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I treasure the beneficent luxury of having my mother close

Always, never never, yesterday, about then, today, tomorrow, the labels we designed to encourage wayfinding on this website we maintained for years, a joined force with my sister as a kindred spirit in unknown territory, profusely outlining our journey through my mothers forgetting, were actually quite straightforward conformations of how we all use time as an anchor, a common-ground always referred to when trying to depict experiences and emotions, life itself essentially, for it’s unidentifiable to us if not embedded in time.

Cling to it spasmodically however and you’ll fail to behold the gems along the way, a savvy perspicuity deployed by storytellers of all sorts, using flashbacks and dreams copiously to add value and transcendence to hold their audiences attention, bound to drift off otherwise because a chronological timeline all but too soon becomes boring and predictable.

In remembering the trials and tribulations of my mothers disease, I render her memory loss less of a beacon than this pinching concept of time becoming obsolete because she could no longer cling to it, thus allowing me to be her father, brother and son, all at once, upgrading the importance of the title ‘familiar’ into ‘what matters most’.

When inquiring about my mother’s condition, people routinely asked me if she’d still recognized me, to witch I usually replied that I still recognized my mother in her, a gentle way to distract from their dismay about things to come or already there, their manifest anxiety of ‘what if she doesn’t anymore’, as if that would somehow herald an inevitable drama.

A part of my mother’s foregoing entourage, people who knew and loved her, was so dominated by this fear of being affected by her fate of timelessness, that they postponed a visit indefinitely. I obviously also recall the awkwardness and tragic moments, but I treasure the beneficent luxury of having my mother close, way past her ability to recognize me in any factual timeline, even after she died in our arms.

The rosemary next to our front door, just now starting to bloom as if there’s no sense of time for prosperity, traditionally represents remembrance, so I call it our Never Never Plant.


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