Memory and Memories

     A patient killer stalked my mother’s mind. 

    Dementia appears to me, watching it happen, to be a process of at least 10 years. Often, I wonder if something my mother, Cerini,  did or said was because of her person or because of her pathology. 

     She enjoyed learning of little tidbits, amusements to her curiosity. One I remember appears to be a product of her person. I suppose my memory is from about 15 years before her death. She had a National Geographic article about comparing beach sands under a microscope. “They’re little THINGS!,” she said, a usage of the word meaning “creatures”, referring to the recognizable shapes of the tiny animal shells composing beach sand under our feet. I remember the phrase because it is a linguistic sample*, but the reason I bring it up here is the wonderment it brought to Cerini’s face.

    An example that appears more like a product of her pathology is when she told, several times, of a TV news story relating to climate change. It showed the earth tilted. She seemed to think that the tilt affected climate change, whereas any 5th grader should know that is merely the basis for the seasons. What really aroused my mother’s suspicions was the fact that she never saw the picture displayed again.  The subtext of her story appeared to be that pernicious forces of social control had suppressed the depiction.

I can understand how an isolated person like Cerini could be fearful in their ignorance of the workings of the world, especially sipping information through the soda straw of television.

 

    Television increasingly was her window on the world, even as she drew the blinds on the literal windows of her house, anticipating the long, windowless sleep of death that she approached. On 2 occasions, the TV let her down. Once, she pressed the wrong button on the set, and a repairman had to come out. Until then, she sat in her living room and stared at the street with the 1 or 2 degrees of view that her front door afforded her. Another time, the electricity went out, and she was powerless in more than 1 way.

 

    In at least one instance, her TV reality bled over into her real one. Once, from a bluff in Avila Beach, we watched from the seats of the car as whales, orcas, I believe, surfaced to breathe a mere 500 yards away. Often, we would walk on the pier nearby, looking down at the water 10 yards below. An advertisement, which appeared regularly in this time, featured a giant fish, emerging with open jaws toward a fisherman. She conflated this into a story of an orca emerging toward us on the pier, a worrisome breakdown of her grasp on what was real and what was not.