Floating Fire

Photo by Christina Schmidt

Floating Fire

by Mike Gracey

        From folding chairs near the side of a brook, my mother and I watch my daughters—Liv dragging a bucket after gray minnows that dart away from her pink plastic, as elusive to her as her name is to her grandmother; Abbey leaning over stones to examine a leaf spinning in a whirlpool. Before long, they move on to other curiosities, but Mom keeps looking at the swirl. I try to pull her out of it by asking what she’s thinking. Then I ask again, louder this time, because she’s losing her hearing along with her memory.
        She tells me she’s trying to listen to the water pouring through the rocks, and that as a kid she built dams at an oxbow behind her house because the bubbling eased her to sleep. I’m skeptical as I picture the slow brook she’s talking about, but I give her the benefit of the doubt; she can still remember the old stuff. Her hearing, on the other hand, is harder to predict. Tell her that her turnips are burning, and it won’t register until she smells smoke, but say to a brother that Mom is as deaf as a haddock, and she’ll bristle from the far side of a Thanksgiving table. “The haddock can hear you,” she says. And just like that, she’s with us—until a few minutes later when she forgets Olivia’s name again.
        Though her memory is drifting away, Mom can still home in on certain moments with an artist’s sensibility, especially those radiant, timeless instants that the Celts believed happen most often at “thin places,” where the divine world nearly touches the human and, through a diaphanous layer between them, bathes it in splendor. As they saw it, water sources and holes in the earth—springs and wells, clefts and caves—are where this layer is thinnest, and heroes can travel through them to retrieve distressed women.
        I’m no hero—taking Mom out for a picnic is the noblest thing I’ve done lately—but it’s true that I want to retrieve her, and that I’m drawn to thin places when I try. So as I linger at the brook with her, watching its eddies, I curve back through time to where I first bathed in light, and I look for Mom.

***

        A seasonal stream ran through a ravine on the side of our yard. It was only a few inches deep, but its purling made me content to stand beside it awhile. The fishing rod I held was the other reason I was so still, though I clearly wouldn’t catch anything; fish couldn’t have lived there because the streambed went dry a few hours after the rain stopped. But I waited it out anyway, basking in the gathering warmth of late spring and hoping for magic to emerge from the water. Across the brook, waxy ground cover was white with reflected light, and, above me, the green of backlit maples verged on gold.
        The ravine garden seemed medievally stony. Built into the slope behind me was a lichened fireplace with a short chimney. On the patio before it sat a cool, gritty bench and to the right a birdbath that looked like the top of a well except for the spout in the middle, which rippled the image of overhanging leaves when turned on. Up the incline were lilacs and forsythia, and down the stream stood cedars, more maples, some oaks, and an elm tree towering over everything. I traced the elm from trunk to limb to twig and found it as infinitely branching as my thought, which I’d just discovered, along with a feeling that someone watched me from above. I turned and saw Mom leaning into the hillside garden. She straightened and saw me looking at her, and then she smiled.
        Her smile—that’s what planted this moment as my first memory. With her around, it all took root: daffodils and daylilies, snowdrops and scilla, and me. As long as I could turn and see her, I would stand quietly with a useless fishing rod in my hand and the light on my face. And it was good—the quiet and the light and the warmth it brought. It’s just a fragment, this first memory. But though I can only remember it in part, it returns with the conviction that I once knew something in full and saw its repleteness in a light I might see again if I went back to thin places and looked for Mom.

