Sunrise Senior Living

April 23 2018

I spy her in a shapeless dress

but my eyes are fixed on her hair,

more white than grey

and frazzled, neglected, unkempt;

looking finger-in-socket wild,

or as if left by itself to dry

in the close institutional air.

The awkwardly long stare

before she recognized her youngest.

Only later would I notice

the scrawled reminder

among the random scraps and cryptic notes

see Brian Sunday.

An antique table, I recall from home

littered with reminders,

its burnished finish dull

and the joint of the rim splitting

in the dry winter heat

of her cramped rectangular quarters.

80 degrees, the thermostat says,

while out the narrow window

cars idle under falling snow

four stories down.

It would be kind

to call her absent-minded,

when the brain is riddled with holes

and she knows just enough to know

how her mind is failing.

The surprising flashes

of mental sharpness.

The essential self, both good and bad

than seems indelibly her;

both stubborn and kind

polite, and paranoid,

her old familiar impatience

combined with uncommon grace.

The loneliness

of an unbreakable couple

when you're the one who is left behind,

and there seems no point to life

except more of the same.

I try to travel back with her,

but even in the distant past

she seems unsure.

And I realize

that as her memory goes

parts of my life are going as well;

the matriarch

we depended on

to remember for everyone else.

We counted on her as the glue

    —   from curating birth-weights, to cousins-once-removed   —

but now the custodian of our story

barely navigates these corridors

and loses track of days.

The busy foyer

where residents shuffle by,

and Filipino women

with smooth oval faces, and lustrous black hair

dutifully shadow them.

Where she sits, purse clutched,

bulging with stuff

no one can fathom.

Where she putters and straightens and neatens-up

with that politely fixed smile

that seems both apologetic, and driven,

perhaps

her sense of order still offended

at our unmade beds

and the mess of growing boys.

So which is tougher?

Getting older

in a broken body, with a healthy mind?

Or in a body that's oddly robust,

only to be betrayed

when the mind fails?

I cannot help

thinking of myself

when I see her this way.

Will my final days

be filled with rage

or grace

or someone to care?

Or will I, too, end badly,

in some dreary place, like this,

fingers fitfully picking

at dignity's tattered threads

as the sun descends

in its steady arc?

A shadow of herself,

peering out

with agitation and doubt

through the gauze of incomprehension,

confused by a world

in which she finds she has lost her place.

Old age,

where loss after loss

is what you learn to live with,

and memories fade

to the eternal limbo of now.

For the first time in a long time, I visited my mother in her senior's home (yes, Senior Sunrise Living) in Toronto. And yes, I have been negligent in my filial duty (my hatred of travel notwithstanding).

My two examples – birth weight, and the remote relative – are chosen quite deliberately. Because birth weight is where this started: it's utterly insignificant, I know, but sometime during this visit the thought crossed my mind that no one in the world now knows what weight I was at birth (oh, I suppose it's recorded somewhere; perhaps surviving as a small paper entry in the dusty recesses of an ancient medical records department) except her; and she was the one who sent out cards and kept track of family and remembered every significant date and anniversary. Now, no one does any of this, and the extended family atomizes.

She has deteriorated substantially. Clearly, she will soon need to move to a higher lever of care. Since the loss of my father and then her move from home, I get the impression she is waiting out the clock. As seems to happen with dementia, one's enduring traits and underlying character are unmasked and sharpened. So she can be both frustrating and endearing. Her hearing is going, which I know adds to her feeling of isolation. I can't tell if she is lonely, or if she simply forgets the social life she leads there. One consoles oneself that forgetting can be a kind of blessing, but it can also be accompanied by distress. Especially when I observed how agitated she got in the early evening, becoming disoriented and demanding: the so-called “sun-downing” phenomenon, which is a common feature of dementia.

I owe the third last stanza to my niece Jacqueline, who is a new mother herself. She commented on how lucky she was that her two grandmothers are still alive, then added how ironic it is that one is riddled with infirmity and pain but razor-sharp mentally, while the other is in good physical health but losing her mind. I had to wonder which I would chose. My niece's answer was quick and clear: she thought losing you mind was better, because presumably you wouldn't be aware of it. Trouble is, you are: only in the advanced stages of dementia do you lose insight. My mother will frequently lament how her once incisive memory is now so poor, and clearly gets frustrated at her disability.

This is a long poem. There are details and tangents and discursions that may seem excessive or distracting. But in my writing I've always taken pleasure in close observation, which I think is the poet's calling. And I think l these small excursions have purpose: for example, the table from her past life that is deteriorating from neglect; the falling snow, adding to the sense of bleakness; the caregivers' hair, in contrast to my mother's.

And don't we all wonder how we will end? Who doesn't give in to this very human solipsism? Is a parent's fate our own destiny? Will the mean curmudgeon I fear lies just beneath my surface emerge as my mental faculties and social defences are stripped away?

And how ironic that some regard the ability to live in the moment as the highest form of enlightenment, when in the case of my mother the “eternal now” seems more life sentence than liberation.