by Suzanne Roberts
“When it’s my time,” you always said, “push me downriver in the red canoe.”
Instead we sit with the other slumped memory care residents and sing Karaoke: “Mustang Sally,” “Peggy Sue,” and “Little Darlin.’ The doctor says you might retain the ability to read long after nearly everything else goes. You still know the words by heart.
You went through this with your own mother, and when you accepted it was happening to you. you worried this would happen to your children and their daughters. The thought used to make you cry. But that’s gone, too, because your brain’s mosaic is now moment and shard without cement—too disconnected for depression. And soon, the doctor says, you will lose the ability to smile, which is hard to imagine until it isn’t.
Someone asks you, joking, if you would like green eggs and ham. You say, “Yes, I would like some bog and gam.” For now, you smile. And so do we.
You start sentences about fixing things or going fishing and then the words scatter like confetti, so you pat your baby doll named Katie (who named her? No one seems to know). “She likes that,” you say. The woman seated on the couch next to you holds a stuffed dog. She smiles and says “Why, hello,” and then later, frowns and says, “It’s time for me to go home. Home. Home.” There’s a shift in her anxious face, and she loses track of what she’s saying, smooths the dog’s gray fur, smiles again, says to us, “Please. do come again.”
We agree, though we will soon be on our way to board an airplane and then another.
I worry that when you put Katie down, someone will pick her up, mistake her for his own. But this never happens. Everyone knows who’s doll or stuffed toy belongs to whom.
At the family meeting, the doctor explains the three ways you will likely die: infection, trauma, or air hunger. Your oldest daughter says, “But Pa isn’t ready to go. I asked him if he wanted to meet Jesus, and he said no.”
A brother-in-law, also a doctor, wonders why the other ailments are being treated—insulin for diabetes, antibiotics for infections. An argument about ethics ensues, and the middle daughter tells her doctor-husband, with her eyes, to be quiet. I only nod, hearing it all but saying nothing, married into the family. But I wonder, Is this Pa’s red canoe?
You once told me you never wanted to be a burden. But your oldest daughter claims she speaks a common language with you, understands what you want. She visits you more than we do. She carries with her a baggie of her own prescription drugs, doesn’t think the doctor knows how many pills she needs. She says she only sometimes screws it up, has to call poison control.
When Gammy—that’s what the grandchildren called your wife—was alive, we sat together by the window. Black-capped chickadees fluttered like eyelashes on the seed-dappled snow. A tangle of birch branches, a gray web against white sky. She told me, “He’s not the boy I married. The doctors call it cognitive impairment. They don’t want to say dementia or Alzheimer’s. He can answer the five questions they ask him, but they don’t live with him, watch as he searches for his tools.” But the tools are under the trapdoor, along with what he’s supposed to do before the train leaves, whether or not this is his blue jacket.
“I know I shouldn’t be drinking,” Gammy told me. “I don’t know why I do it. It’s dangerous for someone like me. But look outside,” she said, “it’s snowing again.”
We watched as you worked in the yard with your youngest son, my husband, despite the snow.
And the bird tracks were covered, one flake at a time.
Years earlier, when the signs became clear, you took up drawing as a way to exercise your mind. You sketched a picture of a canoe in charcoal; in it, a boy and his father. The picture now hangs on our dining room wall. My husband says, “I think that’s Pa and me. Do you think so, too?”
I say I think so. I don’t say that the black-and-white canoe—it’s meant to be red.
Suzanne Roberts is the author of the award-winning memoir, Almost Somewhere, as well as four books of poems A book of travel essays, The Bad Tourist, is forthcoming in 2020. She serves as the current El Dorado County Poet Laureate and teaches for the MFA program in creative writing at Sierra Nevada College.
Suzanne Roberts