In Departing Light

My mother all of ninety has to be tied up in her wheelchair, but still she leans far out of it sideways; she juts there brokenly, able to cut with the sight of her someone who is close. She is hung like her hanging mouth in the dignity of her bleariness, and says that she is perfectly all right. It is impossible to get her to complain or to register anything for longer than a moment. She has made Stephen Hawking look healthy. It’s as though she is being sucked out of existence sideways through a porthole and we’ve got hold of her feet. She’s very calm. If you live long enough it isn’t death you fear but what life can still do. And she appears to know this somewhere, even if there’s no hope she could formulate it. Yet she is so calm you think of an immortal – a Tithonus withering forever on the edge of life, though never a moment’s grievance. Taken out to air my mother seems in a motorcycle race, she the sidecar passenger who keeps the machine on the road, trying to lie far over beyond the wheel. Seriously, concentrated, she gazes ahead towards the line, as we go creeping around and around, through the thick syrups of a garden, behind the nursing home. Her mouth is full of chaos. My mother revolves her loose dentures like marbles ground upon each other, or idly clatters them, broken and chipped. Since they won’t stay on her gums she spits them free with a sudden blurting cough, which seems to have stamped out of her an ultimate breath. Her teeth fly into her lap or onto the grass, breaking the hawsers of spittle. What we see in such age is for us the premature dissolution of a body, as it slips off the bones and back to protoplasm before it can be decently hidden away. And it’s as though the synapses were almost all of them broken between her brain cells and now they waver about feebly on the draught of my voice and connect at random and wrongly and she has become a surrealist poet. ‘How is the sun on your back?’ I ask. ‘The sun is mechanical,’ she tells me, matter of fact. Wait a moment, I think, is she becoming profound? From nowhere she says, ‘The lake gets dusty.’ There is no lake here, or in her past. ‘You’ll have to dust the lake.’ It could be She has grown deep, but then she says, ‘The little boy in the star is food,’ or perhaps ‘The little boy is the star in food,’ and you think, ‘More likely this appeals to my kind of superstition.’ It is all a tangle, and interpretations, and hearing amiss, all just the slipperiness of her descent. We sit and listen to the bird-song, which is like wandering lines of wet paint – it is like an abstract expressionist at work, his flourishes and then the touches barely there, and is going on all over the stretched sky. If I read aloud skimmingly from the newspaper, she immediately falls asleep. I stroke her face and she wakes and looking at me intently she says something like, ‘That was a nice stick.’ In our sitting about she has also said, relevant of nothing, ‘The desert is a tongue.’ ‘A red tongue?’ ‘That’s right, it’s a it’s a sort of you know – it’s a – it’s a long motor car.’ When I told her I might go to Cambridge for a time, she said to me, ‘Cambridge is a very old seat of learning. Be sure –’ but it became too much – ‘be sure of the short Christmas flowers.’ I get dizzy, nauseous, when I try to think about what is happening inside her head. I keep her out there for hours, propping her straight, as she dozes, and drifts into waking; away from the stench and the screams of the ward. The worst of all this, for me, is that despite such talk, now is the most peace I’ve known her to have. She reminisces, momentarily, thinking that I am one of her long-dead brothers. ‘Didn’t we have some fun on those horses, when we were kids?’ she’ll say, giving her thigh a little slap. Alzheimer’s is nirvana, in her case. She never mentions anything of what troubled her adult years – God, the evil passages of the Bible, her own mother’s long, hard dying, my father. Nothing at all of my father, and nothing of her obsession with the religion that he drove her to. She says the magpie’s song, which goes on and on, like an Irishman wheedling to himself, and which I have turned her chair towards, reminds her of a cup. A broken cup. I think that the chaos in her mind is bearable to her because it is revolving so slowly – slowly as dust motes in an empty room. The soul? The soul bas long been defeated, and is all but gone. She’s only productive now of bristles on the chin, of an odour like old newspapers on a damp concrete floor, of garbled mutterings, of some crackling memories, and of a warmth (it was always there, the marsupial devotion), of a warmth that is just in the eyes now, particularly when I hold her and rock her for a while, as I lift her back to bed – a folded package, such as, I have seen from photographs, was made of the Ice Man. She says, ‘I like it when you – when when you...’ I say to her, ‘My brown-eyed girl.’ Although she doesn’t remember the record, or me come home that time, I sing it to her: ‘Da da-dum, de-dum, da-dum ... And it’s you, it’s you,’– she smiles up, into my face –‘it’s you, my brown-eyed girl.’ My mother will get lost on the roads after death. Too lonely a figure to bear thinking of. As she did once, one time at least, in the new department store in our town; discovered hesitant among the aisles; turning around and around, becoming a still place. Looking too kind to reject even a wrong direction, outrightly. And she caught my eye, watching her, and knew I’d laugh and grinned. Or else, since many another spirit will be arriving over there, whatever those are – and all of them clamorous as seabirds, along the walls of death – she will be pushed aside easily, again. There are hierarchies in Heaven, we remember; and we know of its bungled schemes. Even if the last shall be first’, as we have been told, she could not be first. It would not be her. But why become so fearful? This is all of your mother, in your arms. She who now, a moment after your game, has gone; who is confused and would like to ask why she is hanging here. No – she will be safe. She will be safe in the dry mouth of this red earth, in the place she has always been. She who hasn’t survived living, how can we dream that she will survive her death?