Together, Abiding The Unchangeable

Our conversation begins as it always does. I come for a visit and find her sitting in her chair, looking out the window. I pick up the small microphone that dangles from the newest of her hearing aids and begin the ritual.

“How are you Auntie?” I ask, as always.

“Oh, I’m a hundred percent,” she answers, as always. There is a pause while we share the echo of the ironic humor she has carried with her through life.

She says, as always, “Don’t be in a rush to be 97.” And I say, as always, “Well, all right, Auntie. I was going to rush, but I won’t.”

I sit down on the edge of the bed and take photographs out of my pocketbook. I show them to her one by one, a rogues’ gallery of the nieces and nephews that she calls, happily, her “uglies.” She smiles at each picture as if this were the first time she’d seen it, though in fact I have brought this stack to her many times before.

Then she says in her precise diction, “Tell me what is going on in your world?” I lean into the microphone as if it were a radio interview and tell my audience-of-one some stories. Where we’ve been. Where we’re going. What we’re doing. Stories that I have told her before.

Sometimes she will tell me, if I ask, tales I have heard before. Tales about a childhood in England, school in America, the longing for college, about her parents, her husband, a whole world that is now in the past.

On a good day she says, again, “I am just waiting to leave this planet. I say that philosophically, not sadly.” On a bad day she asks, again, “You cannot help me exit, can you?”

We became family, Auntie and I, when she was much younger, which is to say in her 80s. I married the nephew who is more than a nephew to her - her prize, her lifeline - and began learning.

One day coming back from a family gathering, displaying my careful new in-law manners, I said how pleasant lunch had been. She looked up and said - not unkindly, not sharply, but directly - “I thought it was boring.” Laughing, I said to myself, “No shucking, Auntie. We will be friends.”

Now, we’re losing her. Or rather, she is disappearing.

What she calls in her own erudite language “the diminution of my faculties” has continued in countless increments. Ears, eyes, legs. Hearing, sight, mobility. The fierce independence that characterized her life, the long walks, the daily bus trip to Burger King until she was 94. Gone, one by one, like chits she must turn in before being allowed through the door.

Her daily newspaper has given way to a large type weekly. The names of relatives have dropped off her screen, like atrophied limbs. And then there is the rest of her. The memory. She lives in a narrowing time frame, a day that is repeated over again without a sense of yesterday or maybe this morning.

My husband, who shares her honesty and her humor, calls her life “Groundhog Day” after the movie about a man destined to endlessly repeat one day. Yet we are still her students. In her presence, we learn about time, about age, about letting things be what they are.

My husband will visit Auntie tomorrow though she probably will not remember, the next day, that he was there. He doesn’t go to chalk up a credit, just to be there.

I bring the photographs this Sunday, though she won’t remember them the next. I am no longer afraid that this ritual mocks her memory loss. I judge my act by her smile.

I know now that the only way to be with Auntie is on her terms, in her time zone, in what the Zen philosophers call the now. So, for a while, at her side, I am keenly aware that life is always lived in the moments. Moment by moment.

In The New Yorker, biographer Edmund Morris wrote recently about visiting Ronald Reagan, about trying to make small talk with a man hollowed out by the crude, cruel tool of Alzheimer’s. “About six months ago, he stopped recognizing me,” notes Morris.”Now I no longer recognize him.”

I hope this won’t happen with Auntie or to Auntie, but it may. The long ending, with its certain destination and its uncertain timetable, is a melancholy affair. We begin to miss the people they once were while they are still, not wholly, here.

But sitting beside Auntie today, a companion to her leave-taking, I no longer see it as tragic or unfair. It simply is.