A: Aging.

Alphabet Experiment A.

Aging has been sold to me like the creams that would fend it off, naming the “signs of aging” as fine lines and weight gain, osteoporosis and invisibility. Tips and tools presented in magazines alongside ads for those creams and coverups, promising control. My mother raised me to protect my hands from the sun, cover my neck with turtlenecks, use the creams and let this holy trilogy do their work tending to and extending the illusion of youth. 

Despite the lessons, I’ve wrinkled and my neck is a new shape. ‘Weight doesn’t come off like it used to’. I’ve learned surgery after 40 does not require the six months of PT the doctor describes, but a lifetime commitment. And in so many ways, it’s great. It’s more peaceful in self. I know and feel things I wasn’t secure or clear enough to devise before. Special treatment fades and invisibility creeps around the corner. It comes with relief. Dignity is accessible in new ways, and I’ve (hopefully) got a long road ahead, still. 

My mother’s skin is still fairly taut ‘for her age’. Her topical efforts and genetic profile ensure her face is frequently confused for a much younger one. What deception she maintained paved a gradual path into the mist of age. Over the last five years for her, though, things have sped up. Steep drops on her path have landed her in deep fog, with no chance to turn back. The sharpness leaves me thinking about aging—beyond the Presidential insanity and my aching knee—with new acuity. 

Aging has grown beyond threats of change to be a reflection of all that has passed, is past. Aging as a reflection on the wealth of time, the dwindling of clarity, the ambiguity of honesty and what we can perceive. Aging as a state with few answers. 

The unknown ahead also often is perceivable. One way to deal is to declare you’re ‘out in front of It’, whether It is mediocrity, accountability, attack, or Alzheimer’s. To laugh about It, to dance in front of Its looming shadow. To charm and dominate it, grandly declaring It can’t have you—whatever It may be. 

Mom knew Alzheimer’s was coming for her. For thirty years she has been claiming her fate. Said it would consume her like it did her grandfather. Said she was sorry in advance because she wasn’t always nice even then, and she knew it would likely be worse in times ahead. Said she hoped to get quickly to a “point where it was all lovely and new” and she could let go of the past. Knew we don’t have the funds for the fancy care so requested/threatened, “At some point, just shoot me,” repeatedly. 

*If* that request was ever funny, I am no longer entertained. About a year ago -- in an era that made very clear to me how brutal this (she) can be, how deep the wounds of painful interactions past go, how electric the web of shared trauma is within us -- she thrust the old request/threat. I told her No. That I was done with the joke/threat. That I am not interested in giving up my life to prison to free her from hers. That she’d have to deal with it herself if she wanted to die so badly. She doesn’t remember this conversation. 

She doesn’t remember what day it is, or what she ate earlier, or likely what happened the night before, unless prompted. She has come to a point of not remembering who is in front of her. I’m not clear when she is present or not, when she has vacated or has been pushed out of her own mind. Staring into her eyes trying not to trip the disrespect wire, the trauma wire, the fear wire, trying to see what is there like the doctor staring in at her optic nerve, I am trying to see if she is charming from a place of survival or presence, if she is there. 

There are no answers. There are no answers to when it started, or what will happen next, or if she has Alzheimer’s or another kind of dementia or an unknown condition, if a diagnosis of one or the other would open more doors in medicare or supportive systems. 

There is a fog of moments that blur together where decline was starting, or maybe it was a mood disorder, or perhaps she was righteously angry and I’m forcing a false narrative. Maybe I’m making too much of that one time, or that one tick, or that other thing. Even the doctors I trust and loved ones who have gone through dementia with their own family don’t have answers. I’ve deduced the answer is to accept the abyss, do what care you can, be grateful for the supports that keep her less isolated each day, for the ability to show up in person, look the doctors in the eye and be clear we will be doing more than just “waiting to see.”

Advocating for my mother’s health completed the role reversals we have played with for years. It is a stark reminder of the passing of time, the threats against our presence and offerings even if time is plenty ahead. 

Almost every interaction throws my nervous system. Family and friends and community and somatics and therapy and writing and boundaries and a myriad of other tools allow me to keep going back, to keep going into and forward with her. Still, the chaos that she is in and the storms that spin off it all shake me. They remind me of a woman I knew in New York who lost her dad and spiraled to a whole new realm. She warned me you’re never the same after losing a parent. 

Mine is not lost. We had lunch together and December, and she was even there, speaking from the truth I know her to be with tone and clarity that comforted me for years. And when she’s not mentally there, her hands still feel the same and her laugh hits the same notes. My parents are here. My father is irreplaceable as her daily support. But she is also past. 

The artifacts of my childhood are now in my house, on my kitchen shelves, or distributed to the world. She doesn’t need them anymore. The bowl she made tuna salad in for my whole life, I now make tuna salad in with love. The artifacts are evidence she is gone. Her precisely kept address book accidentally made its way to my house, making clear she floats disconnected now. 

