Mum is curled into a chair, legs up, a comma, an hiatus in her day. Her form is shaped around a huge red photograph album. It is hers. From another time. Another home. She does not remember the album or the home. Nor many of the faces.
I recognise some of them, she says, but I can’t put names to them.
Here, I say, and I twist the album so that we can both see.
She is astonished at her young, beautiful self.
“But who is this beside me?” And she looks quizzically from a photo to me and back again.
“Guess”, I say, “have a go, Ma”
From the picture to me again.
“Is it you?”
It is – “and what am I to you?” I press.
My cousin, she says confidently.
Nooooo, I laugh. “Try again”
“My sister?”
Mum, I admonish. (How does she not know it’s her daughter – not because we have had this conversation a dozen times already today but because I am calling her ‘Ma, Mum’)
Are you my daughter? (uncertainly)
Yes, I laugh.
Oh ok, she says, she does not sound convinced, she sounds as if she’s acquiescing for the sake of peace.
She will check our relationship before we have finished flicking through the album. She will check again this evening. And again tomorrow. Like she did yesterday.
“How could I forget such a thing?” She asks me.
“I’m sorry” I say, like I always do when she reflects on lost memories. And then I say, “I never know, ma, is it better to live in oblivion of lost memories, or better that I remind you and remind you and remind you”.
I want, I tell her, to make her feel safe, even amongst those of us she perceives as strangers or – at best – recent acquaintances.
I don’t think she is sure how to answer for she doesn’t.
She can always pick herself out of a line up. A photograph of a school reunion: she finds her face in the back row of a dozen middle aged women. She cannot name a single one of the other ladies but, she says, immediately, her finger on a short lady at the front, “She was the cleverest girl in our class”. I sense something delicious, like rivalry. And I laugh.
This was your home, ma and I trace the image of an old school house with a lawn spiked white by frost, its slate roof dredged with a sifting of white powder: Winter, February 1994.
“Was it?” Mum says, surprised, ‘but it’s beautiful’
She bought it in the months after dad died. A generous endowment from my father’s employers meant she could gift us a home within six months of his going.
It was beautiful Mum, I say, you made a wonderful home there for us when dad died.
And I guide her around the proportions of a warm family kitchen where we gathered for every meal, the huge high lead paned windows in the sitting room where light spilled in and which we shuttered on winter nights to keep the place snug, unfolding the wooden panels which so charmed us, ‘how old fashioned!’ we said.
Her fingers caress every page, as if trying to reach back and find something of substance there, something more than images decades old.
“Was my memory this bad then?”
No ma, your memory was perfect, tack sharp. You remembered everything.
And she did: the foods we liked to eat when we came home, all our birthdays, Christmas stockings. And later – she remembered my children’s brithdays, the authors and illustrators they loved so that our bookshelves grew bowed with the weight of books from her. They arrived, great bundles, whole series, in the post to exuberant reception from her grandchildren.
I have reached into a past to try to reinforce connections. And now I reach for a future by showing her pictures of those same children.
“I came to England to have them; I spent weeks with you before delivery. And weeks afterwards”.
She reaches out and strokes my back, “Did you? Did you really? But that’s wonderful”.
There you are, I say, and I point out a picture of her cradling my son, her first grandchild, so new the space between his eyes – which are screwed shut tight – is still nipped pink by stork bite.
I turned the album to my gaze out of guilt, because I knew, behind me where I tapped my on laptop, she was puzzling over all these people and trying to place them. I impatiently spun it around.
So I am surprised then, when I find the time has slipped by for I have been as lost in this reverie as she.
And whilst she has briefly, for today, for now, connected the dots of her parents to me, to my children via the conduit of herself as daughter, mother, grandmother, so I have remembered something. In all these hundreds of photos, she is there, smiling and central and strong.
She was not always ill with dementia.
She was not always ill with Depression. There were many, many happy moments. Hundreds.
And here there are, caught beneath cellphone to remind me.