Memory may be mutable, but insights last a lifetime

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/11/2022 (1412 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When I was a just-new 60-something, I gave a presentation at a retirement community complex located in Winnipeg’s West End. It was based on a novel I had written that had found some favour: two women in their 70s face losses: one suffering a broken hip from a fall; one devoted to her ailing lover and suffering the clearer sense that the life they have built running a dress shop can no longer be maintained.

When I first enter, I note a games room, dining and sitting rooms, a small library. With a just-new-60 naiveté, I feel myself a long way off from such living quarters. I primarily think only of the endings that are taking place in this late-life community, wondering how community members are to be reallocated space as independence is compromised, and panelling moves them from independent to assisted to enhanced levels of care.

I begin the presentation by singing the opening of Leonard Cohen’s Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye. I can’t sing well — I drift from one melody to the next such that Silent Night gives in to Somewhere Over The Rainbow without my awareness of the mutation — a “gift” my children endlessly perform for their amusement in singalongs they laughingly conduct. But, with an audience of the elderly before me, guitar in hand, I somehow find a way to sing that pleases. Imagine that, I think to myself. Not too shoddy.

There are about 15 people in the room, mostly women. Some rest in wheelchairs and walkers, some are with attendants, a few more are unaided. I had been told there might be 30 people or so. While I am singing, more enter and take their places.

Startled by the rendition I have delivered, even a little buoyed, I begin my “lecture,” weaving the novel’s story with others of losses I’ve lived: the death of my parents, aunts and uncles; the decades-long, chronic, incurable kidney disease my husband and I face together; the early deaths of childhood friends, deaths met by accident or by disease, before the reach of maturity or middle age.

I am looking out at the audience, looking down at the script that frames the planned readings from the novel, making way through the sections selected and rehearsed, but the text on the page ripens in the presence of this audience.

This often happens during the reading of creative work. The practiced reading changes, curated by the temperature in the room, the quality of the air, the space between the lectern and those seated, the presence of their attentiveness, their gaze. What had been a room full of old people blended together gives way. Each person becomes more of an individual secured in specificity. Relationships between us develop.

One particular women’s mesmerizing presence makes it increasingly difficult for me to focus on my script. I feel her steady beam, the pull of her awareness as I describe the novel’s hospital’s routine — benign but inept interventions and dreary procedures that torment the novel’s protagonists. Her aliveness awakens me more fully to the fact that those listening have lived with profound losses during the time of letting go late life requires. Their knowing comes through in the words some bring to me as they are leaving. Softly spoken: “I remember…”; “I know…”; “I can tell you…”

I listen. Transfixed. My throat is sore, the way a throat can be sore when you want to cry but don’t think you should. Bittersweet moments pass between us. Each exchange teaches. Memory. Story. They let me bring mine into the sphere of their influence. They let me lay it down beside their own.

The woman whose penetrative beam I felt with such force stands in front of me. She is beside a man in a wheelchair who smiles. He doesn’t speak and the woman tells me that he woke up while I was talking. Often he does not, she says, but today he found something of interest to hold his attention. She tells me to remember that.

She also tells me she was a nurse during the war and worked in a health-care centre very much like the one I am describing in the novel. She went to medical school, wanting to do the best she could for patients suffering the distress a medical system’s rules and regulations often impose.

Now she is in this retirement community. She has taken up painting. She loves the community and the painting. This is a very special place she tells me. I should remember that too, even though I am seeing only in from the outside. She adds that she has developed a tremor of late such that painting on canvas has become more difficult. So, she’s stopped, put away her brushes.

I listen carefully. I sense every word matters. She smiles. “I painted you today.” I look at her, bewildered. “Yes, while you were talking, I painted you. I painted…in here.” She points to her head. “I still paint all the time. I don’t need brushes anymore.”

In my usual way, I immediately want to know more. I want to see the paintings she once created, talk to her all afternoon, become her best friend. I ask if I might call, if she has an email address.

She smiles again. “I don’t use email.” She begins walking away, then turns back and adds, “I don’t think you need to see my paintings.” She has anticipated the rush of my enthusiasm. She looks at me steadily, waits.

My wanting to know more is silenced. I recognize, with her help, that what I would want from her has already been given.

She offers me the chance to know it; shows me how creative gifts are not laid down though brushes might be laid by. She shows me creativity ongoing, outwitting a failing body, alive in a mind and heart immutable, well able to create new forms of expression. She shows me her way to say goodbye to one dimension and simultaneously hello to another.

Ten years later and counting, I don’t forget her teaching. So often, the image I have painted of her in my own mind comes back to me. As do her words. I guess that’s what immutability means, for while my memory is changeable, my connection to her insight is not.

There are moments that have this kind of immanence and incandescence. I remember a second. My husband in the ICU in a bed, earmarked for palliative care, waiting to be transferred to a more appropriate space where he might continue dying. He has to be moved because ICU beds are at a premium, need to be taken by those with a chance of recovery. We wait, our little Winnipeg family, in this liminal space. We have never waited in such spaces before.

Our eldest son and his partner arrive from Kingston in the nick of time, their expressions haunted by the change to palliative they had not expected. We had all hoped against hope the second kidney transplant would not fail.

This son comes close to his father, who opens his eyes. This father has not opened his eyes for hours. Our son gently brushes the top of his head with his fingers. I tell my husband, his father, that they have just got off the plane. Suddenly awake, he asks, “Did you use my Air Miles?” That is the last thing he will say. He sinks further into the embrace of sedation.

I hold to this exchange: it embodies the chrysalis of this man’s care as father. Always he tried to give everything he had to his children. A practical man, bringing his tools and know-how to every broken or breaking-down thing his children might set inside their to-do lists, believing always anything could be mended, and thus the path for these children eased.

After his death, when we are together, a family feeling diminished by his absence, this story comes to life. Its visual character is shared, details are recalled, the time of day noted, the entrance of the palliative care nurse, the quality of the fading light that brings evening and ending.

Most significantly, at the centre of this memory, a portrait of a father’s eyes wide, open to what he might yet give. Immutability. In the midst of heart-wrenching goodbye, a warming hello to the enduring and evolving dimensions a last picture might yet paint.

debbeschnitzer@mts.net