Will a day come when no one
remembers the right mistakes, no one still
knows what speech impediment
exactly to feed?
Will anyone bore through your sandcastles
of semantics with
firebreaks and understanding?
Why, after each mouthful, does she always
wipe the rim of the cup dry with her thumb?
Why do simple sweet wrappers suddenly become
transparent mysteries?
Why do I see her testing with her lips, the tip
of her tongue the difficult corners
of words as if she is
standing on a narrow ledge with her back
against the wall — why doesn’t she dare
to look down, and does she say
that something’s dizzy there?
Back home our mother goes visibly downhill. My father cannot see the reality and is balancing on the edge of a depression (for which there must be pills, but what good are they?). It threatens to infect us all. Inwardly I sometimes have the feeling that I am slowly transforming into some dull, colourless metal, with very little resonance. Something like zinc or tin: as solid as it is grey.
She collapsed. Her muscle tone is weakening. She can scarcely move her fingers or toes any longer. Slowly she is curling into the foetal position. It may be connected with the cold, with this long winter. Perhaps it will soon improve.
My father clings to any sign that somewhere in that languishing organism the woman he knows still lives. Some while ago I met my brothers and sisters to open up and get drunk — but also to establish whether we all agreed that a point is coming at which we will have to decide to put an end to the suffering. It sounds businesslike, but when the moment comes it will nevertheless be a dreadful decision — or, who knows, who knows, a release.
We have decided against a thorough periodic examination. The GP will keep an eye on her condition and if there are complications she can always go to the hospital.
What is the point of shoving her under a scanner every three or four months?
Subjecting her to the horror of a spinal puncture to find out what we actually already know — that the substances that are making her ill are not going away, on the contrary — would simply be a token of sadism.
Nor will she be given any pills which supposedly slow the degeneration of her nervous system, because the pills don’t do that. They are magic balls, that’s all, like extensive swathes of medical jargon: magic formulae with an ancient etymology that hangs our mother out to dry between the pages of a textbook.
For us doctors are not healers but interpreters: what we know in ordinary words they translate into terms of Greek and Latin origin. Leave philology out of it. I like doctors who don’t know everything either and say that in so many words. They exist, but they’re becoming rare.
I don’t want her to fall into the hands of some white-coated type who double-checks everything against his protocol of statistically backed bullet points and has scarcely any ear or eye for the person she still is.
Look and listen, listen closely, says our GP. And talk, but that is difficult with your mum, of course.
Mum, I remember, one of the first winters where it was clear to everyone how ill you were, sitting here on the chair by the window, and it was cold outside, bitterly cold. You were sitting right next to the radiator, the faintly ticking radiator. If you’d been able to, you would have crawled inside it. You held your hands against the warm side, all your fingers spread wide, and shivered and shivered.
I don’t know if you remember — no, you can’t possibly remember, I forget how old I was, perhaps about ten. We went to visit Lea in Ghent. We were walking along the Lousbergskaai; you were carrying my younger brother on your arm and at a street corner your foot slipped off the edge of the kerb and you fell.
My brother finished up on the asphalt, bawling. I remember I picked him up. You crawled to your feet — grazed knees, torn tights. You swore and bit back your tears, and pulled the tails of your jacket straight, that rust-coloured check two-piece, over your fake crocodile leather shoes. I remember thinking, or rather it being whispered from my gut: mothers die too.
Why do we accept the mortality of our fathers more easily than that of our mothers? Because the tough thread of life is spun from mothers? I think of your fingers on that radiator: so fragile, almost translucent, like the newly opened fingers of a foetus, through which the first blood vessels meander their way.
You fell, two summers ago, during the very last walk we all went on together. The Ardennes, end of September: the earth a carpet of dry leaves and husks, the smell of dew and vegetable decay. Somewhere on the descent from a hill, down to the river, you fell and I saw you scramble up, like thirty years before. First you wiped your knees clean, bit back your tears, and swore virtually identically — except that you now said it was our fault. We said nothing.
You could no longer cut up your own food. We saw that for the first time. You picked up your knife and fork for a moment — it seemed to be a ritual between the two of you — and then put them down again, after which my father took over and cut the potatoes and the meat into little pieces.
We heard that you could no longer take a shower by yourself. That he took you with him, lathered you and held you tight when you were frightened by the water coming out of the showerhead.
It took you about two hours to calm down when everyone arrived in the house that one of my sisters had rented. Upset by the commotion of playing children, laughter, pleasure, you went upstairs, where it was quiet. You used to be in charge, and let all that exuberant life wash over you. Now you crept away, behind my father.
She’s like my shadow these days, he said.
And now you are a blue-veined china doll. You no longer wear tights but thick woollen socks. The winter bends your fingers into small, cold claws. In your footwear your toes curl against your soles. So your slow withering begins. Winter after winter you become a little more bent, you contract around yourself, under the increasingly thick sweaters and coats with which we try to keep you warm — one great vanishing point.
I shall have to restrain her, he says. Otherwise I’ll never have a moment’s rest. I can’t be everywhere at once. And if she gets into the drawers and grabs for a knife or breaks a glass… She doesn’t know what a knife is any more, or slivers of glass, how sharp they are. I’ve applied for a wheelchair from the Health Service. Then I shall restrain her, there’s nothing else for it.
Eventually your system will have become too weak to resist infections. A wealth of clinical terms will run riot over your bones. Your blood pressure is already beginning to drop worryingly, and you sometimes lose consciousness in your sleep. It is as if reverse birth pangs are passing through your cells and each wave is taking something else of you with it. Your insides rattle and jangle. The winter may bring the final bout of pneumonia. One day you may no longer have any appetite. You may have a fall, break something, and mess up your dislocated head even more. How far should we go to keep you alive? When does care become another word for torture?
You won’t notice a thing. Whatever awareness or consciousness is still dormant in you, a frightened owl chick somewhere in the tangle of collapsed beams in your head, will glide away into the fog of morphine — we hope.
I wouldn’t like her to lie there suffering later, he says.
I wouldn’t want her to be dying and us to be just standing there watching.