Hello friends,
my friend, poetic ally, and colleague, Tony Brown, challenged his followers to write a poem on the them of “I don’t remember…”
I don’t remember when my mother first
flailed for a word, or got lost on a trip.
Dementia wasn’t a thunder burst,
not like a rain that soaked her to the slip
and left her naked and shivering wet.
She’d greet friends as strangers, then speak their names,
laugh and say it was a joke. We’d forget
she forgot, as her brain kept playing games.
She’d ask me to read menus at dinner,
at least at the start — then she’d let me choose
and joyfully ate; I’d picked a winner.
I don’t know when she started to refuse
to call me her son; I chose to forget
When mom and this stranger named “Andrew” met.
I don’t tend to write a lot of very personal poetry. I think this definitely qualifies. I think it was John Keith, who said that the good poem wounds its hearer in a way that they’re never quite whole again. I definitely feel that writing this has wounded me.
In a good way.
Maybe.
About This Series:
- Poem: Mom’s Dementia V
- Poem: Mom’s Dementia IV
- Poem: Mom’s Dementia III
- Poem: Mom’s Dementia II
- Poem: Mom’s Dementia I
My mother has been sinking into dementia (probably related to a concussion in 2013 or 2014, but maybe originating from something else) for about ten years now. I’ve only just recently started writing about it; in retrospect I wish I’d been doing so all along.
You can find my other poems about my mother’s dementia here.
