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Sweet Lies

Marilyn Hillman March 19, 2010 No Comments

Marilyn Hillman

I can sense the question before it comes.

“How are you doing?”

I want to answer, How do you think I’m doing, with my husband morphing into a ghost? I’m dying here. But thanks for asking.

Instead I clench my fists and deliver a cheerful response: “I’m good.” Which is, of course, a lie.

My husband is demented.

I cannot say these words out loud. Pushed to the wall, I’ll say that my husband has dementia, like it’s temporary–a virus curable by bed rest and chicken soup. Murray admits only to memory problems, while I split hairs over which verb I can stand to put next to his decline. We skitter around the truth like insects caught

Family Business

Joanne Wilkinson March 5, 2010 No Comments

Joanne Wilkinson

My mother’s mother was more a force of nature than a person. Chablis in hand, stockings bagging a little over her solid, practical navy pumps, she delivered her opinions without the slightest sugar-coating. She used words like “simply” and “absolutely” a lot. “He is quite simply the worst mayor we’ve ever had.” “She had absolutely no business having four children.” My cousins and I all listened and quaked, hoping the wrath would not be turned on us. Even after my mother’s death, when you might imagine she would soften toward me a little, I still felt the need to stand up straighter whenever she looked at me. Behind her back, I called her “The Graminator.”

The Graminator had been retired for almost

Maman

Paul Gross November 20, 2009 No Comments

Paul Gross

At a recent religious service I attended with Maman, my 87-year-old mother, I watched her fumbling attempts to find hymn number 123, “Spirit of Life,” in the hymnal. I held my book up, opened to the appropriate page, so that we both could sing from it.

She glanced up momentarily, tightened her lips, hunched forward and resumed turning pages, finally arriving at the song when the congregation was singing the second verse, which she needed help finding–what with her poor vision and the swirl of notes and words on the page.

As this ritual repeated itself, hymn after hymn, it occurred to me how much cozier it would be if my mother and I could share from the same hymnal.

Giving Care

Ronna L. Edelstein June 26, 2009 No Comments

Ronna L. Edelstein

When I was six, my family and I spent a week in Atlantic City. I loved the Boardwalk with its saltwater-taffy aroma and colorful sights, but I feared the pier that jutted far out into the Atlantic. One moonless night, my big brother bet me a bag of taffy that I couldn’t walk to the pier’s end by myself. Never one to back down, I accepted his bet. But the farther out I walked, the more frightened I got. It felt like one more step would send me off the pier’s edge and into the bottomless black water. My parents rescued me by dashing to the end of the pier and carrying me back to safety.

I spent the next half-century living

In the Taxi to the MRI

Rachel Hadas October 24, 2008 No Comments

Rachel Hadas

I try to concentrate on the weather. Everything
deliquesces into simile.
Sleet ticks onto the windshield like a clock.
Truth blinks on/off like a stuck traffic signal.
It is better to live in the light but the light is flickering.
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak-
Poetic paradox understood too late
or maybe just in time. What time is it?
A small white poodle in a quilted coat
lifts a leg to pee against a hydrant
on Sixtieth Street, and we are nearly there,
early, of course. And since (she said) my heart
has been wrung out, no, broken, this is the …
this has to be … The sentence will not end.
The mind pulls, stretches, struggles, and

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Tag: dementia

Sweet Lies

Family Business

Maman

Giving Care

In the Taxi to the MRI

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Tag: dementia

Sweet Lies

Family Business

Maman

Giving Care

In the Taxi to the MRI

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