        In all of my early memories, Mom was there. We were gardening or playing cards or eating honey-butter sandwiches or watching from an upstairs window as my brothers stepped onto a bus. None of these moments lasted much longer than the one in the ravine, and they were still wordless. My recollections of school added language and stretched a bit further, especially a discussion with my principal when I advanced from three-letter words to four; but my first sustained memory of home that consisted of more than an amalgam of holiday scenes or silent images came from when I was about seven.
        A mid-December storm started as a mix of snow and rain, but a cold pocket moved under the warm air and stalled near the ground, producing freezing rain that turned the state into an ice sculpture by the time it stopped a day later. At dawn I could see ice sheeting the trellis near the kitchen door and covering laurel and yew bushes. It hung as icicles from shutters and the roofline. It encased birdfeeders, leaving blue jays without a foothold or a place to peck; it downed power lines, leaving us without electricity. It bent saplings until they brushed the ground, loaded branches until they snapped, and closed the roads before the governor did.
        Somehow Mom saw this emergency coming, so we had everything we needed. She bought food easy to cook over a fire, had us pile wood beside the fireplaces, and positioned candles in every room, even deploying summer lanterns from the screen porch. When we finished, Mom brought us out into the ice that our neighbors were still hunkering down to avoid. Maybe she suspected something memorable was waiting for us, or maybe she knew that my brothers and I were more of a threat to each other inside than the ice out there.
        The hockey rink we’d built in the side yard seemed redundant and restrictive now, its boards confining us right when we wanted to be free. The new coat of ice everywhere didn’t feel as smooth as the patch we’d sprayed, but it went on forever, past our vegetable gardens and our neighbor’s yard, and over the hay and corn fields beyond. Dan fired a hockey puck over the garden, and our spaniel scrambled like a cartoon character to chase it. After clicking her claws on the ice, she found her stride, but she saw the garden fence too late to slow down, her hind legs sliding past her nose as she braced for impact with chicken wire. We were better equipped though Mom’s figure skates made cornrows a challenge until she got used to their bumpy rhythm.
        Everything was lacquered—fences, corn stalks, high grass left by the baler, the roof of the old tobacco barn Dan had burnt down that fall. That’s where Mom stopped us. Aside from the dog’s panting and Jocko’s chuckling at the memory of fire trucks there, it was almost quiet, the only other sound an enamel clicking of trees in the wind.
        “Look,” Mom said.
        We saw a crystal forest, trunks and branches so laden with ice that the thinner ones bent like supplicants, heads to the ground. At the extremities, where there was more ice than wood, the tips of twigs glided through a spectrum as they shifted in the breeze, creating a dancing iridescence. I turned back to Mom, whose stillness told me that a glance wasn’t enough here—this was something to behold. So we stood, waiting.
        And we kept watching until the frigid air gave me a crystal-sharp ache in the throat. The silent stasis of the moment was luminous, but it didn’t warm us, so we moved on to skate over the bumpy fields. After lunch Dan and I went sledding down the road in a gulley shaped like a bobsled track. There I managed a couple of crashes that he said would fit nicely in the “agony of defeat” sequence from the “Wide World of Sports,” right after the Yugoslavian ski jumper’s cartwheel. I limped home as the sky turned the color of a bruise, our spaniel inching along beside me.
        Mom was there to feed me cookies and aspirin, and I sat in front of the fire drinking tea and reading Charlotte’s Web by candlelight. It was the first time I remember enjoying a book, so for me reading will always be linked to the flickering candle that made it possible, to the huge moth shadow projected onto the wall from the pane of a tin lantern, and to Mom, who prepared a supper of sausages and fried potatoes at the hearth a few feet away.
        She and I played rummy after dinner, and I fell asleep watching a low fire with deep coals and feeling the calm that comes when beatitudes are fulfilled, when hunger gives way to fullness, work to rest, and cold to warmth. Later, when ice-laden branches snapped in the dark, the flames were still at the same height, and Mom was watching me from the sofa, her face a flux of light and shadow as she waited to kindle again.

