slip and I am ratcheted into sorrow, the death of my beloved, ferocious, complicated father opening like a fresh wound.  The song goes on:  “Oh Mothers, let’s go down.”   And you are there.  I fall down, skinning knees, hands, face, on the harsh rocks of love and fear.  “Oh Mothers, let’s go down, down to the river and pray.”

Nothing will be every be truly finished with you. In death you are a mystery of loose ends and I have come undone with you.  My heart is split by this song.  I feel a chaos of the heart – arteries, portals, chambers all opening, closing, opening – a beating cacophony.  The house of love thrown open at last.