I spend less time with Mom than her nurses,
Understanding and adjusting her care,
to delay old age’s many curses
which pluck our flesh and catch us unaware.
She’s thirty years ahead on Time’s long bow,
but her arrow’s curved down toward the grave.
There, also, my trajectory must go —
not early, nor late, cowardly nor brace,
but just as gravity’s graceful arches
lift the world’s weight on buttresses of life.
Fragile the house’s front and back porches,
and feeble those rooms where illness and strife
or trauma and trouble weakened the walls
or Death casts shadows in hospital halls.
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.
