Early this year, I ran across a call for submissions to a poetry anthology about grief. The call made a point of indicating that they were looking for grief born of various life experiences. I had been thinking about my mother and the dementia she endured at the end of her life, so the call for poems gave me an opportunity to give expression to what I had been feeling.
In addition to the poem(s), the call also requested a short essay from the writers about the poem. They did not specify any exact content of the essay, it could be about the prosody of the poem, or the story behind the writing, or anything else the writer felt connected to the poem. So, I am posting both the essay (first) and then the poem.
Essay
As my mother went into her final decline at age 90, her memories were peeling away backwards through her life. Memory lapses had been occurring over her last few years; short term memory breaking so that she would forget why a particular shopping errand was being run. Then, slowly, her familiarity with her own children and grandchildren grew confused and then lost.
In her last month, it was obvious that only her oldest memories remained clear. My brother told me of visiting our mother in the hospice. She did not recognize him. She was anxious, distressed to be in a place she did not know, among faces she did not recognize. She asked plaintively, “Where’s Morrison?”
Morrison was her older brother, her only sibling. They were the children of a Presbyterian pastor from Nova Scotia who was serving in Trinidad. When she reached the age of 11, she was sent to boarding school in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was a long way away from the Caribbean island she had known.
In my brother’s recounting I could almost hear the plaintive question of the 11-year-old girl about to board a ship heading to a far-away place. “Where is Morrison?” The one sure thing in her discomforting, changing world.
As she was declining at age 90, her brother had been gone several decades. But all the long years of memory had been peeled away like onion layers, leaving only the lonely core of a small girl about to set out on a long journey, alone.
In thinking about this personal situation, I felt there was a double thread of grief spun from it. One thread was that of the unspeakable grief my mother must have felt, of losing a world that made sense to her. The other thread was the grief I and my siblings felt is watching her sink into her past where we could no longer connect with her through any memory. She looked for comfort in that memories remained to her, but none of them could be physically present to her as she faced her shrinking unknowable world.
When it came to writing the poem, I borrowed some aspects of prosody from Irish poetry, although I wrote in iambic pentameter. One aspect of Irish poetry is the repetition of the first (major) word of the poem in the last word of the poem. I used the imagery of peeling an onion because the fragility of dementia reminded me of the fragile outer layers of the onion, as well as the pungent, stinging juices of the bulb. Our memories are both flavorful and fragile, and their substance can bring tears.
(Poem) “Dementia”
The tears produced by peeling back the skin
Bring bitter sting stretched out thin every day
Each loss leaves wet frustration to provoke
A sense that each woke morn brought less and less
The pungent juice that jolts each favored dish
Becomes a weak wish crying to know why
A thing known yesterday has disappeared
Leaving weird thoughts of moldy memories
As each thin slice of memory is shed
And recent recollections are bled dry
Each laugh and love today becomes a loss
An onion skin fate will toss out in sleep
And then the long ago child light at heart
Stands weeping at the dark dart piercing sharp
The sense of unsought and unknown release
Of peace approaching treading through fresh tears