***

        Around that time, Dad bought land for a vacation spot on the coast of Maine, and he and Mom gave sketches of what they envisioned to a builder. On the high deck above the shore, Dad would read and write and look west across the bay, a fir tree brushing his shoulder as he viewed kodachrome sunsets, the concerns from his law practice dissolving in the soft wash of bay waves on the rocks below. Mom would eventually paint when she could, but during the summer of construction she watched over us up there, giving Dad a foretaste of the quiet he’d enjoy in future visits and giving us a feel for the new terrain.
        She showed us where developers had blasted boulders to cut the dirt road, leaving hundreds of pieces to choose from for our stone fireplace. She pointed out black and white mica among the rubble, taught us to peel back the layers, and let us linger to feel the filmy slices and see the play of light. When we got back to toting rocks, she had us identify shapes in what we sorted—a fish, a loaf of bread, mussel shells, a shovel scoop, a masonic eye—and later she had us search for things that could fill the branches of our second Christmas tree four months later. We always strung the “nature tree” with white lights, but aside from that it couldn’t have anything artificial, so we collected mica from the road, pinecones from the woods, and thin, white shells from the shore. We found horseshoe crabs and washed up starfish, including a big one for a tree-topper, and we picked statice, sweet alum, and sea lavender to lay on branches. Though we still have some brittle ornaments from that time, collecting didn’t hold our attention once we realized Dad wouldn’t be joining us in our searches. Without much warning, we left Mom and went out on our own, following hunters’ trails into the woods or casting a line at high tide or playing Wiffle ball at a sandpit up the road.
        On the last day of our August trip, Dad decided enough of the house had been completed for us to spend the night. A photo of my brothers probably came from that evening. Even if I’ve distorted things in recalling them, here the memory becomes vivid as if I were walking into the frame from behind Mom while she snaps the picture. The sun subsiding across the bay reflects off the water. Their faces are underlit as they gather dry sticks beneath the pines. We drag branches down to the shore, over rocks skirted by seaweed. Because the upper rocks are too steep and too close to the dry bushes below the new deck, Mom has us drop the firewood near the seaweed and wait for Dad to light it.
        But Dad keeps turning pages, and Dan becomes agitated, afraid the dampness will prevent a fire; Mom distracts him by having him collect driftwood, and together they fashion a base on which they pile other sticks. Dad still doesn’t budge from his spot above us, where a scrub pine makes a backrest for him, curving from exposed roots and straightening toward the sun. Annotating a book with an image of Buddha under the Bodhi tree, he applies his mind to something beyond the trusts and torts he’ll handle in a couple of days. At his hip, noosed and sweating, are the last two cans from a six-pack of Schaeffer, apparently the one beer not to have when you’re seeking enlightenment because he winces at the metallic taste of the one in his hand. He keeps drinking until it’s gone and puts the empty can into the brush with three others.
        Once the tidewater advances across the flats, Mom lets Dan light the fire, starting with pine cones too misshapen to be ornaments. She seems worried. I figure she’s afraid it will spread like the one that took the tobacco barn, but she looks the same after the flames have lowered to a cooking fire. From her glances up the rocks, I see that her concern has to do with Dad, who still doesn’t join us when the hotdogs are done. Even as we roast marshmallows and the creeping tide lifts the rockweed, Dad sits under his tree, straining to read in the afterglow. Soon the water reaches our feet, so we crab-walk up the rocks and wait near him for the fire to die out. The sticks start to hiss, but Mom’s driftwood flotilla remains intact. It rises until it’s free of the last rock mooring and then recedes, still burning as it rolls slowly over bay ripples.
        “Look at that,” Mom says.
        My brothers marvel at the magic of fire on water, making loud, conflicting predictions about how long it will last, but they can’t get Dad to see what they see. When he finally finishes his chapter, Mom asks him to take a look, but he only glances our way before nibbling his cold hotdog. Finally, Jock and Dan stop commenting on it, and soon we all head up to the house. I check once more after I get to the deck, and I see the small flame still drifting, still burning. But Mom isn’t there to witness it with me—she’s unrolling sleeping bags in the loft—so I’ve already stopped watching by the time the floating fire is doused.
        Later, Dad screws candles into the tops of wine bottles, and we use Mom’s ornaments for chips in a poker game. I’m not sure what Mom does the rest of the night. Our eyes are on Dad now.

