Authors: Mira Bartók
“I’m sorry it’s just... Nattie, there’s something inside this.”
I pried open the little glass window below the clock face—inside was a drawing of two little rabbits, and below the rabbits was a drawing of a tiger. “There’s another picture hidden underneath!”
On the back of the picture was a list of birth dates for those born in the Chinese Year of the Tiger, which included my mother, and a detailed description of feline carnivores written in tiny script. Underneath the tiger my mother had placed a photo of my sister and me at ages five and six. I look stiff and unhappy; my sister smiles at the viewer and strikes a girlish pose. Behind the photo was yet another picture, cut from a 1960s Life magazine—a still life of red and green Christmas ornaments and holly. Was she trying to protect us? Did she believe a drawing could be a talisman against the forces of evil in the world?
Back at the hotel that night, as my sister and I got ready for bed, I wondered what lay ahead. The next day or the day after that, our mother would be moved to a nursing home for hospice care. How long would she hang on? Days? Weeks? My sister, who suffers from insomnia, performed her nocturnal rituals to calm her nerves. She took an aromatherapy bath, stretched, and read before inserting her earplugs. She put on her eye mask and turned off her lamp. We are both vigilant sleepers: she can’t fall asleep; I wake at the slightest sound.
“Good night,” she said.
“Night, Nattie. I’ll turn off the light in a little bit. Sleep well.”
I pulled a few of our mother’s journals from the pile. As the years passed, I saw how they became smaller and more portable. She daily mulled over her dreams, trying to interpret them and discern if they were real or not. She recorded exactly what she ate each day—mostly donuts, small cups of chili, cheap black coffee, and hamburgers from McDonald’s. She recorded what she spent, down to the penny. She spoke to someone in her head and struggled to understand what was an outside influence and what came from within. She wrote about how light fell on certain trees and described the delicate scents of flowers she saw in the park; she also wrote each flower’s common and Latin names, and drew a picture of it. One sentence stuck in
my head and I marked its place in the book. It sounded like something she had written to me in a letter once: Of my life at the piano, I shall say nothing for the time being.
I picked up her very last journal, the diary I had found when I looked through her backpack. In the pages I read prescient signs of her living with cancer, unaware. My mother was nauseous, dizzy, incontinent, and had blood in her stool. She doubled over with abdominal pain. She was bloated from a tumor but thought it was because she was overweight, so she tried to eat even less. She ate most meals in hospital cafeterias, the cheapest places, and rode the subway all over the city to get there, no matter how bad the weather. She recorded the weather daily, sometimes every hour. Near the end of her last diary, she wrote: Awoke today with stronger remembrance for loved ones.
I knew I should go to bed—it was well past midnight and we wanted to get an early start. but I couldn’t stop reading. She wrote:
This A.M. I’m in a hotel I can’t identify, I see so many gray closed doors. I cannot work with poor memory. To note something, a rat will find incentive to report. Caution: I’ve suffered as much as anyone in history. Note: Metamorphic rock means changes deep inside earth from heat and weight of other rocks.
I cannot work with poor memory either, I thought. How will I remember these passing days? Once again, I thought of Nicolaus Steno. My mother was dying and yet I turned to history for solace, to ancient geology. I thought of when Steno made his final public appearance as a scientist. These things I remember well, these odd little facts from science, history, and art. That year, in 1673, Steno was dedicating an anatomical theater and gave a speech on the importance of scientific research. He told the audience, “Beautiful is what we see. More beautiful is what we understand. Most beautiful is what we do not comprehend.”
Natalia was fast asleep in the bed next to mine, like when we were little and our names were Rachel and Myra. I read about how many nights my mother slept outside in the rain one November, hungry and cold, suffering from a bladder infection and a terrible cough. She had been sleeping in her old backyard while the owner was out of town. This was how she spent her birthday in the fall of 2001, two months after the tragedies of 9/11. I felt sick
to my stomach, knowing that my own mother spent so many nights outside in the rain. Why didn’t anyone help her, lead her to safety? I wanted to go back in time and be the person who took her in.
