Forgetting and Letting Go

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

I keep wondering about giving aging a voice, not a whine but a voice in the literary sense. Does anyone care about my tremor? Should I try harder to rise above the little indignities, or do they make for a good essay?

Up until just recently, there was an abstract quality to my observations about getting old. Often, they would focus conveniently on someone else. This one’s cheeks are wrinkling like walnut shells.  That one gets lost in the soapsuds mid-sentence. I’m sorry to say that some of the same comparisons and petty jealousies that I remember from seventh grade are still lurking. I want to be the sharpest tack, the most sought-after girl in the class. 

I am boring myself to death before my time. It is my heart’s greatest desire to be free of this sludge and I see that the depredations of aging are cleverly designed by whomever to cut me down a peg. If I ever thought I was special or chosen in any way, I now see that I’m getting old like everyone else fortunate enough to survive this long.  I can’t carry a cup of coffee from the kitchen to the dining room table without leaving puddles on the cork floor and my memory?? Fuggetaboutit.

A few days ago, I met with my sister on FaceTime. My sister is 89 and does not get out of bed. She does not engage with her family upstairs unless they come down to see her. I got on the call with my usual agenda of cheering her up and encouraging her to remember me and contribute to the savings account of our recollections and affections.

We sang some Gilbert & Sullivan and some Rodgers & Hart. But midway through “This Can’t Be Love,” I started seeing myself in the tomato-red shirt she was wearing and realizing that ten years ago, when she was my age, she was walking up the driveway and the front steps to see her daughter. Now, the blankness that I can already detect in myself has carried her off. When will it come for me like the thief in the night that it is?

Recently, I’ve had a taste of it with something that might be post-Covid brain fog. I had a brief encounter with the virus about ten days ago. Really, it was nothing. But now the scurrilous defecting nouns have been joined by whole battalions of verbal interactions that seem to be surrendering, giving up the ghost.

It’s not the same as trying to remember something specific like the capital of Kentucky (Frankfort, not Louisville). It’s entire chunks of conversation that took place ten minutes ago. I will have a faint sense that something important was said, but I can’t bring up the subject matter, and the harder I try, the further away the words retreat into some dark underground cave.

This may be how Biden felt towards the end and I don’t have a high-energy Kamala waiting in the wings. I feel a newfound empathy for him and an awareness that people will laugh at the memory impaired in ways that they would never allow themselves to deride a person with heart disease. We are easy marks, and it’s open season.

Thinking about this made me weary which only added to the blur. I lay down on the couch to take a nap. But just then, the geese descended onto the pond, invading my space with a spirited honking that seemed to say, “We’re here right now. You don’t have to remember us. We’re not a figment of your imagination. We are noisy, messy fabulous creatures. I dare you to sleep through this racket, this flourishing of life.”

It occurred to me that I didn’t know if or when the fog would lift. But I saw that the presence of the more than the human world had a tonic effect. The squawking of the birds and the lilting sound of the wind in the trees brought me out of the narrowing corridors of my brain and back to the gift of the spacious present.

It reminded me of the Pacific when my mother was making her plans to die and the ocean was never more beautiful. It reminded me of how fortunate I have been to be led by the nose out of the canyons of Manhattan into the great world where I have been welcomed by a thousand beings beyond language.