MEMORY (upper and lower case)

I travel a lot.  I have for most of my adult life.  Home (childhood home) has become mixed into a multitude of places where I have lived long enough to put down roots of some kind.  Home (childhood home) has become a place that I visit every couple of years to spend some time with family.  Family, with the passing of my parents and oldest sister, has shrank (if it is “shrunk” then Mr. Googles steered me wrong) to one younger and two older sisters, along with a healthy smattering of nieces and nephews, in-laws and cousins once or twice removed.  Many live in or near where we/they grew up.  My son, born and raised in Nicaragua, emigrated to the U.S. a few years back, and now lives a distance away, but close enough that I can combine visits.

Growing up with four sisters was, at times, challenging.  Don’t ask them, because they will say that I lived like the king of the castle while they toiled and troubled over household chores and picking up after their pain-in-the-*ss brother.  But having three older sisters – spanning a difference from my age by 13, 11 and 4 years, meant that I often had to put up with more than one female “authority” figure in the house – a terrible thing for a young, rebellious, overly-active boy.  Of course, the larger difference in age meant that I had less time with the two oldest, as they married and moved on to their own lives while I was still young enough to enjoy some relative freedom.  My younger sister, with only one year of age difference, was simply the one that I could fight with and torture the most. 

My sister Elizabeth (never other than Liz), just 4 years older than me was around the most as I entered into pubescence and early teenagery.  She was often the guide stick as to what I could and could not get away with.  Rebellious in a different way than that occasioned by my entry into teenage angst in the tumultuous years of the late sixties, early seventies, she had her fair share of misadventures and challenges during her life.  I won´t go into any of these, as we all have our own demons and are free to acknowledge or not what they meant to each of us.

What prompts this reflection is a recent visit.  Liz has suffered from what was originally diagnosed as “Early Alzheimers” – striking her at an unfairly early age.  Over the years, the clinical definition has gone from this to “Dementia” and back again.  From bouts of forgetfulness (Where are we going?  What just happened? Where did I leave my Dr. Pepper?), she has progressed steadily to remembering very little about her past life and being unable to recognize those around and close to her.  From living independently after the death of her last husband, she now requires almost constant supervision and help.  My sister Rose has been there for her for a number of years now, managing her financial and medical needs, helping to get her around and maintain a semblance of normal life with the help of Liz’s oldest daughter/niece (the dual designation is another story).  Liz is now living with her second oldest daughter.

When I visited her two weeks ago, Liz was sitting at the kitchen counter, drinking one of her accustomed and addictive Dr. Pepper sodas.  A virtual smokestack for years, she is not smoking anymore – apparently because she forgot that she ever did.  Nobody is reminding her.  I asked her if she knew who I was.  No.  “You don´t remember your brother, Bill?” “You don´t remember all the trouble you got me into when we were kids??”  Nope.  I joked with her.  I made her laugh.  I tried a couple of specific childhood memories but there was no click.  She knows that she isn´t remembering.  She appears to know that she should. She is aware that this isn’t right.  She will start to say something and fade out in a forgetful haze.  She had had a bad morning, being cross and argumentative about things – lashing out at those around her, but for now this relatively charming and funny guy (my words) that popped into her living room from somewhere seems to have taken her to a different place, and the frustrations of not remembering or understanding things subsided for a bit.  I wish I could be around to do that a bit more.