Reading to her satisfies and keeps us from the dull ache of not knowing how otherwise to talk, how to fill in the silences, how to understand what’s said in them, the spaces between words, between thoughts. Being with her is like writing a poem, or in some ways, better, like those essential silences inside any piece of music. Tomorrow, I propose a poem by Emily Dickinson whose silence is about everything I have to say here, though rather more enigmatically. That silence, as you’ll see, is embedded, not so much within the words, but by way of syntax, and this time, by syntax, I mean the order of what’s unsaid. What’s essentially unsayable.
But that’s tomorrow. For now, back to her.
Her hearing all but gone now, we play and replay this set piece on the lee shore shore of Long Island Sound. A lakeless, oceanless, summer, through the windows the late peonies larded with pinks and reds, red, so fulsome you’d think them edible. Finches sing the trees to calmness, their heads tilted toward the sun. She can’t hear them. I ask her to say if she can hear me read, if not, we’ll do something else. But she can hear me fine, she says. By which she means, she can’t hear me at all.
Papery skin, deep blue, like a body-covering bruise. Perhaps she wants this time together, hearing someone gentle and loving, possibly this is her son, possibly, making low murmurs of an article she’s well past needing, and cannot hear anyway, and she knows I know, that thought would please her, and what pleases her, even if she can’t hear it, even if she doesn’t need to hear it, is as I said, the low hum of (whose?) voice, and the fact of this caring from somebody probably important to her, likely related, one of her sons? (“He calls me Mom,” she must be thinking. Then forgets.)
But she doesn’t want to trouble me with her doubt, any more than she wants to trouble me with the multiple insults of her failing body. When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions. Across the scarred table her hands flutter. The pain she describes in all of its parts to her nurses, but when with me, denies even the smallest discomfort. No, nothing hurts. Why do you ask?
I’m doing pretty well, considering I’m 88. She’s always with the 88. Mom, I say, you’re 95. No, that’s impossible! 95. Really? I’m not 88? You were. Now you’re 95. I was 7 when my best friend died. She lived downstairs. She caught something and died. Her mother told me. She gave me the doll, but I didn’t like dolls. I put it in a box. Thank you for coming. Have I already said that?
No, I tell her. And anyway, it’s nice to hear, I say, arranging in a red vase the shell pink roses I’ve brought for her, and setting the vase down on the table by her recliner.
Oh my, what beautiful tulips, she says Just beautiful. Very beautiful, Mom, who gave them to you. I don’t remember. Did my sister, your daughter, send them? Those are beautiful tulips, she says. I know, yes, very beautiful, and roses too. Which ones are the roses? All of them. They’re not tulips? They look just like tulips. They’re tulip-roses, Mom. An exotic kind of tulip. So beautiful, she says.
She closes me into the mind’s blue pacific room. She hardly knows me, or me, her. Each wedded to the stranger in ourselves, our hands in a shell pink, climateless light, wrapped inside the blue fire of the unsayable.
