“No.” I replied. “I’m warm, I’m always warm.”
We have the same conversation every time I visit her.
“See.” I said, placing my left hand on top of hers as proof. “Warm as toast.”
She smiled. Our respective husbands were deep in conversation about politics and advances in science and medicine, and of course, tales of our latest trips.
She was trying valiantly to follow, just keeping her head above the mire of dementia that was lapping at her brain. She raised herself unsteadily on her eighty year old legs and I watched her husband, as he watched her intently, as she tottered towards the kitchen. She returned with a plate of shop-bought biscuits, identical to the ones she’d already served that were still sitting on a plate on the coffee table next to me.
“Have a cookie”, she said. “Eat, eat.”
“We’ve just come from a cafe, we’ve just had breakfast.” I said again. But I took another one, to placate her anyway. There was a time when the biscuits would have been home-made, oven-fresh. Buttery shortbread kisses with passionfruit cream filling. The house always smelled of baking. But in recent times, cooking has become a liability, an activity that has to be heavily supervised by her husband.
The men folk continue on. We sip on our mugs of tea. Hers is half full so that her shaky hands won't spill it.
We talk about family, about her daughters and mine. At times she can’t finish her sentences as she loses the thread of what she was saying. She talks to me about how hard it is to deal with her diminishing health. About how her mind isn’t working. About how she can’t recall things anymore. She says she doesn’t want to continue the way she is. I don’t argue with her. I know what that feels like.
Our husbands move to the front yard. Mine is showing off his new car. I walk with her around the massive hydrangea bushes. Their blooms waning as winter is now upon us. An apt symbol, echoing our earlier conversation. I watch as she bends the stems of the already dead flower heads. “I do this, so they will die quicker, so the new shoots will come sooner.” she says.
I reach for the taller ones, to save her stretching or over balancing, and bend them down too. I’ve always thought that hydrangeas are the flowers that keep on giving. I love the powdery blue of their blooms and the colour variations that occur due to the soil they grow in. And I love that as they die, they hold their shape, fade and continue with a different kind of beauty until their petals dry into fragile skeletons.
“How can you stand it?” she asked me with a disarming suddenness. I knew what she meant. She was talking about her own condition, but she was referring to the loss of my son. Her eyes were crystal clear and the was an urgency and lucidity to her question demanded an honest answer.
“I can’t.” I said. “I can’t bear it.”
And because we were standing outside, in the cool morning air; and because our husbands were out of earshot; and because I knew she had lived a long and full life; and because I knew she would ‘get it’; I elaborated...
“Most mornings I wake up and I am disappointed I am still alive.” I said.
“Yes.” she agreed. Her eyes lighting up. She clutched my arm. “Yes.” she said again, a little gentler.
“But you can’t tell anyone.” I continued. “You can’t tell the ones that love you.” I said nodding towards our husbands. “You can’t tell them, because they don’t understand and they become very afraid for us.”
“Yes.” she agreed again conspiratorially. I could see she was grateful for my candour, for a moment shared. For simply understanding.
“Its not that I want to die.” I said. “Its just sometimes I don’t want to live. Its not the same thing. I just want the pain to stop.”
And with that my husband called out to me.
“Come on.” he said. “We’ve got places we need to go to.”
So we bade our farewells, I kissed her softly on the cheek and we left.
And as they stood there at the end of their driveway in the sunlight, smiling, holding hands and waving us on our way, I wondered if I would ever see her again.
