Thelma Zirkelbach, who won an honorable mention in a previous Writing It Real personal essay contest, has a talent for evoking those she is close to. In this winning essay, she writes about her mother as she is today and as she was in the past, calling up a lasting evocation. More of my thoughts about the essay’s workings appear at the end.

Mother’s Day
by Thelma ZirkelbachI lost my mother eight years ago.

The woman who lives in a nursing home a few miles from my house bears little resemblance to the mother I knew. Her once quick mind is vacant. Her intelligence, her wit, her memories have all vanished, destroyed by the scourge of dementia.

We always refer to her condition as dementia. We don’t call it Alzheimer’s because no doctor has made a definitive diagnosis. No one has used the dreaded A-word. But the name we give it doesn’t matter. The woman who lives in room 338 in the nursing home is a shadow of her former self. Her heart pumps, she breathes in and out, she moves and talks. Trapped in a healthy body, she’s alive but not alive. She inhabits a world where every day is strange and unfamiliar, where every sunset erases the past completely. On her lucid days, which occur less and less often, she talks about aging. “Being old is hell,” she says.

On a warm spring afternoon I coaxed her into going out for ride. As we drove, she suddenly asked, “Do you ever think about getting old?”

I never used to, but now I do. “All the time.”

“Do you? I never did,” she murmured. “I used to look at my mother. She had age spots on her arms, and I’d think, ‘I’ll never be like that,’ but here I am.” She paused for a moment, then gave me a smug look and patted the seat on the passenger side. “Twenty-five years and you’ll be sitting here.” She is probably right.

Most of the time she has little awareness of herself or her situation. Although her room is filled with pictures of her family, she doesn’t recognize us. On a recent holiday when she came to dinner at my home, she sailed, “I don’t know who you people are. I don’t know why I’m here.”

“Did I have a husband?” she asked one day. When I nodded, she said, “What was his name?”

“Alex.”

She frowned. “Where’s my daughter? Does she know I’m here?”

 “I’m your daughter. I’m Thelma.”

We repeat this exchange each time I visit her, and every time I feel that strange pang, knowing I’m no longer part of my mother’s memory bank. For Mother’s Day I wonder what to give her. She has no interest in clothes, jewelry, cosmetics. If I could choose the one thing that would really matter, I’d give her back her memories. I can’t give her a future, but if I could, I’d give her the past.

With my gift she could recall growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, skipping rope in front of her house with her best friend, Lena, earning praise from her teacher for her school essays–the teacher said she could become another Emma Lazarus. She could remember herself as a young woman, riding the streetcar to work with her sister Rose, meeting a shy, soft-spoken man from Texas and falling in love. She could relive marriage and babies and watching her daughters grow. During those years there were family trips, sultry summer afternoons at Barton Springs, birthday parties to plan.

And other memories: the smell she baked into our big kitchen, the whir of the fan on summer afternoons when air conditioning was undreamed of, the sound of radio programs–Jack Benny, “One Man’s Family,” Walter Winchell, “Fibber McGee and Molly.”

Mother was patience personified, but she stored up every slight, every hurt, and reprised them whenever anyone inflicted a new one, however unintentionally. Ironic now that she can’t remember anything.

She loved to shop and would spend afternoons browsing the downtown stores, going back and forth on the bus because she never learned to drive. Her favorite purchases were shoes. They were her obsession, her one indulgence.

Her feet were tiny, beautiful. When she was a young girl in Omaha, a shoe manufacturer asked her to model his line. Her mother said no. Modeling, in my grandmother’s opinion, was only one step up from prostitution.

Mother bought sample-size shoes-4B. She gave us her old shoes to use in our constant games of dress-up. My best friend still remembers her disappointment when she outgrew Mother’s shoes.

Shoes and her vanity over them were Mother’s downfall. Though she was wobbly, though the doctor said she shouldn’t wear hells anymore, she wouldn’t listen. She fell, going up the porch steps, and the earpiece of her glasses pierced her good eye. I prayed she’d die in surgery that night. I couldn’t stand the thought of her living nearly blind. But she survived.

She wears ugly shoes now. She hates them. Old-lady shoes, she calls them. The remains of her youth were bound up in her shoes, and now they’re both gone.

Several months after she moved to the nursing home, my sister and I made a trip to Austin to clean out her house. An arctic cold front hit just as we arrived, and we spent the next three days wrapped in an icy cocoon, re-living our past and our parents’ as we rediscovered relics of our former lives.

We opened Mother’s closet, and there were her shoes: dainty sandals, elegant pumps, patent-leather sling-backs, some of them hardly worn. Memories of my mother’s life, lined up two by two on the closet floor.

On Mother’s Day, along with all those memories, I’d give her one more pair of high-heeled shoes. I’d wave a magic wand and watch her slip them on and walk down the hall one last time with her old, graceful step.

And I’d have one more chance to see the woman who used to be my mother.

 ****

How do we tell of our heartbreaks and still honor life and its fullness? Thelma Zirkelbach manages it this way: She announces sadness with a direct, one-sentence paragraph. She uses her second paragraph to fill us in on her loss–her mother, the woman who was once vibrant, has dementia.

She dedicates her third paragraph to describing the world her mother seems now to inhabit. Then she takes a turn to one of her mother’s lucid days. At the heart of this day is the irony of the mother’s message for her daughter, a woman we will learn she doesn’t actually recognize. “Do you ever think about getting old?” Thelma’s mother asks. Thelma answers, “Yes, all the time.” How different it is for Thelma, who is watching her own mother’s decline into dementia and fearing her own future, than it was for her mother who reports merely looking at her mother’s age spots and blithely proclaiming she’d never have them.

After more description of her mother’s dementia, Thelma wonders about a Mother’s Day gift. Of course, there is nothing appropriate to give a mother who doesn’t remember she is a mother. The impossibility of a gift of memories that could restore not only her sense of the self she was but also her daughter’s sense of having her mother creates heartbreak on the page: the speaker states her desire to remember her mother despite the fact that her mother doesn’t remember either herself or her daughter.

The memories are small, riding a streetcar, baking in a kitchen under the whir of a fan, listening to now vintage radio programs. They are large–meeting the man who would become her husband, having children. They are about personality traits that make her imperfect and human–a personality that stored slights. They are about shopping and having many pairs of shoes. They are about horrible accidents like piercing her eye in a fall.

The speaker reveals her own surprising memory of not thinking she could stand the sadness of seeing her mother live and go blind. And then she thinks of finding her mother’s elegant shoes while she and her sister cleaned out their mother’s house when she had to go to a nursing home after the surgery. That’s when we get the perfect memory–her mother as she was to the young girl–entirely herself, in high-heeled shoes, walking elegantly down the hall. A gift to the mother? I think, the memory is a gift to the speaker, the daughter conjuring love for her mother, always.