In my mother’s very last diary, from the fall of 2006, she returned to the history of the earth:
The outer shell... is divided into about thirty large and small pieces that fit together... called tectonic plates. They move on hot layers of rock within the mantle. Continents sit on top of the plates; plates are also under the ocean floor. As the plates move, the continents and oceans slowly change.
What hadn’t she studied these seventeen years? I searched her journals for my name, my sister’s, but she barely mentioned us at all, and even then only obliquely:
Long nightmare dream of losses. Bury the nightmare. Bury the losses. Bury the dream.
On Friday morning, Natalia and I sat side by side next to our mother’s bed. My sister graded her students’ English papers while I drew in my sketchbook. It felt like old times. When we were children, Natalia sat on the bed and wrote stories while I sat next to her and made pictures—rare moments of calm in a turbulent world. I still felt at home sitting only a few inches apart, her writing, me drawing, neither of us saying a word. Soon our mother would be moved to a nursing home. We were waiting to find out where she would be placed. She still thought she was going “home.”
There was a radio in the room now; one of the nurses had brought it in after I told her how my mother’s favorite classical music station calmed her down, and that she listened to it twenty-four hours a day. Christmas was in three days and every radio station was playing “Jingle Bells.”
“Turn that holiday crap off,” said my mother. “I can’t stand it anymore.”
“I’ll bring some CDs as soon as I can get a CD player,” I said.
“What’s a CD?”
“It’s a little record. I’ll get you some classical music. Don’t worry.”
“Well, hurry up. This crap is killing me.”
I only came home once during Christmastime, the first year after I left for college. My Russian Orthodox grandfather was still alive then and he was the only one in the family who celebrated Christmas. After he died in
1980, our mother always spent the holidays alone, or with our grandmother, the two of them eating corned beef sandwiches, watching sitcoms on TV. I always told myself that it didn’t matter anyway, that they were secular Jews who had no interest in any religious celebrations, Chanukah or otherwise. A neighbor from next door told me that my mother spent her last Thanksgiving in the family house locked up inside. When the neighbor peeked in the window, she saw piles of dishes in the sink and garbage on the floor. “I was afraid to go in but was worried your mother would starve to death.” The neighbor left food in the milk chute, then came back later to retrieve the empty plates.
As my mother slept, I tried to draw her face. It was my fourth attempt since I’d arrived on December 18. It had been many years since I had drawn her. When I was in high school, I stayed home on weekend nights sometimes so she wouldn’t be alone. We listened to the radio together or to records. She’d lie on the couch and smoke and I would sketch her. Now I drew her asleep and dying, head tilted back upon the pillow, her mouth open as if in song.
I took out the drawing the doctor had made of what my mother looked like inside. It reminded me of choreography, the staging of an intricate dance. It reminded me of my own inevitable demise. There is a Buddhist meditation I do sometimes. I imagine the layers of my body as I sit, mindful of my breath. I picture my flesh falling away, then the muscles and connective tissue, the organs, and finally the bones. I do this once in a while to remind myself of where I’m going. A rather macabre way to comfort myself, I suppose. Sometimes I take it a step further, into deep time—I imagine my bones beneath the earth, crumbling to gypsum, forming into chalk held by a child writing words upon a blackboard. I imagine the words erased by another child’s hand, and still another, breathing in chalk dust, exhaling into air.
An aide came into the room to remove my mother’s tray. She had barely touched her eggs. Little by little, we cease to consume, take in food, water, air. My sister glanced up, then jotted something down. What would she remember? What would I? Our brains are built for selective attention—we focus on some things while ignoring a vast array of other stimuli around
us. It is those select things that we recall, not the rest. I couldn’t take notes about what was going on around me like Natalia. Just the act of taking visual and auditory information in, processing it, then writing it down, is an act of multitasking, something I don’t do well anymore. I was afraid I would miss something, something so small you can’t see or sense if you are putting words to the page—the subtle twitch of a finger, a swift sideways glance, a snippet of song down the hall.
