Mother’s Lost Past

“Mother, Mother on the Wall whose the fairest of them all?” I ask myself looking up at a photo of my mother that hangs on the wall above my computer.  Looking out from that photo through the eyes of a 92 year old, I see myself in 40 years, not my mother, the blind amputee turned collector who resides at Orchard Manor Nursing Home in Grove City, Pennsylvania.

 

I haven’t spoken to that woman, my mother, in over 10 years yet I phone the nursing home each week. Our conversation is mostly the same, “Hello Mother?” I ask. “Mother?” she chides “I have no children.” She is quick to reply. “Is this Mrs. Green?” I ask. “Yes” she answers. Then I know at least we are on the same page, because last week when I phoned she was answering to Mrs. Green. Then we have our conversation and she tells me about the arguments she has with Rose, her phantom leg, and the various guests from my childhood that she has entertained the past week. She can describe in detail what they were wearing, and amusing anecdotes they made during their visit. I have to laugh because when these people were really alive they would never have uttered such words.  But the truth is not what I’m after.

 

Mother and I entertain this fictional account of her life each week when I call her. I ask questions and she replies. She never asks about me or her grandson, but I don’t expect her to because in her world we don’t exist. (I wonder who she thinks I am?)

It’s just good to hear her voice. See, my mother has always been a collector-- and though I used to complain when she lived in her own home and it was too full of junk to even walk from the front door back to the kitchen-- I know that she has some idea of her past and the people that lived there, through the few collected items she is allowed to keep in a box under her bed at the nursing home. Though she has no way to explain her collection or even to name them, she knows they exist because she meets them every night. I wrote a poem about her collection and how she interacts with it.

 

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A Box of her Lost Past

 

 

Grandmother’s glass eye, not the one

that rolled under the bureau and slipped through the grated heater cover,

the one she never wore, the one

only I could possess, the one

that would never cast a sideways glance

at a child’s hand emerging from a cookie jar.

 

I kept it in my shoebox alongside brother Alan’s skate key,

the key he would never use again, after the ice opened up

one sunny, late winter day, and

swallowed him in one gulp.

 

These are a couple of the items in my collection; but

there are more--they have become a collection of my past.

 

At night when the head nurse makes her rounds,

each resident’s light is switched to the off position.

 

The place goes to sleep, room by room, except

for my room, number 3-4-5.

 

Night time is when I come alive.

 

I climb down off the bed, onto the floor,

slip under the bed on my night gown and

reach for the shoe box.

 

No light need guide these knotted hands;

they feel their way under the bed,

into my shoe box where I fondle each treasure

from my past.

 

Naming my collected items has gone from me.

 

It’s just me in the darkness, on my knees beside the bed.

Pictures flash through my mind, as I cradle an item in my hand.

 

Smiling, laughing, crying; like a pianist with her fingers dancing

over the full range of keys, I can live

this way forever, until the night nurse comes in and

escorts me to the bed.

(She misunderstands me.)

 

In the daytime, I feel small,

propped up on pillows in the bed, my head angled toward the tv screen.

 

I am the resident with alzheimer’s, defined

by what I can no longer do,

attach names to memories in my past, to people

I should know.

 

At night, with my collection, naming does not matter;

my past comes alive through pictures in my mind.

 

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I look up at the photo above my computer each night before I turn the light off to go to bed, and I say in a voice that only I can hear:

“Mother, mother on the wall, you are the fairest one of all”