This post took me more than two days and several drafts. In the middle of the night, or in the shower, in some passive moment when I am not really thinking of anything, obviously deep down there, I am: I wait, then it unfolds. So, today’s blog is about saving. Or about being saved. 

Robert, on a Facetime call:

“Hello, Snooks,” he  said. I mentioned something about his head. He said, “that’s the important part of me.”
I heard a man in his room. An aide was helping his roommate. I could see Robert’s eyes darting, tracking left to right. “What are you looking at?” I asked. He said, “the guy who is rooting through the closet.” Like I told you last time, he seemed to be responding and relating better, in full sentences, sometimes without prompts. I said, New Year’s is coming. He said,
“How is that going to affect me?”

I didn’t know what to say.

Yesterday morning, on a post-snowy-Saturday, a Facetime call rang just as I was sitting down to coffee. I had no plans to go out, nor to wrestle with cold or ice. It takes a while for Felicia, the “recreation aide,  to prop-up the iPad at Robert’s bed so that I can see a full face. Parts of him come into view but never at the same time. Adjustment after adjustment, a few minutes later, Robert appears on the screen, usually just his head, for a while, anyway, and then the iPad gets jostled and I have a view of the ceiling, the containment, the top portion of his room that forms the box he lives in twenty-four hours a day, a room that has been sustaining him in a holding pattern also known as limbo.  We did not have much interaction. There was no spontaneity, there was no notable use of language. I could see that he was clean and shaven. It appeared that the light of the sun was available to him, that the curtain separating him from a roommate was not being used for that purpose but was, perhaps pulled back enough to brighten him. I could only surmise as my visual field is so narrow. I began doing my usual Shakespearean soliloquy, a dramatic lecture of the play of our life with all the comedy and tragedy woven through. Here is the dying King, here is the surviving Queen, and an affected prince who doesn’t really display how he feels about his father’s situation. But you know he does. And so the story goes: I tell the King about his life. I remind him of his family members’ names, where they live, if they live , where he lived as a child. The King asks me how I know all of this and I say, “you told me many times, I remember everything,” And I truly do.

I can feel his awe at my ability to retrieve his memories, and, at his own forgetting. On this day he was unraveling, or perhaps I didn’t notice before, not having had this very conversation. Not remembering that the first school in which he worked was in Manhattan, was a shocker. So, I refrained from asking and continued the lecture of this King’s life: the thousands of subjects he ruled over, all the thrones he sat on, all the subjects he commanded. How he led them down a strong path of education: science, music, humor, art, some of these things purely incidental to the curricula. I never said that someone was out to steal his memories, that Rob was being robbed, daily, of all his puzzle pieces: the inner mind cinema of the past. We know it as dementia: a kidnapping of the brain for which there is no ransom: there is no cure, thus his incredible brain cannot be saved. There is no knight, no duke, no god who can approach on a white steed and poke his lance into the misery to turn the King around.

 

 

 

 

And the Queen is on her own.

Let me describe a photograph by my father of a little girl, posed (he was in The Germane School of Photography), in a close-up wearing her mother’s beautiful, jewel-colored silk scarf over her head and tied, babushka-style, under her chin. The scarf was full of golds, and blues and greens.The mother, with her grand sense of style and pizzazz, bought it at the Plymouth Shop on First Avenue and 20th Street along with stunning pieces of costume jewelry. The little girl would use that scarf to make tents, hideaways in her parents’ bedroom for when she suffered from migraine. One day when the pain lifted, a tight, with a tight, cold bandana tied around the circumference of her head, she weighted the scarf down atop two open umbrellas with beautiful rhinestone pins, some colorful, some clear:  de rigueur artifacts of the 1950s. Sometimes she’d poke holes with the pins into the umbrellas to keep everything in place. She was a six-year-old perfectionist.

The little girl is looking directly into the camera, her mouth ajar. She is missing one of her bottom teeth. She would have to wait for months for another, a real, adult tooth to fill the space. A tooth that was hiding dormant at the moment the shutter clicked.

That tooth and the one that would eventually appear next to it, two enamel buddies that were with the little girl into and through her adulthood, are said to be disintegrating internally from a strange malady called resorption and will have to be removed. The little girl, now an adult, but still feeling like the little girl was told:

“They cannot be saved.” What was always thought of as permanent, was a lie.

The other day my son visited a storage unit that Robert began renting many years ago. He had filled almost every space of our home. Robert needed to save everything. He kept. He hoarded. He had a tremendous insecurity about loss and never having enough.

Every lesson, everything he ever made, designed, constructed from his schooling and on, into his work years for the next forty-four years of teaching, every check, bank statement, cancelled check, had to be saved, along with all the baby toys, the train set (which he likely bought for himself and not for his son, because, he never had such a set, and longed for it his entire life). The projects, artwork and other tangible memories were found stacked high in cartons on sagging plastic “Sterilite” shelving in a room, like his current room, a room like a container with a floor and a ceiling, far from our house, secured by a padlock and costing over $300/mo. If only that were the cost of his current room.

 

Let me explain: When Robert wrote a check he didn’t just write it, he embellished it, he created a thing of beauty. He spent many minutes on each one. He had developed an “old-time” calligraphy full of swirls and curls. He even used antique rubber stampers from a large collection we amassed from old printing shops. When tradespeople would come to our home to do a repair, Robert would sit down with the checkbook and start designing. Some recipients would remark that they didn’t want to cash the check, that it was too beautiful. Others would resolve the issue by making a copy of the check and often hanging it in their store.

So, I ask you, dear reader, how to let go, how not to save? How, if all of these things, these art-works, graphic-designed booklets for schools, decorated checks and a million other things in cartons piled from floor to ceiling stored in a sizable room, for years, are revisited, could we part with them?  When the lessons, the incredible lessons of a master educator and all of the other “stuff,” are tossed, or not saved, will that mean that Robert has been obliterated? Gone forever?

And then there was that night at Flushing Town Hall. Many of the musical programs were jazz, many were international music concerts with a dance lesson prior, and dancing during. We’d get special seats in the front because as time passed, it was hard for him to walk even with a cane; he had become so unstable that I would be on edge, on constant vigilant guard fearing a horrible fall. We would watch the dance practice. We would watch the show. We’d be sitting in the front row a leg away from the dancers who had just learned the steps and left their seats to crowd the dancefloor wearing grins and abandon. Robert looked at me and said, “Do you want to dance?”

Saving another person is impossible.

Saving every paper from a lifetime is impractical, but perhaps Robert knew that one day in his future his memory would fail him and he would depend on something tangible to recall who he was, how he was defined and that he existed.

Saving teeth with a weird condition, I am told is impossible; I am in mourning for that soon-to-be loss. To me those teeth were more to me than teeth; they were loyal friends.

In my existential Universe I am beginning to see that the only thing that can be saved is a memory but some people are not even lucky enough to have that.

That concert at Flushing Town Hall was in 2019: it was the last possibility.

But I did not save that last dance.

 

The Drifters/Save The last Dance for Me

 

 

 

 

 

📌The series starts here:
Part 1: And The Band Played On … a mother’s life, a daughter’s journey

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