After each exchange, I rebuild myself in the fresh context and a new reality framed by what I’ve witnessed, where it seems we are. I presume choices that led her here. Choices about faith and isolation and exercise and consumption and social security and politics and medicare and money and care that feel like paths I’m being challenged to take, to try and avoid the abyss. I cry much more now. Love is gnarly.  

Present tense is the focus now. It seems nothing—for me or for her—is ahead anymore. Time has come. It’s here, it’s huge and heavy and full of prongs. My mother’s mind skips like the CDs she is “sorting through” but really just moving around in piles that become meaningless with each passing minute and will all go back in the box because nothing linear happens for her anymore. 

While signing up for public announcements from New York City some 15 years ago, I clicked the box to receive “Missing Vulnerable Adult” messages. At least once a week or three times a month, an email comes through with the name, age, outfit description and sometimes a photo of a person who has wandered off. ‘Likely disoriented. May not know who they are. Probably won’t remember their address,’ and other notes to set the expectations for interactions. I followed along in empathy for their families, in a learning stance for the threat this would come to ours. 

We are never notified when they are found. are they found? Like the man who sang “Always and Forever” repeatedly as he walked the R train front to back, front to back for years, and suddenly was no longer there. Like the falafel guy whose cart was on the corner by my office until it wasn’t. I wonder at these souls of New York from time to time and hope they are safe, where they want to be, that they are ok. Each Missing Vulnerable Adult email is a person, a family, a prayer, a threat. They haunted me with glimpses of what might come our way, when I didn’t need the turtlenecks yet and my knees seemed indelible. 

Now, aging casts a shadow on my body while it cuts deeply into the body I came from. I have learned many times over, and am being sharply reminded now, that there is no person whose pain and fear we know like we know the pain and fear of our mother. The actual immersion within her, emersion from her cast a code that I am forty-two years on and just starting to decipher beyond the emotions and behavioral grooves it set me into.

My mother has always spent time afraid and in pain. She wouldn't say so much, or wouldn’t have, before. Before she couldn’t remember so much, before she stopped doing her hair and went from being incredibly organized and clean to throwing her clothes around in piles like a two year old throws their toys—with joy and purpose, to be sure, emptying all shelves and bins, drawers and hangers from their contents. In the bathroom eight toothbrushes. When we intervene, she demands we keep at least four. 

She’s lost some of her fears, which in a way, I celebrate. The woman who spent the decades screaming in disgust at the use of mayonnaise and butter, who ate clean before it was a thing with a name, who refused sauces and dressing but ordered double orders of cheese for her salads, who cut sugar out of her diet for years at a time, who was, in a word, “disciplined”. It seems now, though, that the fear of fat and the control exercised against it has flown free. That same woman now eats whatever is in front of her, often with glee, often celebrating the buttery taste or the use of mayonnaise. She prefers, though, frozen raisin bagels straight from the freezer with no toppings. She remains, “particular”. At times it seems she may be cresting toward that “point where it was all lovely and new”. 

We look across a foggy glass wall at each other. Through it, nameless deep complicated fears seem closer than ever. Her charm and coyness is at an all time high. This is lovely on a surface level and for those who are just meeting her. But in the mirror, I know my mother. All I see is survival. Enter, more grief. Grief for what was and what is. Fighting to be herself. Savagely inter-playing with what we can see, what is looming. The archetypal true mother deep in her is fighting to keep the Babadook and the baby separate.

The grief work is ongoing. Grieving my mother, time lost, clarity and dynamics now seemingly gone. I find myself unpacking boxes and wailing over artifacts of the past, releasing. Grief is of course personal, but also larger. It fills the space between what could be and is on personal, interpersonal, structural and systemic levels. I grieve the lack of accessible ease for the elderly in the U.S. Friends in Canada and Norway don’t have magic wands, but there are resources for all that we just don’t have here. I know many communities defy the lack of care in the U.S. by cultivating it within community and culture. I am not from these cultures. The pay or suffer dynamic of so many things here haunts freshly as we experience it for the elders and look ahead at how even what exists publicly for my parents is dwindling. I grieve what our special brand of capitalism takes from us all.

We are not alone. There are communities for caregivers and other resources. We have each other, and I don’t diminish that. If you have tips or tools or resources or communities or doctors or other things, I’m open to them. I’m learning. I’m grateful to everyone who has offered insight or grounded me in resource. Our family is navigating a thing so many of you and all of us have navigated in our own ways. I know we are not alone.

Aging, they say, is better than the alternative. It has brought me beautiful things, realities. Even those at the core of these challenges are offerings I accept. My mother-in-love (not married/partner’s mom) reminds me often that we can’t program for the future. That patience and love are useful in these times. The artifacts crossing my path seem to make, over and over again, a divine offer of choice. Choice of release or hold, expand or escape. I witness mourning the past and flailing at planning for the future in their service, or lack thereof. And there is present tense, juicily full of choice and possibility. It is all upon us.