Memories & loss

We tell ourselves that we know, kind of, what's coming with age. We think we've seen and understood some of it with the passing of grandparents, and in how our own parents appeared to manage that; we may have seen a pragmatism in their farewells, a turning to their own families which is where their lives had already been focused for so long; 'parents in the past' maybe the best way to express it.

In the grinding, awful coming-to-terms with my mother's destruction by dementia, I was dragged into a far fuller, and darker, understanding of the concept of loss.

- - - - -

There are things we tell ourselves, abstracts, in advance, when we look at our close family and think of the distant future; how we'll respond to the onset of a degenerative condition, of how we'll pursue treatments both traditional and holistic, and of how we'll do all the reading there is to better understand the processes so we can better communicate with those others closest to us.

And Alzheimer's can be discussed, a disease understood in its mechanisms of destruction. It can be faced, and illuminated by the family sometimes already left far behind even in its earliest moments; and in the illumination a family can at the least survive, intact.

This survival of the family, though, depends on those abstracts being real, true foundations; and I found that one half of that notion of family was built on, and made of, sand. Soft, an untrustworthy foundation, subject to disappear at even the mildest gust of a frightening wind.

In a moment, the collapse of three to not two, but one.

- - - - -

What we don't consider until swamped in loss are two all-embracing but somehow invisible specifics of what it is that is irretrievably gone, both to the sufferer and to their loved ones: Memories, these vast, all-embracing components that stand separate to the mechanics of memory in the body.

One loss is the ability to remember; the other is the ability to share what may still be remembered, somewhere in there. They are tied so closely together it can be hard to see them as separate, until forced to the realisation.

The second of these is the less visible, and less discussed, and less considered, in my experience. Memory becomes locked in, whether still present somewhere in the sufferer's mind or not. The door quietly closes, unseen, and those memories - the unique moments of one, or two, or five, or a dozen, or more lives - simply cease to be. They can no longer be stumbled on, shared in conversations that can no longer happen.

My mother was the family's repository of knowledge, at least until I reached a point of my own self-reliance. Talking of a holiday we'd had, she could tell the hotel we stayed in, our favourite meals on the trip, the route we took to get there. This knowledge - this momentary detail of the small things of which our lives are mostly composed - were gone.

Gone too was what she remembered of her own life, before the family she created; no chance to now know what happened in wartime, no way of asking where her hard-edged determination sprang from, no opportunity to simply have her fill in the gaps in a child's memories of his own early years.

- - - - -

I was a blue-eyed, white-blond-haired boy, crawling in our backyard in Subiaco under the lawn sprinklers and under the watchful eyes of Lucky, a collie, and Candy, a poodle. The Swan River, and a West Australian beach, and a shepherding dog preventing an infant from getting too close to the water. But I know these things only because my mother knew these things. I have no true memory of this boy, or his animal companions. These memories are gone, and there's now no-one to ask to share them with me, once more, and again.

- - - - -

And at the end of it all, and afterwards.

I'll never be called treasor again. No more nounours, never again the childhood laughing-torture of being called Chantale. The loss of these things, known and lived and loved, and the importance of the memory that held them - hers.

And I know that somewhere I once lived in her memory, a blond-haired infant running through lawn sprinklers in the burning Australian sun.

We come to mourn so many passings in this life. All of them long before the end.