Dove sta memoria?
I was reminded of the following section of his epic poem Omeros after being introduced to this video of a connection opening temporarily between an elderly woman incapacitated by Alzheimer's Disease and a caregiver trying to reach her and evoke the inner person, howbeit briefly.
The poet Derek Walcott encountered a similar situation, and presents it in chapter XXXII of his masterpiece:
Omeros
by
Derek Walcott
Chapter
XXXII
I
She floated so
lightly! One hand, frail as a swift,
gripping the
verandah. The cotton halo fanned
from her shrunken
crown, and I felt that I could lift
that fledgling, my
mother, in the cup of my hand
and settle her
somewhere else: away from the aged
women rubbing
rosaries in the Marian Home,
but I was resigned
like them. I no longer raged
at the humiliations
of time. Her turn had come
to be bent by its
weight, its indifferent process
that drummed in
wrist and shank. Time was that fearful friend
they talked to, who
sat beside them in empty chairs,
as deaf as they
were; who sometimes simply listened.
They were all
withdrawn. They'd entered a dimension
where every single
thought was weightless, every form clouded
by its ephemeral
halo. Time's intention
rather than death
was what baffled them; in the deed
of dying there was
terror, but what did time mean,
after some friend
stopped talking and around her bed
they opened the
panels of an unfolding screen?
The frail hair grew
lovelier on my mother's head,
but when my arm
rested on her hollow shoulder
it staggered
slightly from the solicitous weight.
I was both father
and son. I was as old as her
exhausted prayer, as
her wisps of memory floated
with a vague
patience, telling her body: “Wait,”
when all that
brightness had withered like memory's flower,
like the allamanda's
bells and the pale lilac
bougainvillea vines
that had covered our gabled house.
They, like her
natural memory, would not come back.
Her eyes were dim as
dusk. There were no more hours.
From her cupped
sleep, she wavered with recognition.
I would bring my
face closer to hers and catch the
scent of her age. “Who am I?
Mama, I'm your son.”
“My son.” She
nodded. “You have
two, and a daughter.
And a lot of
grandchildren,” I shouted. “A lot to
remember.” “A lot.” She
nodded, as she fought her
memory. “Sometimes
I ask myself who I am.”
We looked at the
hills together, at roofs that I knew
in childhood. “Their
names are Derek, Roddy, and Pam.”
“I have to go back
to the States again.”
“Well,
we can't be together
all the time,” she said, “I know.”
“There is too much
absence,” I said. Then a blessed
lucidity broke
through a cloud. She smiled. “I know
who you are. You are
my son.” “Warwick's
son,” she said.“Nature's
gentleman.” His vine-leaves haloed her now.
