Fading memories as the best of times and the worst of times are recalled

SHE is bowed in a drowse when you arrive, so you nod and smile at the others before carrying over a chair to sit beside her.

She does not hear you sit down.

That’s because the hearing aids went missing more than a year ago and testing to replace them is no longer an option. You watch her as she sleeps in the armchair.

Up to recently, it held a long, padded plastic gadget that yowled if she tried to stand up, so that one of the nurses or nurses’ aides would be alerted and would come running to gently talk her back down, using her first name all the time. That was while the broken hip was healing.

Her hair is straight. Thick and shining clean, but straight. She never, ever had straight hair. Always permed. Always rollers at night. Always just-so during the daytime.

Early on, when she was here, while they could persuade her to get her hair done on the day the hairdresser attends, she would balk unexpectedly or get frightened under the hairdryer, so the hairdresser said it would be too much of a challenge to try a perm. The rollers did the job for a long time, but that stopped, too.

You wonder if they’ve been thrown out, those rollers with their plastic toothpick holders. Not that it matters.

Her hair is short now, and that’s an improvement. Until a couple of weeks ago, it was a long, uneven parody. On one visit, a nurse suggested this might be a good day to see if she could be persuaded to have it cut, and you played Round and Round the Garden with her to distract her from the terrifying scissors. Your index finger tracing a circle in her palm, your face as close as possible to hers, laughing while you loudly rehearsed the words: “Round and round the garden goes the teddy bear. One step. Two step. And tickley under there…” No tickling needed. The tune of it, the old rhythm of it calmed her.

Then she noticed her own bent finger. The one curled by arthritis. She noticed it as she notices it every day. Anew. Afresh. As if she had never seen it before. She tried to straighten it out. Showed it to you. Laughed at its rigidity while the scissors went from side to side of her head.

“I should really cut one side good and short,” the hairdresser murmured, “but if she got upset in the middle, that would leave her lopsided and I wouldn’t want that for her.”

The hairdresser deals with the residents once a week, doing her best to give each of them what they would want if they could still want a particular style. Kindly guesswork.

A frond of cut white hair floated down, that day, between you and her, falling like a cloud on the black nylon cape protecting her dress. She flinched. You captured it and blew it from your fingers so it feather-flew between you. That made her laugh. The haircut moved from remedial to reasonable and you leaned in and told her she was a good girl. A great girl.

Sleeping still, she fiddles with the elasticated bracelet someone has put on her wrist and you remember the charm bracelet she once wore, each charm marking some sweet spot in a shared life.

You try to remember if she took the bracelet off when she was baking, sweeping wholemeal and buttermilk together with the big wooden spoon in the mixing bowl for the brown bread your father ate in doorstep-thick slices.

In the summer, there would be tarts, with raspberries fresh from the back garden and you would almost drink in the smell, as they cooled enough to be eaten.

In the winter, she would make the marzipan icing, brushing aside the fact that nobody in the family liked marzipan. You had to have it, she would say, or the white sugar icing would not stick. Coming up to Christmas, the puddings would be grumbling on the cooker top while you watched, holding your breath, as she cut confidently into one of the Christmas cakes to create an elevated ski-slope running down the middle. A tiny Santa on a sleigh was tissue-paper safe in a small tin, and it was your job to pick his position on the slanted snow white slope.

Guests would wonder aloud at how she’d managed, not just to make the ski-slope in the cake, but find a sleigh Santa and two elves on skis. You knew that if she hadn’t found them, she’d have made them. There was nothing she could not make.

She’d be delighted when your father would tell the story of him announcing their engagement to a man who worked with him and who’d never met her.

“Oh, the girl in the tricky little blouses,” the man had said.

Foot-pedalling confidently to power the old Singer sewing machine, she made all her own tricky little blouses and, later, your smocked dresses and those of your sister.

When she was done with the sewing and the baking and the boiling of the hankies in the huge washing pot, she would sit at the piano. The big hands would span the octaves as she played from memory, rarely taking the yellowed music sheets out of the piano stool where they were stored.

At rest, when she was preoccupied, those strong straight fingers would, unbidden and unnoticed, play out silent scales on the nearest surface. Music was that integral to her being.

No memory now of music or of anything else. It’s only when a parent’s memory disappears that their children fully understand how much of their own memory is owned by their elders, how often the next generation can casually ask “Which was the guy who…?” or “Remind me how it was when…” confident of instant retrieval of a shared past.

AS SHE stirs, you reflect that this is not the worst. The worst was when memory loss was sporadic and she fought it and you. The worst was when you argued with her and made points to her. When you asked her questions she could not answer and were furious at the confected replies she came up with.

She wanted to be left alone where she was. You wanted her back where she had been. Or to accept a future she could not imagine or accept in advance.

You did everything wrong trying to do everything right, and that leaves in your mouth the coppery taste of remembered self-righteousness. Ill-gotten, unearned, and wrong.

Now, when she wakes, her hand is in yours. She squeezes it instinctively, as a baby curls its fist around a mother’s finger. She straightens up and looks at you in astonishment.

“Who in the name of God are you?” she asks.

It’s the only understandable sentence she has uttered in weeks. You tell her who you are and she laughs merrily as if you were joking.

You laugh with her. You answer what are clearly questions, although they make no sense.

When you leave, she hardly notices. That’s why this is not the worst of it.