Memories

My mother takes me downstairs to visit the neighbors. I am bewildered because we are on cordial terms with them but not particularly friendly and we’ve never been inside their home before.  An extended family lives there, including a newly married couple.  As we enter the house, we are ushered into the young wife’s bedroom, where she lies in bed surrounded by family members and guests.  Beside her bed is what looks like a chamber pot half full of blood with a fleshy blob floating in it.  After a while, the mother-in-law hands me the pot and asks me to show it around to everyone in the room, as though I am serving a platter of cookies.  Each woman peers in, shakes her head and murmurs something sympathetic.  I feel like I am being helpful, but I dislike the task.

Memories are odd things.  We can’t be sure that they are accurate.  I have a hard time making sense of this bizarre memory, but it recurs, triggered by nothing in particular.  Why was I there? Why was I asked to show the bloody fetus around?  Who needed proof that the wife had had a miscarriage? To my adult mind, it does not make any sense, but flashes from the past come unbidden and unexplained.

Memories come in snippets.  I was lying in bed with my mother for our summer afternoon siesta, but she kicked me off because I kept picking my nose and she was disgusted. I remember looking out of the window and seeing my neighbors in their swimming pool.  I felt envious and wanted to be in a pool too, on this hot summer day.  Later, when I started first grade, one of the boys swimming in that pool was a classmate.  Why this seems significant enough for me to remember, I don’t know. 

At this same house, we had a large balcony, and when I looked down into the dusty lot next to us, there was a mud hut with a corrugated tin roof, no more than one small room, that was inhabited by a family of five.  I used to have a recurring dream about falling from the balcony and wafting down to become a part of this poor household.  I felt a mixture of guilt for their poverty and gratitude that I wasn’t one of them.

Poverty was all around in the Iran of the 1950s.  Once, as a family, we were all in the foothills outside of Tehran, where we went on summer evenings to get away from the heat. Unusually, my father was with us.  We were all eating ice cream cones, when a beggar boy came, asking for a cone or money.  My father shooed him away, but the boy persisted, and finally stuck a finger in my father’s ice cream and brought it to his mouth.  Disgusted, my father dropped the cone to the ground.  The boy scuttled to it, picked it up and started to lick it.  I remember feeling that my father had been cruel.  Why not give the cone to the boy instead of dropping it and getting it gritty?  It was a truism that if you paid one beggar, you’d be swarmed with others wanting a share of the bounty, but still, it seemed unnecessarily hard hearted.

Poverty led to such desperation that parents often maimed their children to make for more effective begging, or people pretended to be crippled to gain sympathy.  There was a man hoisted on a makeshift plank with wheels scooting himself around with his hands, and he stopped to beg from us.  Thinking that he was only pretending to be crippled, my father told him he would give him money if he stood up.  The man gave my father an uncomprehending look, full of loathing, because he was clearly crippled.  My mother told my father to stop and paid the man.  Why remember these particular events, when this kind of poverty and much harsher behavior was all around?

When my mother reached the age of 70, we started to notice a decline in her.  She would forget to eat, forget words, add the wrong seasoning to food, and could not pass the written driving test.  Her memory was fading, except that the past was still vivid to her.  As her dementia progressed, the last thing she could remember was her name, and after that, only how to breathe, chew and swallow.  I was convinced that memory still lurked in the depth of her brain, but she could not convey anything to the outside world.  It seemed impossible for a mind to be completely blank.  We talked to her, played her favorite songs, and even tried to dance with her in her wheelchair.  There were glimmers at first, but eventually they blotted out.

If we have no memory, who are we?  Don’t memories make us? Beyond the fleeting memories that have no function, we need to remember names, faces, events. Our memory attaches us to our world.  Imagine if every event, place, face, minute were new.  We depend on our memory. Dementia is so pernicious in how it invalidates an entire life.  What goes on in the mind of someone with dementia?  We start accumulating memories from birth. It is how we learn to recognize faces, behaviors, words.  I often wonder what my grandchildren will remember from their current lives at the ages of four and two.  And how will those memories shape them.  How do any memories shape us and who are we without them?

At this stage in my life, I sometimes grope for a word that doesn’t come to mind when needed or forget names and faces.  Having seen how dementia ravaged my mother, I fret that I will meet the same fate and I do all the things that purport to maintain mental acuity—puzzles, exercise, healthy diet.  But I think my mother did many things right and still had strokes leading to dementia.  There is no escaping age and death, and we all want an easy passage.  To lose memory must feel very much like losing self. 

In a book I’m reading by Steven Petrow called Stupid Things I Won’t Do When I’m Old, he quotes Wendell Berry:  “Back at the beginning, as I see now, my life was all time and almost no memory.  And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time.”  Petrow talks about the memories his father recited over and over, yet he cherished the repetition rather than finding it annoying.  I want to share mine, not because there is anything profound about them, but to connect with others.  I think memories, like dreams, sometimes explain the inexplicable. They make us.