Consolation

Five years before my mother died, we had a violent argument—a thing that had never happened before.

- André Alexis

She was in her early eighties and still driving, and, because I am an inveterate back-seat driver, on one of our outings I suggested that she take a road she did not want to take. She resented it, and I could feel her anger growing.

When we got to her house, she came at me, all hundred and ten pounds of her, flailing, screaming, and cursing. It was like being assaulted by a very short scarecrow. I shouted back at her, pushed her away, and left the house, resolved never to see her again.

I did not speak to her for almost two years. A mistake, because, in the time it took for me to overcome my hurt feelings, dementia gradually took hold of her, so that the woman I made up with was no longer the one I had angered. The argument between us had been, I now think, a signal moment in her decline, a manifestation of the irrationality and confusion characteristic of the vascular dementia that erased her before she died.

At my mother’s funeral, three years after we’d made up and not long after she’d forgotten my name, I was overcome by emotion. Not the emotion I’d expected, however. As her coffin rested on a bier in the aisle between the banks of pews, and my older sister spoke of how much we had loved her, most of my thoughts were of my father, her ex-husband, who had died ten years before.

This was as disheartening as it was emotionally tangled. I missed my father, of course, but I felt the injustice of his ghostly presence, as if even here, at my mother’s funeral, his loss was as fresh as hers, the memory of him unavoidable.