Alphabet Soup
When you were thick in the soup of dementia, you spooned out letters of the alphabet. Starting with Q.
“Q...R...S...T...U...V...W...X...Y...Z”
I think you took it all the way to the end. You might have landed at V, I cannot remember now.
(In order for me to say the alphabet from Q, I have to start from A. What does that indicate about my memory?)
But you started with Q, speaking out of the blue when words had disappeared and your ability to talk came and went unaccountably.
On days when you seemed least likely to converse, suddenly the recitation of letters would begin. Repeated over and over:
“Q...R...S...T...U...V...W...X...Y...Z”
And I would be left wondering if you were attempting to organize your interior self, when it must have felt so disorganized.
(Only a year before you called in a panic to say, “I’m losing my mind,” when simple words could not be retrieved. And I told you not to worry, insisting we all had our “senior moments,” dismissing what I now understand was the trailhead of your journey away from us.)
When your alphabet habit first began to surface I assumed you were reverting to an age of learning the building blocks of language, stringing together letters so as to become literate once more. You who could no longer read your beloved Proust or Colette. You whose sharp wit, analytic acuity, and unfiltered observations had all been muted by a disease as censoring as any dictatorial regime.
And I questioned how you landed on Q. If you silently made your way to the 17th letter, knowing it was there you would magically find your voice and break free. Or was that building and rebuilding of the alphabet a way of holding onto sanity, searching for—then clinging to—characters representing sounds of speech...
“Q-R-S-T-U-V”
...bobbing up from a brothy swirl of lost words.
Perhaps you were constructing a safety ladder from the letters you managed to retrieve, each one a rung for you to climb upon, to try and pull yourself free from the cloudy chunks of Lewy Body proteins that were causing your once supple and highly intelligent brain to harden and forget.
Often when you would loop those letters and seem to want to say so much more, I felt a desperation from you, a need to communicate. I would nod and tell you “Yes” to demonstrate that though we were not speaking the same language I could understand.
Then I would sing the alphabet song to you, the way I once did to Julian when he was small and just learning the marvel of words. Not to baby you, but to distract from the fight I sensed,the losing battle within.
And you would smile, calmer, forgetting for a moment all that you forgot, a reprieve from the piercingly painful recognition of losing memory just as it was slipping away.
Eventually Q became muddled and broken. The chain of ten letters confused, capsizing and sinking into the murky depths of the soup. Sometimes there remained a moaning staccato rhythm that seemed to be more an expression of physical pain than an attempt to hold onto linguistic ability.
But maybe the groans of discomfort were also about the powerlessness I presume you felt. You who always wanted things put away in their right place, now confined to a state ruled by the untidiness of a disorderly mind.
_________
WHERE ARE YOU? ARE YOU HOME?
I want so much to believe that you have been cut loose from of all you suffered. I want to know that you are as free as the breeze tickling the Ewe tree where the mourning doves built their flimsy nest in the spring after you died.
Even today, three years after your death, I still hear their lament and feel an echo of my grief woven into their longing, their calls to one another repeating and repeating—making sure each is nearby—reminding me with such profound sadness of the how you always phoned, multiple times, whenever I drove away.
“Where are you? Are you home?” You would ask before telling me the time we had was far too short, that you missed being together and wanted to know when I would come back.
The first call usually came five minutes after I’d left, to thank me for the visit and sometimes apologize if there had been tension because of your pain.
The second call happened a half hour later. “Where are you? Are you home?” though the trip was never less than an hour. Often timing your inquiry as to my whereabouts as I drove along the West Side Highway, just as I reached 86th Street and glanced at the building where we once lived, wondering if somehow your question had more meaning.
The final call rang the house phone when I got back to Brooklyn, to be sure I was there, but really to ask when I would return. “Where are you? Are you home?” (How else would I be answering the landline?)
In the dove’s cry I often think of you, will always think of you. And then I wish for the phone to ring, for you to be caring that I am safe even if those calls were more about you having been left behind.
“Where are you? Are you home?” I am more understanding than I used to be of the need to locate someone you love when they have gone. For now I am the one left behind, with no way find you, left with unanswerable questions.