        The way Mom receded from view that night foreshadowed the ways we’d overlook her later. We liked what Dad liked, especially baseball since he coached several of our teams. Mom, on the other hand, we turned to when we were hungry or sick or sad. After one of our cats was hit by a car, for example, she helped us bury it, marking the grave with a small American flag left over from Memorial Day, the red and blue fading to white in the shade of a spruce.
        If we wanted to get any time on our side-yard rink, we had to lay down lots of ice on cold nights. Yet when temperatures plummeted toward zero, Mom was reluctant to let us stay out there for long. She left Dad, Gordon Lightfoot, and the fire to take our place. In the glow of the barn’s floodlights, she slowly backed away from the patches she had sprayed, her long shadow flat over the ice but bent on the boards and trees behind her, where she moved like a giant with a crooked knee. Glancing out the kitchen window, we gave her credit for taking the time to smooth the rough surface, and for bearing up in the cold longer than the rest of us.
        I tell my friends that one night the nozzle’s drip froze her boots to the ice, and that when Dan saw her wind-milling, he put on his skates, did warm-up laps as Mom tried to loosen her laces like the desperate maiden on railroad tracks, and lowered his shoulder to knock her free. The body check was embellished—something to laugh about so I wouldn’t have to recall what really happened. None of us would have lifted a hand against Mom or dropped a shoulder; my problem is that I didn’t lift a finger for her. In the next few years Dad’s swirl of drink and depression exerted a centrifugal force on us, shooting us off into our own worlds. But it was inverted for Mom: she had to fight a centripetal pull on her own while watching her life get sucked away. And I did nothing about it—didn’t share a tender word, didn’t tender anything.
        Twenty-five years later, I dream that I’m sitting with Mom in her kitchen on a Saturday morning, paying her bills as I do every few weeks. I’m so intent on my work that it’s dark by the time I look up. Mom is no longer in her chair. I am. A man comes in and looks into the refrigerator and cabinets. I ask him who he is and what he’s doing, but I can’t hear him when he looks at me over his shoulder and moves his lips. I stand to confront him, only to discover, upon rising, that I’m just a boy. When he takes pills out of a plastic container and hands them to me with a glass of water, I balk, closing my eyes and lips tight like a kid refusing cough syrup. Breathless, I finally open them again, and I’m in my own bed, my wife beside me.
        In my dream I put myself into my mother’s place, something I don’t always do during waking hours. She has Alzheimer’s. From day to day she can’t remember the homemakers who cook and clean and administer medication. Nor can she always hear them when they re-introduce themselves, and she must imagine that they don’t listen to her either. Since the absence of context makes dreams hard to remember, I wonder if her days feel like dreams now or nightmares.
        Doctors talk to us about plaque on the brain, but I also know that Dad’s drinking dissolved Mom’s connections to the world. Without those, it was harder for her to make meaning. She took care of him at the expense of everything else. She stopped gardening, and her flowerbeds became overgrown. She went from designing silver jewelry to pounding pewter into molds, a craft that let her vent anger but seemed less creative than her earlier work. When Dad’s cold-turkey seizures started, she stopped working altogether, shutting down her shop in the barn so that she could keep an eye on him in the house. My brothers and I had left by then, and we weren’t bringing our buddies around anymore. Mom and Dad lost touch with most of their friends, who didn’t like watching Dad deteriorate in front of them. Her stress, her need to forget the ugliness of what she saw, her tendency to match his drinking when she couldn’t stop it—all of this was magnified by an isolation that made her wither, memories falling away like leaves when she stopped creating new ones.

        Remembering is partly a creative act, like writing memoir; but by the time Dad passed away three years ago, Mom’s recent memories were closer to pure fiction. If she couldn’t recall something, she made it up based on the evidence around her. A few times, she even forgot he was gone when she saw his books and crossword puzzles lying around. When I drove her to Maine in her car that July, she told me she’d bought it ten days earlier, though I knew she’d gotten it in January; and the car conversation repeated itself every fifteen minutes or so, an interval about half of what it had been a few months earlier. She forgot routines she’d been following for twenty years, at one point mopping the floors of the summer place before sweeping the accumulated dust, leaving a series of cyclonic swirls on pine boards. She cooked her meals on the stovetop now, where the passage of cooking time was visible in the food itself, over which she stood with new vigilance as if she expected it to combust at any minute.
        On one visit, she had a bruise on the side of her face, the result, she said, of catching her sock on a loose nail in the floorboard—the same explanation she had offered for an earlier fall. My brothers agreed that she needed to stop driving as soon as I brought her home just before Labor Day. First, though, I took the Greyhound from my home in Massachusetts, having arranged for her to pick me up across the street from Bowdoin College, about fifteen minutes from her place on the island. What I didn’t count on was a late bus. The sun was low on the horizon by the time I left. As I made the trip to Maine, I pictured Mom circling the center of Brunswick, forgetting how she’d gotten there once the darkness closed on her.
        Her relief was palpable when I finally arrived, but she told me she’d only been waiting ten minutes—the number she fell back on when memory failed. The bruise on her face seemed to have faded as we ate scrambled eggs by candlelight. I gave her updates on my children, dropping hints about their ages and joking about their personalities as if she could remember them—one-liners that didn’t require further explanation. She mocked the condition of my sneakers and toasted me when I credited her for my being too tight-fisted to replace them. She even made a joke out of her loneliness, saying she’d developed a special language to commune with the squirrels, seagulls and raccoons, all of which visited her after dinner and were rewarded with leftover bread. It was a nice quiet meal, theirs and ours, with Mom still feasting on the scraps of memory I held out to her after the eggs were gone and the deck empty.
        As I sat back afterward and looked through sliding glass doors toward the bay, I thought I saw a flame flickering on the water, but then my eyes adjusted: I saw it was just the reflection of our single candle.

