musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Yea from the table of my memory, I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records


Sometimes we struggle to understand how others think, but it can be even harder when, despite their history with us, they lose themselves and leave us behind to search for them. And yet, often their world abuts ours in ways we may not have considered. This was a realization that crystallized after reading an essay about sticky notes.[i]

I suppose I hadn’t given much thought to how we sometimes tried to remember things in the past -lists, for example- before the smart phone with its ever-present settable reminders that replaced the need for carefully scribbled lists on crumpled pieces of paper. The ‘mind palace’ mentioned in the article was my go-to in those days (when I could remember it): imagining a familiar room, say, and associating each item to be remembered with a location as I mentally walked through it. In a way then, because each item in there was so personal, it’s recollection was not only a list of things to remember for the grocery store, but of a part of me: a part of who I had come to be in the world I occupied.

I can easily appreciate how important locality and its familiarity would be if I ever found my identity shredding as my memory slowly peeled away like sunburned skin after a visit to the beach. I have often wondered just how far I extend into the environment: is a pencil a part of my mind? Is a smart phone? Does a place where I feel comfortable count as well? According to the extended mind hypothesis, we think by means of our environments, and ‘external’ objects are part of our personalities. If we strip those away when we are already fragile, when we are desperately clinging to something -anything- to reassure us of who we are, we will not go gentle into that good night.

The essay talked about sticky notes that glued the writer’s mother into her reality by pasting her identity onto walls and places she felt sure she would notice them. My mother, though, was different. I don’t think they even had sticky notes in those days; my mother didn’t at any rate, just letters from her mother who lived thousands of miles away. The letters seemed to be a daily occurrence throughout my childhood years in post-war Winnipeg. My mother would reply immediately and so I suppose, despite the several days delay, it must have been as if she was in daily contact. It was almost as if each letter was a diary entry for her life, and yet until the end I never knew what had happened to them. I never found them in the garbage, and she never mentioned their contents to me.

Eventually, in early retirement and in delightful mental health, both my parents moved to the West Coast to be closer to their respective families; my mother and grandmother stubbornly continued with their letters, however. There was something sweet about that, I think; it was who they had become.

After my father died, both my brother and I moved to the coast as well, so for a while at least, we were all living near to each other. But as my grandmother aged, she became too frail and ill to continue writing and when she died, my mother began to lose herself -there were no more letters to look forward to each day, I suppose. We tried her in various elder-care facilities, but on every visit, she still asked me or my brother whether any letters had come for her. The caretakers in each facility tried to write her the occasional letter, but despite her failing faculties, my mother saw through it.

“The letters are not the same,” she would complain when she was handed one. “There’s nothing in them that connects me to anything…” She would then burst into tears. “The letters don’t know who I am… who I’ve become. They don’t even care…”

And so, the letter saga continued, with my mother asking every day if a letter had come for her. My brother and I could only smile, hug her, and say “Not yet mom.” And then when her face fell, we’d tell her that  maybe the mail had been delayed. Maybe it would come tomorrow…” Today and tomorrow were separate universes for her, different Magisteria…

I’ve been divorced since my kids were little, and one day my now-married son handed me a letter. Apparently it had been sent to my wife and I in the early days before we split up.

“It’s a letter from grandma,” he explained. “Mom saved it for some reason, and then forgot about it; when I told her about grandma’s letter problem, she wondered if this one might help.”

It was hard for me to read, actually, but I recognized my mother’s squiggly cursive instantly -that and her habit of folding the paper and only writing on the topmost surface -never the other way around; I suppose it was the way her mother had taught her, because they both wrote that way. This one was dated 1983, when both the kids were really young.

I thought the letter was worth a try and on my next visit, handed it to her with the formal flourish I sometimes used for her as I child when I’d retrieved her precious letter from the mailbox by our front door in Winnipeg. I could see the smile instantly. A letter had arrived for her -a real letter. “It’s already opened,” was her first comment, though.

“It was a letter from you, Mom. You sent it to us years ago… Of course we opened it; wouldn’t you?”

This time she initiated the hug, and then opened it as carefully and slowly as she might a recently discovered archeological find -I guess it was, actually. Finally she read it -no, digested it- several times as a cow might its cud.

She put it down carefully on her night-table. “I remember that letter,” she declared triumphantly. I was so excited for you two, I just had to write and tell you.” She shook her head slowly as if it all made sense to her again. I didn’t tell her about the eventual divorce -that was a different time for her, a different world. She had her letter, though, and she was happy for a while. She, the accomplished writer of letters, was still there…

[i] https://psyche.co/ideas/what-my-mothers-sticky-notes-show-about-the-nature-of-the-self

, , ,

gozzter

, , ,

Leave a comment