She perches on her couch, erect, contained. Her huge gnarled hands lie motionless in her lap, a pose drilled into her as a child. She always wears her pearls; the emerald ring that belonged to her mother hangs loosely on her index finger.  

“How’s Mother?”

“Grandma died thirty years ago.”

“Did she! She must have been very young.”

“She was ninety-three.”

A pause while she reflects. 

Beyond the window: sky and the frozen river and the white of winter. I sit on the other side of the narrow room, beyond her coffee table, on one of the pretty pink and grey chairs she brought with her to this strange city. 

“Then, how old am I?”

“You’re eighty-nine.”

“Oh, that’s a great age! Time to go!” 

She lost her memory but she never lost her wit.   

**

All my life I put as much space as I could between myself and both my parents, especially her—an ocean, a continent. But in 1989, after the collapse of my marriage, I moved to Ottawa. Dad was still alive back then. They lived in London, the town I couldn’t wait to leave, when I was growing up. And then, after his death, I encouraged her to move to Ottawa—and she did so, ostensibly to save me the seven hour trip—no talk of visits, no hint of obligation. I found a residence that suited her just across the park from where I lived, with a view of river and sky, and of course I visited her—I loved her, of course I loved her, that’s why I ran during all those past years. I loved her too much. And while she could never permit herself to say so, I knew that she loved me.  

And now the furies that marked my childhood—her sudden moods and bouts of terrifying rage—were gone. She reverted to a long-ago, ancestral identity, and became—surprisingly, unaccountably, gracefully—sweet. And as the anxieties and pressures of the past drained away, we were, in our different ways, happy. 

**

“I’m thirsty.”

“I brought you a bottle just yesterday.”

“Did you? Where is it then?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you squirreled it away somewhere. In the closet? 

We both get up and peer into the closet: shoes lined up below crowds of close-packed dresses and coats and suits, hats on the shelf above, a box or two of papers piled in one corner. Best not do a thorough search. The driver makes a run every Thursday. If there is a bottle concealed and forgotten, I know it won’t be the one that I so recently supplied,  

“A whole bottle? Where could it possibly be?” 

“Maybe you drank it.”

“Oh, no, Jerry. Not me.”

“It’s not in your closet.”

“Well, It’s not in me.” 

**

At first I assumed that a bottle of Rye a week would do. Then I doubled the supply, and still that wasn’t enough.  

“Think of it as palliative care,” my psychiatrist advised. 

So that’s what I did, letting my scruples fall away while she, in her turn, shed her memory. I took to carrying a spare bottle in the trunk of my car, just in case. Noxious stuff. I still detest the smell. 

** 

She liked playing Solitaire—or “Patience”, as she called it. There wasn’t a lot to talk about on our visits, so I would lay out the cards on her coffee table, and help her play. 

“Black on red, black on red. That’s right: there.”

“Doesn’t the Knave go on the Queen?”

“Only if he’s a different color.”

“A woman came into my room this morning. She came in and sat right there in your chair. She was sewing. She said no words. I didn’t know who she was. I didn’t like to move or speak, so I looked at her sideways and she sat and sewed. Sat and sewed.”

“Really?”

“She was dressed, oh I don’t know, like a gypsy, or an Italian mother, in black, with too much gold.”

“How long did she stay?”

“Long enough.”

“Do you think I should report it to the front desk?”

“And then she gathered up her sewing and went away. She never looked at me.”

She lays down a card.

“That’s right,” I say. “The black Jack on the red Queen. That’s right.” 

** 

I reported the gypsy seamstress to my shrink. He always sat in a rocking chair in one corner of the dim room, a block of wood beneath one sandalled foot. As I retailed the traumas of my life, he rolled the wood back and forth, over and over again. 

“Delusions, apparitions, it’s all normal,” he said. “Lucky they’re benign.” 

** 

Two weeks later she reported another. 

“I went shopping today.”

“Did you? Where did you go?”

“Oh, out. Holt Renfrew.” 

“How did you get there? You didn’t take a taxi? You should never take a taxi on your own. Did they let you take a taxi?”

“Oh no, dear. I wasn’t alone. A nice young man came with me, and returned, and he carried all our packages in past the desk and he came up with me in the elevator, and he laid them all out in my room. On the bed.”

“A young man?”

“He reminded me of you, dear, in your younger days. He was very good looking.”