        For the first year and a half after Dad’s death, before we got live-in help, I visited Mom every other weekend to load pill boxes, stock the refrigerator, pay bills, and have repetitive conversations about my wife and children, whose names she’d forgotten. On the rare occasions she talked about herself, she made things up. She claimed to have picked up the Christmas tree across the state line, something we hadn’t done in a few years and which she couldn’t have done without a car. I’d actually gotten it at the Lions’ Club sale down the street, but there was no sense challenging her; she’d forget my correction in a few minutes and be agitated in the meantime. What she’d remember was her creative version of events, which she repeated when we passed her tree vendor’s empty stand on our way to a garden center on Mother’s Day weekend.
        Inspired by a change in Mom’s mood that came with a turn in the weather, I bought her new gardening tools and loaded up my car with trays of plants, hoping that if she dug in the flower beds again something would bloom in her like a perennial that skipped a season. Some of her vitality did return as we went down rows of plants, and she loaded our cart with azaleas, impatiens, delphinia, hostas, and amaryllis—the last of which, she informed me, was also called “naked lady.” That she could still name all of these gave me hope; that her jeans tended to fall when she leaned over made me worry that neighbors would spot more than one kind of naked lady in our yard that afternoon.
        There was no need for concern because her energy faded as we drove away. Maybe it was pure fatigue from the morning excursion, or maybe the very abundance she named reminded her of what she had lost. Whatever the reason, her enthusiasm was gone by the time we sat down to lunch. Now she couldn’t believe we’d bought the trays of plants in the back of my car, their scents blending as Mom foretold their demise.
        “It’s too late in the season,” she said. “They won’t take root.”
        Her face looked pained as she said this, and when the food finally came, she had to take a deep breath before starting the struggle of chewing it. I knew she wouldn’t garden that day, knew the flowers would dry up in their containers if I didn’t plant them myself. But faced with the choice between planting flowers she wouldn’t water and going home to tend to my children, I chose the latter, gilding my decision, when I explained it later, with the fantasy that Mom might plant on her own.
        To stick it out over the long term, caregivers for Alzheimer’s patients must lower expectations and cut losses, especially the loss of time. We move our feet and find ourselves trying again, knowing we’ll be faced with the absurdity of our half-measures the next time we explain them, or the next time someone explains their futility to us, as when one of Mom’s visitors said I should have planted the flowers we bought.
        “I thought she’d do it,” I said. “She really seemed to be rallying.”
        I get creative with the past, too.
        Over the next few years, I tried to get Mom out of the house each time I visited because I thought the stimulation was good for her. I took her out for lunch or dinner, partly because Dad rarely had, and partly because she needed a break from the four dishes she still prepared for herself. But the meals were rarely as relaxing as I’d hoped. One time I took her to an inn where a sorority was having a dance in a side room. After examining the menu with the help of a flashlight that periodically reflected off the eyeglasses of a couple at the next table, she commented on the outfits of the passing college students, declaring several times, in a voice loud enough for two girls to hear, that their dresses were too small for them. We skipped dessert.
        As I walked Mom to the car afterward, it occurred to me how similar she and my son Aidan had become. Not only did I have to hold him up when he was tired, but I also had to curb his impulse to share loud observations about strangers in public. Aidan was improving in both respects, though, while Mom was headed the other way.