And yet, what does it matter anyway? Memory, if it is anything at all, is unreliable. Even birds, with their minute brains, have better memories than we do. Nuthatches and black-capped chickadees remember precisely where they stored food in the wild. Honeybees have “flower memory” and remember exactly where they already have been to pollinate a flower. They can even recall the colors and scents of their food sources, and the times of day when their food is at its best. We humans are different—our brains are built not to fix memories in stone but rather to transform them. Our recollections change in their retelling.
Still, I wondered if I should try to take notes. Without some kind of written record, would I remember these quiet, fleeting days? Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel says we are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember. Who am I, then, if my memory is impaired? And how will I remember my mother after she is gone?
Some of my old memories feel trapped in amber in my brain, lucid and burning, while others are like the wing beat of a hummingbird, an intangible, ephemeral blur. But neuroscientists say that is how memory works—it is complex and mercurial, a subterranean world that changes each time we drag something up from below. Every sensation, thought, or event we recall physically changes the neuroconnections in our brain. And for someone who suffers from brain trauma, synapses get crossed, forcing their dendritic branches to wander aimlessly down the wrong road.
And yet, I can still walk into a museum and name almost everything on the wall. I can recall pictures I drew, even ones I made as a child. I remember artifacts from museums, fossils, masks, and bones. The part of my brain that stores art and all the things I loved to look at and draw is for the most part intact. Perhaps the visual part of my brain can help retrieve the events that
are lost. If neuroscientific research suggests that the core meaning of a memory remains, even if its details have been lost or distorted, then if I find the right pictures, the pictures could lead me to the core.
In my mother’s room, while she slept and Natalia wrote, I took out one of my mother’s diaries, one from 1992. That year I had gone to Israel and brought back a bag of stones. One contained an ammonite, a fossilized nautilus shell. When I got home I poured water on it to see what it might have looked like centuries ago in the sea. I wondered how long it had been hidden in the earth, a rock shifting against rocks, rising up over time from primordial sediment. Isn’t that how memory works too? We look at something—a picture, a stone, a bird—and a memory surfaces, then that memory carries us to another, and another. Memory isn’t just mutable, it is associative. Thomas Aquinas once said, “One arrives at the color white through milk, to air from the color white, to dampness from air and on to Autumn.” How, then, would I arrive back at my own past?
“Myra?” my mother said, her eyes half shut. “Are you still here?”
I hid her journal inside the book in my lap. “I’m still here.”
“Where’s your sister?”
“She’s here too. She just stepped out for a second but she’ll be right back.”
“You won’t run away?”
“No,” I said. “I won’t run away.”
“Myra?”
“Yes?”
“Would you do something for your old lady?”
“Anything.”
“Brush your hair. It’s really a mess.”
“I’ll do it right now.”
“Good. Because a girl has to put her best foot forward whenever she can.”
We left the hospital late that night. Most of the day had been quiet, just the sound of our mother’s slow breathing and the radio purring in the background. My sister got ready for bed while I pulled out one of the photo albums we’d brought back from U-Haul, our baby book. “You coming?” she
asked. She switched off her light and turned her masked face to the wall. “Soon,” I said. “Good night.”
I held the photo album up to my nose. It smelled like my mother used to smell—cigarettes and Tabu, her favorite perfume—our sense of smell, the strongest memory trigger of all, the only sense that travels directly to the limbic system in our brain. I thought of my mother’s small white face in the hospital bed, her delicate, cold hands. Then another picture of her rose up in my mind, her hands hovering over mine at the piano—a younger Norma; my mother in the bloom of life, a dark-eyed beauty in a red silk dress, her face unreadable, listening to something no one else can hear.
I took out my mother’s last diary. Her final entry was a random list:
Hyssop: plant used in bunches for purification rites by ancient Hebrews. Po River: Runs through Italy into Adriatic. Avert: to turn away or aside. Note: My white cane is missing. I dropped my sunglasses on the bus
. Then farther down, these words:
Chica—drink of Peru. Hecuba—wife of Priam. Baroque Palace—? What palace?
What did her last entry mean? A few pages back were little sketches she had made: a leaf, her hand, a shoe.