Amo. Amas. Amat.

On senility, dementia, and miscellaneous matters.

Fels like I have a vacation this week; Isaiah and his class are going for a few nights to Washington DC to protest all the shite going on with this administration.

I kid! About the second part, anyway. They’re going to DC to visit some museums—Holocaust, among them—see a little bit about the machinery of our democracy, such as it is, on a ventilator right now. No phones allowed.

Maybe rooming with classmates will give him some ideas about sticking to a routine regarding personal hygiene, given my entreaties about such seem to have no impact at all. Instead, he exhales with excessive intentionality in frustration, strains out loud “Can you just stop!”

A command. Not a question.

But I find I can’t. It’s a scab I pick at. Brush your teeth. Pick up your socks. Change your drawers. Throw the dirty ones in the laundry. Throw your dirty tissues away. Don’t eat half the strawberry and then leave the stem in the container. Shoes in the closet. Backpack in your room. Plug in your Chromebook. Do your homework. Take a shower. Clear your dishes. Make your breakfast.

I nearly hate myself for all the nagging.

Have you watched Adolescence? It’s brutal. I thought I’d stop watching after the first episode, upsetting as it was. And the actor in it—so sweet seeming, reminded me of so many of the boys who populate my life. The line between calamity and uneventfulness so barely there, like the faintest sound of a faraway breeze. Terrifying.

The show is good—the acting is exceptional, the writing superb. I guess from a cinematic point of view it’s fabulous on account of each of the four episodes is a single take. It’s gutting. Tragic. Brilliant. Proceed with caution. (Also, bonus for fans of the young Prince Anne from the Crown. Real ones know.)

Anyway—of course being a mother to a boy in that demo—who spends some time online—it’s scary and worrisome. What if he gets caught in that Andrew Tate manosphere galaxy? What if he uses obscure emojis and comes to think of women as conquests and rejection as unacceptable?

Fuck. So many things to worry about these days.

Last week he got sick—fever of 102. Terrible congestion. One day he worried he was so congested he’d not be able to breeze. He stuck tissues up his nose like sponges, Walking around like some low-rent dragon breathing fire.

Then I got it. Friday night I was suddenly so chilled. In bed under blankets, shivering. Fever in the morning too. Terrible runny nose. A little achy. By midday fever was gone.

This year of illness goes on and on even while time is galloping by. Jessie’s birthday is this week. Then Rebecca, then Joann.

Ah, Joann. Whose cognition is falling faster than—than what? Faith in democracy? Or, simply, democracy? She had a good run. She’s still here. But I still on some level cannot absorb the extent of her decline. I get frustrated by it her disengagement and forgetfulness—not quite believing that she hasn’t simply thrown up her hands and decided to play demented. How can it be so?

Would it have been otherwise had she done more crosswords?

I probably mentioned this—forgive me if you’ve heard this one (har har)—some summers back when my parents were still quasi-independent, I drove them to New Hampshire to see their friend at her farm up there. Eminently capable, R is one of those industrious women from Boston whose face has a weathered, life-well-lived look. Like she’s faced the briny winds that would make others cower with a welcoming smile. She enlists her children and grands and guests to help harvest blueberries from the bushes scattered over her property, and then she freezes them to use to use over the winter, making jams and suchlike. She has a loom set up and weaves gorgeous blankets and kitchen towels. Her husband was a good friend of my father’s—a chemist but also talented in his own crafting, in his case woodworking. He died some years ago and is buried under a tree on their property. My father wanted to go up to see him and recite kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, and to say goodbye, knowing he’d likely be unable to make a journey of several hours ever again.

At some point on our visit, my parents’ friend pulled me aside and offered her conjecture that my mother was probably not really losing her memory or cognition as it seemed, but rather was somehow jealous of the attention my father’s own frailty had earned him and was therefore cosplaying at dementia—perhaps consciously, perhaps not—to get in on the action. It’s easy to judge the unwell when you are not among them—I’ve done it myself. That border is delusion.

We saw her today—Isaiah and I—and my dad, for a very brief visit before I had to get the kid to the pitch. We held hands in the community room—she and I—as the cruise director oversaw a maudlin round of trivia titled “Notorious” not for Hitchcock but for all the savage murders and violence the round invoked. Geez. She was happy to see us. Laughed. Asked Isaiah again when his bar mitzvah is. Told me again how she doesn’t like this assisted living facility. Told Isaiah he’s getting so tall.

When my grandfather—my dad’s dad—was elderly, he was not demented, but senile. Maybe not even that—I don’t know how you’d describe it diagnostically. I only really knew him at this stage, or I only remember him at this stage. He’d visit us and drill us in the Latin conjugation of Amo, Amas, Amat. He’d recount over and again how he came to this country as a boy—entering the fourth grade at 14 but wound up going to Columbia. (Did he really go there? Thinking on it now, I want to fact-check it.) I remember walking with him up and down Randlett Park hearing that story again and again. He played violin and there’s a photo of him playing with Rebecca and Jonathan when they were very small.

But isn’t memory funny? I wrote the above earlier today. Then, I went to New Jersey for a soccer game and Rebecca and Cliff met us for dinner. Rebecca had no memory of the conjugation. She said he’d had a stroke and things deteriorated from there. Maybe it was just the one time we walked down the street and I was made to learn basic Latin. Maybe only that afternoon did I ever hear about being the oldest by years in the class. I have so few memories of him. He didn’t live nearby. We didn’t visit him that much. Such is my perception. Whether it’s true, I don’t know.

Jacques Brel’s “Les Vieux” was originally written in French, then translated as part of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. The whole song is a gut-punch.

“Though you may live in town you live so far away//
When you've lived too long.”

That’s one of the lyrics, crystalizing so well and artfully this universal arc.

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