An unremembered life
COVID robs us of happier lives lived so long ago
“Have you met my daughter?” The question startles me, and I look around, searching for someone my mother is about to introduce me to. I hate it when she does this, slowing her already unsteady shuffle as she runs into people she wants me to meet. And there are ample opportunities for these awkward moments. Her assisted living facility is chock-ablock with folks as eager to greet others’ family members as they are to introduce their own. Making our way back to her room after lunch seems to take forever. But this time only my sister is standing behind me. I turn back to my mother ready to kid her as I have so many times when her memory momentarily fails her. But this time my teasing dies on my lips. I just can’t. She is looking up at me, her blue eyes swimming layers of pleading and confusion. She reaches for my arm and asks again, “Have you met my daughter?” No jest: My mother has no idea who I am.
When my siblings and I moved her into assisted living a year ago, my mother was recovering from a hard fall that left her psychically befuddled but physically OK. The latter surprised us. She has always been petite. Now in her 90s she is bird-tiny, her wrists nothing but fragile bones swathed in purple-blue veins. Her hands are translucent. When she caught the wheel of her walker on a curb and tumbled head over heels, we thought it would kill her. Not so easy, that. Over the year her bruises healed and the fog lifted. She regained her sharp humor, cracking bawdy jokes that made us cringe. But it was hard not to laugh. My mother could be wickedly funny.
Then COVID-19 arrived, crashing unwelcome and frightening into our lives. For us, all in our 50s and 60s, the onset of the virus was worrisome. We donned our masks, washed our hands and did our best. For my mother it was catastrophic. Already lonely, having outlived three husbands, every day she fought to turn back the clock, to stop her aging body from denying her the pleasures she once took for granted. With the added isolation of quarantine that COVID demanded, she began to let go of reality, tumbling into a void where we couldn’t always reach her. She was afraid of dying alone and wanted one of us to be with her. We told her we couldn’t. She lost any real sense of time, only complaining that it seemed she had been locked up forever. When she fell again, three short days before her quarantine was to end, she insisted on going to the hospital, even though it meant more time alone in her room. Then the nurses closed her door, eliminating the last sliver of light from the bright hallway beyond, hushing the voices of her only connections to the bigger world. My mother’s worst fears came true, and she disappeared.
Only childhood memories seemed to linger, which she revisited again and again, as if ensnared in story loops she couldn’t escape. She remembered small slights, like her bewilderment when her family left her behind during a summer vacation. She also recalled with terrified clarity almost drowning, how the sea’s undertow sucked relentlessly at her ankles as she helplessly watched the shoreline recede. To us, these tales indicated the depth of her unhappiness, yet there was little we could do to help.
Now, nine months after COVID began to narrow all of our lives, my mother still sits in her room, isolated and alone, waiting out a pandemic that won’t go away. Her childhood anguish has become the narrative of her life, her past and present indistinguishable. The anguish of abandonment, a lifelong fear of the ocean, amplified by forced confinement, are, as far as I can tell, all she has left. She has lost touch with her friends. She has unremembered us.
The virus has done this. It has robbed so many of us of hope as it unravels our long histories of happy lives. Good lives. Now, in our brief visit together between quarantines, as we walk slowly back from lunch, my mother looks up at me, gripping my arm, and asks if I know her daughter. I do the only thing I can think of that won’t embarrass her. I reach out my hand to my sister. “Hi, I’m Erica. It’s really nice to meet you.”
She is looking up at me, her blue eyes swimming layers of pleading and confusion. She reaches for my arm and asks again, “Have you met my daughter?” No jest: My mother has no idea who I am.