April, 2021
I never feared for my mother.
Through the death of my father.
Through the advanced breast cancer diagnosis a week later. Through the chemo.
Through the falls and snapped bones.
Through the inevitable continual decline in stature and health.
Until yesterday.
Why did I not worry? Part of it was that our relationship was complicated. More of it was a not-conscious recognition that her legendary stubbornness and general bullheadedness were manifestations of a tough defiant strength. Mom might be the on the lower end of the spectrum when it comes to self-starting, nimble, make-it-happen, going-places, etc. But, like a rock, she is strong, tough, immoveable, unbreakable. Fired from Wal-Mart because at 72 years old, she wouldn't stop confronting the 20-year old male shoplifters. Fearless.
Right?
We all know where the ultimate destination is. I always pictured the road there as a superhighway. Smooth, predictable. I could count on her stubbornness - er, strength - as the guardrails to keep everything on track.
We all know that we're not supposed to overdrive our headlights - make sure we can swerve or stop if our headlights spot something in the road. But we do overdrive, especially on highways. They're predictable, they're safe. We have to yank the wheel every now and then, but only occasionally.
Cut to: those youtube helmet-cam videos of mountain bikers plunging down a ridgeline at breakneck speed, willingly catching air and defiantly giving gravity the middle finger. I couldn't watch them even before yesterday.
I didn't know how much I counted on her strength, strength that I didn't even recognize.
Strength that I know now won't always be there. It will be there often, or even most of the time, but being able to rely on it, to count on it, to cope with it... That's no longer a given.
Until you experience it, "memory loss" sounds like a simple absence, an empty void. The void, the gaps in mental capacity, don't stay empty. They get filled. The voids often get filled with fear, even panic. The guardrails are gone, the pavement is gone, the car with 20 safety features is gone. Suddenly you're on mid-air on a 15-lb bicycle and you think you see a landing patch on that narrow ridgeline bordered by rocks and cactus.
Except that it's not you on the bike. You're just watching the video. But it is your mom on the bike, and she's scared. And, while it looks like she's lined up for landing - somehow - you're thinking "how the hell does she make it back to flat ground?" There's nowhere to stop.
And there's no way to stop the video. And it's not a video. You're on a tandem bike with her! "Why the hell is she steering?!" Because she always has been.
But now you have to switch seats, while plunging and bouncing, because she can no longer grip the handlebars.
I'm getting older. I'm seeing my physical decline. It's bemusing. I love playing my sports, but they are a means to something else. They don't define me. The decline is slow enough that I can cope with it. I can swerve the wheel.
My mental decline is more disconcerting. But it's still periphery. My typing is becoming laughable (my brain thinks "our" but my fingers type "hour"). That can simply be mental multi-tasking. Sometimes I have to pause to consider the right word. Inconvenient. I don't remember details. "The hard drive is full!" I can mitigate that with writing, which I like to do anyway (my primary purposes in writing is to understand in the present and to remember in the future).
I can extrapolate my begrudging disappointment and magnify my fragility to my parents' generation.
What my understanding lacked until yesterday is fear. Fear's immediacy, its urgency, its contagion. Its pervasiveness and its power. And how heartbreaking it is to feel that your loved ones are feeling it.
Before yesterday I intellectually understood the inevitable. Today I feel, pervasively and viscerally, the presence and power of fear. And that it's a big part of the future.
And I'm saddened by and afraid for the loss of mom's strength, this personality "quirk" - one I never recognized as a rock, even less the cornerstone that it was.