Ghosts in photographs

Mom with Tappey
Mom with Tappey

This photo of my mom from five years ago appeared on my Facebook feed today.

Yesterday I happened to realize that I’m terribly afraid of losing my memory. I hadn’t known it before I wrote it, but it occurs to me: my mother’s cognitive injuries spawned a state of traumatized memory that persists in me.

What did I come in here for?

Where did I put my list?

I’m haunted by echoes of her voice.

I would lose my head if it weren’t attached.

I’m so tired.

She said that one a lot.

As time passed, she spoke less and less. It seemed to take a great deal of effort to summon her faculties for a conversation.

Mom, with curlers
Mom, with curlers

Before, she’d dominate the room. She’d talk and talk—mostly about herself and the things that concerned her, telling the story of her past, her adoption, her hunt for her biological mother. She told that story over and over to people she’d just met. It was her repertoire. She was fey and funny, and she charmed people.

It’s odd to me now that my siblings and I don’t really talk about the things that made our mom herself. We talk a lot (mostly one to another behind closed doors) about how our mom was lost to us at a young age. We talk about growing up (and going away to boarding school) in the aftermath of the loss. Seldom do we recall together the specific ways she was before. I expect the loss overshadows actual memories.

When she went in for the first surgery, I was five years old, so I have only wispy bits of her from the time before.

Stripey pants!
Stripey pants!

By general consensus she was pretty great. Not that she couldn’t also be pretty awful–at times small-minded and straight-up mean. But only if riled. She was dynamic. Vibrant and vivid.

Even after the surgeries she was still some of those things. Drastically changed, yes, but feisty, joking Betsy on occasion still. This is the thing my siblings, who tell me again and again how they knew her before, how I never had the chance (it is a familial refrain), don’t understand—my mom was all those things she’d been before, just in fits and starts.

And in truth those blips petered out as the cognitive damage she’d suffered from multiple brain surgeries compounded with years of medications and made unrecoverable inroads into a once powerful presence. In time the dementia was diagnosed and made concrete. And that began the long process of brushing her away altogether, fading gradually like an old photograph, until she was little more than a ghost of who she’d been.

a heritage of mouthfuls

I’m still working on converting my grandfather’s family tree work to a digital format– in the meantime Chris and I have been giggling over names we might burden theoretical children with, such as:

  • Enos
  • Submit
  • Laban
  • Erastus
  • Recompence
  • Abiah
  • Lemuel
  • Jerusha
  • Thankful
  • Fennel
  • Grindal
  • Theophilus