“Mother, they shouldn’t have let you go! You spent money? What did you buy?”

“I still have my credit card.”

“What did you buy?”

“Oh, things. Just things. Clothes.”

“Where are they now?”

“Oh I don’t know. Perhaps they’re in the other room.”

“There is no other room.”

“No other room?”

“I’d better call the desk.” 

I get up and check the closet. Nothing. I return to the coffee table and we resume the game of solitaire. 

“I think you imagined it, Mum. Like the silent seamstress last week. Do you think?”

“Oh, no, dear. He was a very nice young man.”

“Mother, you’re cheating. You rearranged the cards. You can’t do that.” 

She looks at me sideways, with her crooked smile. 

“You can’t tell from where you’re sitting, dear. You’re at an angle.” 

**

Sunday lunch in my apartment. I always serve the same food: an omelet filled with tiny shrimp, a dry white wine, a pastry or ice cream. She eats it all, but pauses, captured by the chiselled rush of a Haydn piano sonata. She sweeps her arms in the air, trailing her fingers across an imaginary keyboard. 

“Wouldn’t you love to play that?” she asks.  

It’s full of sun today, and it’s spring. Clouds of yellow-green stretch away beyond my windows, the urban forest. “Look at the trees,” she exclaims. “Could they be swaying with the music?” 

In the car on the way home she suddenly asks, “Where am I going to be buried?”   

“You’re going to be cremated.  Isn’t that what you want?”

“Oh, good.”

“As for buried, which do you prefer, with the Bartrams or with your father and mother and Joyce?”

“Oh I don’t know.  It makes no difference to me.  Whatever’s convenient.”

“What made you ask?  Were you worried?”

“I just thought I’d left it unplanned.” 

A month later, in the car on the way to my place, she announces: “I think I’ve had a stroke.”  

I help her out of the car. Shaky but resolute, she walks into my building, shedding her shoes in the elevator. Once inside the apartment she suddenly sits on the floor. 

“I think I just blacked out.” 

But then she gets to her feet and begins walking back and forth, back and forth, but only on the rugs— “I won’t walk on that floor!” She eats her lunch as usual and listens attentively to music—piano, the instrument that she once played. She seems recovered. We return home to Rideau Place.  

“That was very nice, dear. Thank you.”  

She gets out of the car unaided, an erect, determined little figure in a cherry red coat and a cloche hat, raising her arms in a swooping gesture to trigger the glass doors. She does not look back. 

** 

Early in 2001 she broke her hip for the first time. She was both stoic and brave in the face of pain and the succession of unfamiliar people and processes and operations at the hospital. I was with her throughout most of the crisis, especially in the two or three days while she awaited surgery. She had the DTs in her drugged but alcohol-deprived state. They were benign. She kept telling me to “go and get the car” while she waited for my father.  

“Look at the Christmas lights, oh the lights, Jerry, aren’t they lovely, and the falling snow.”  

When she returned to Rideau Place she had a walker, and we moved her to the nursing floor – a restricted area. Alcohol was restricted as well: the nurse brought her a one-ounce dose of Rye each evening with her meds, nothing more.  

“Oh, all right!” she says. “But it will probably be a weak one!” She looks at me with a flash of the ancient accusation that was once so terrifying. 

“You never told me this was a teetotal place, Jerry. I would never have agreed to come to a teetotal place.”   

I notice that she has propped her check book against her ancient green dial telephone. 

“Is there money in the account so I can write a check?”  

“Yes.  What do you need?”  

“Oh I don’t know, but I needed something.  I don’t have any money.”  

‘‘You had sixty dollars last Sunday.  Where do you think it went?”  

“Did I?  Sixty dollars? Are you sure?”   

I go to the shelf and check Flight of the Mind, a volume in Leonard Woolf’s biography of Virginia. That’s where she keeps her money.  Nothing. I check an adjacent book.  

“I guess it’s gone.  Maybe you’ve hid it somewhere else.”  

“But where would I put it?”  

“In a drawer, maybe, or a pocket.”  

“I didn’t go shopping.  I don’t think I spent it.  Sixty dollars!”  

We repeat variations on this conversation.  I pocket her check book, the last sign of independence. She sits in the light by the window, absorbing the melancholy fact that she can’t get a drink.   

“I’d be better off dead,” she says.  

(More to come.)