        Dad used to say that the edgy side of my grandmother’s dementia was the real her, suppressed for years but suddenly uncensored. He was joking, though. I know the real Mom is the one who has the grace not to give her worst thoughts the worst words but who gives a silent smile when words elude her. This is the grandmother I want my children to remember, the one who invited them into quiet rituals of feeding animals, flying balsa wood airplanes, preparing cups of tea, and sitting for meals; but this one is harder for them to recall when they watch her forget what she’s doing from moment to moment, or when the words she forgets are their names.
        On the night before Thanksgiving last year, Olivia and Abbey, then eleven and thirteen, put in time with their grandmother before going up to Dan’s old bedroom to read. Aidan wanted more direct contact with his Granny. At the age of four he was already competitive enough to exploit an advantage. Thus he challenged her to a game of Memory. Mom didn’t wait for Aidan to explain the rules; she knew she couldn’t play. Instead, we opted for Pahrcheezi, its corrupted spelling the price of my having bought it at a dollar store on the way down. This wasn’t the same game I had played with Mom as a child or with Aidan back at our house; its entry points were shifted and the arrows directed players in the opposite direction. Aidan made the adjustment after a few rolls, but Mom went the wrong way turn after turn. Aidan glanced at me each time without speaking, having learned that voicing what he thought about Granny right then would get him into trouble. I came to the bittersweet conclusion that he had developed more self-restraint than his grandmother, whom I’d stopped taking to restaurants for fear of having a drink dumped on my head by a large woman in a small skirt.
        Once the turkey was in the oven on Thanksgiving morning, I fell into a nice rhythm with Mom and Michelle as we prepared stuffing, beans, potatoes, turnips, and gravy. It felt like the parallel play I used to do with Aidan when we sat side by side, each of us constructing our own buildings with blocks on the rug. But the dinner itself was more difficult because it depended on conversation, which is built on a shared foundation of memory. Unable to connect parts of the discussion in a meaningful way, Mom repeatedly started over, complimenting her nine grandchildren on their height and clothing and commenting on the spread of food and the quality of light in the room. The children giggled when she observed for the fifth time a layer of dust on the chandelier. When we let them go outside to kick a ball and play a game called “big booty,” I was glad I didn’t have to explain its name to Granny.
        The next day, Aidan came down with a stomach bug. Michelle took the girls to visit other cousins, and I lay with him under thick blankets upstairs, sleeping occasionally as he did. When I went down to the kitchen to get him some ginger ale, Mom looked surprised to see me; and when I mentioned Michelle and the girls, she asked where they were, though I know Michelle had told her on the way out. I thought about writing a note reminding Mom what she ought to expect from the rest of the day, but Aidan started calling. So I told her I’d be down in a couple hours and went back upstairs.
        As I lay examining water-stain ceiling clouds, smelling the house’s dusty oldness, I fell into a rhythm of drowsing and waking and lost track of time in the grayness of a November afternoon. I remembered the night of the ice storm when Mom watched over me and kept a low fire burning, and it felt good to be back in the place where everything was provided. But then I pictured Mom waiting for us or for me at least. I thought it would be better for her to forget I was there altogether, but I’d parked my car in front of the kitchen window, so I knew she was wondering where I was, just as she had on the night she waited for an overdue Greyhound, driving in circles as dusk thickened to dark.
        I finally made it downstairs after sunset. Mom hadn’t turned on the overhead light, and the desk lamp pointing down on the kitchen table left deep shadows under her eyes as if something had gone out of them when the day waned. I’d seen this dull expression before, usually when she greeted me at the door, but it had always been replaced quickly by surprise and joy. This time it took longer to change.

***

        In his “Ode On Intimations of Immortality,” Wordsworth traced the great fade from the “celestial light” of early childhood through the “light of common day” to something dimmer later on, and he claimed that even “shadowy recollections” can serve as “a master light of all our seeing,” ultimately allowing us to find comfort in a “faith that looks through death.” But Wordsworth stopped short of the darkness I saw in Mom’s face; he didn’t contemplate the disappearance of the very recollections he saw as the gateway to solace. When Dad passed away, the closest Mom came to a soothing thought was in the prospect that she might join him, a wish she voiced several times. She knows what Wordsworth didn’t consider: without memory, she will face a terrifying ever-present, teetering on an abyss that swallows faith and absorbs light, rendering the “philosophic mind” incapable of reflection. So my job, if I’m to act with a son’s primal sympathy, is to help Mom recollect whatever she can.
        Dostoevsky also wrote about memory at the end of The Brothers Karamazov, but Alyosha’s words to the boys actually shed more light on what it can do for me:
                A beautiful, holy memory preserved from early childhood
                can be the most important single thing in our development.
                And if a person succeeds, in the course of his life, in
                collecting many such memories, he will be saved for the rest
                of his life. And even if we have only one such memory, it is
                possible that it will be enough to save us someday.

Alyosha acknowledges the possibility that we will be insensitive to other people’s pain, that we’ll fail to appreciate the sacrifice of people like Mom; but he insists that the memory of one good, kind act can save us from our own sneering and thoughtlessness by enabling us to say, “Yes, there was a moment when I was good and kind and brave!”
        I want to be able to say that, so I visit Mom every few weeks to help her however I can. There must be some deep needs I’m missing, though, or maybe my visits don’t register at all, because when I call her two days after leaving, she asks when I’m coming again. It’s my absence she remembers.
        I want to give her something to hold onto when my brothers and I aren’t there. Last Christmas, I bought her a digital frame and planned to fill it with old photographs. I thought that as each image appeared on the screen, the threads of Mom’s memory would cross, forming a net that would catch her if she ever felt she was sliding away. The problem, I saw quickly, was that the net had a gaping hole; Mom stopped taking pictures when I was thirteen. I’ve joked that her affection for us waned once we were all teenagers, but the truth was that Dad was becoming more self-destructive, and Mom was shielding us. You don’t snap photos when you’re smothering a grenade.
        Michelle is taking another run at filling the digital frame, adding recent pictures of grandchildren to the scanned black and whites from the beginning of Mom’s marriage. I know we’re culling images of people she can’t name in places she never visited, but I tell myself she can connect the old and new ones creatively, weaving them into a tapestry like the artist she once was. They will come and go in the fleeting way dreams do, and in her waking dream she can imagine that the man smiling in her wedding photo stayed happy, and that her sons are staying close to her as the last of her actual memories dissolve.
        I bring the digital frame down a couple of weeks after we’ve hired a live-in caregiver, and I make room for it on the kitchen table. Mom is fixed on the screen as soon as I turn it on, and she continues watching it as I take phone calls from Michelle and Dan and then sit beside her to watch the Red Sox game. After the photo frame goes through its cycle nine or ten times, Mom shares a hunch: “I think I’ve seen these before.”
        She gets up, opens the door, and invites her cat in. It doesn’t budge, so Mom bends slowly and reaches out to it. “What are you waiting for, Miss Winnie?”
        It still doesn’t move. It can’t because it’s the stone statue of a cat, a doorstop. Miss Winnie has been missing for a week. “I haven’t seen her since I’ve been back,” I say, leaving Mom with some hope even though I suspect Miss Winnie is gone for good.
        Aside from a mysterious smell in the kitchen, the caregiver is doing a nice job, so I’m left with much less work around the house. I still pay the bills, and Mom asks me about them one by one, but I’m not shopping for groceries or loading pill cases or replacing light bulbs or fighting her to take a shower or a walk around the yard. Her physical needs are covered and I can just be with her, without distractions.
        And that’s the problem: there’s nothing to divert my attention from Mom’s experience moment to moment. I start one conversation after another, each one spinning in place as names, events, and details shoot off; I repeat them until Mom senses our doubling back and goes quiet. I re-start the whirling with more questions until centrifugal dread overcomes centripetal guilt, and I flip on the digital frame again so I can drift off to plan for some contingency that will never touch Mom.
        My excuse this time is the mystery smell, which, I discover after some exploring, is a dead mouse behind a bag of potatoes near the cellar stairs—Miss Winnie’s last kill. I pick it up with twigs and carry it across the yard to toss it into the ravine. While I’m there, I take a peek to see what we ought to clear out to get the property ready for sale in the next couple of years. Might as well get ahead of it if I can.
        I haven’t been down in the ravine much since junior high school, and I only went in then to chase the longest of Jock and Dan’s Wiffle ball home runs. The oak in center field is thinner now, its limbs broken, sawed, or wind-sheared. Ropy woodbine has scaled and strangled some trees near the road, and Mom cut the lilacs after they became too old, gnarled, and tangled with bittersweet. Weeds have overtaken the hillside garden, and the birdbath is so filled with leaves that I can barely see it from the top of the slope. Most of the lower ravine is darker than it used to be because it’s so overgrown. A thick place.
        From my vantage point, the chimney of the little fireplace looks like a cairn, a marker for something that is gone, like the cedars that died when the sandy delta from the stream backed around their trunks. Farther down, the elm still towers over everything, and it’s still as infinitely branching as memory, but nothing grows on it, even at the extremities. Surrounded by leafy maples that keep part of the ravine in an early dusk, it stands bare above them, its wispy branches curled back by wind. I linger, wondering what keeps it standing now that it’s leafless, and how long it will last without new growth. Then I make my way back across the yard, thinking of things that can never be whole again.
        On the way out I’d propped the door with the stone cat, so Mom doesn’t hear me when I come in. She’s looking at the digital frame again, but now there is no change of expression as images appear and disappear. To the woman who showed me every kind of light, from dancing iridescence to floating fire, we in the pictures are just flickers on her face as she stares at the screen, darkly.