Extra Credit

“I wish we could start it all over again, it doesn’t go on forever.” She said softly to my mother. She seemed hesitant and completely lucid of her thoughts. I sat there looking around at all of her friends, filling what was now her home. I looked at her, she had a puzzled face. She turned to me, “I don’t really have any idea of what is going on.” It seemed strange and unimaginable to me to be with people who had made such an impact on my life and to have the slightest idea of who they were. I wondered what was going through her head, through her spirit, through her body. I walked down the hallway of the nursing home; saw a man in a wheelchair sleeping. It scared me that one day I could be sitting in a place just like this. A building filled with all of our fears and the thoughts we avoid pondering over. No wonder she was so puzzled I thought, she was trapped in a world that had only one way to escape, death.

Every time I visited her my mother had to remind her who I was, and how she knew me. Part of me felt as though she never really fully understood exactly who I was. I felt awkward sitting with her and felt a loss of words. I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t want to confuse her but I didn’t want to ignore her. It left me feeling just as helpless as she did. Where had her memories gone? Was her mind dying before her body? She went in and out of what she used to be and what she had become. Bursts of life spread across the room and seconds later vanished.

I watched her eyes examine every inch of the room, and I wondered what the alternative to this would be… She couldn’t stand up on her own, she didn’t know what was going on most of the time and she had no family to be at her side. Was this really her only option? I wondered if she wanted to live anymore, did she still find purpose? I think she understood the life she used to live was never really going to come back. Could she process the feeling of being alone anymore? Or was she unaware of it? The system we live in gives us very few options, it feels like you either need a family to support you or an institution to make sure you don’t fall. Before I left her I said I would bring photographs to show her next time, her face lit up for a moment it seemed as though the life she used to live was present again. I walked out of the nursing home sad by the fact that the next time I saw her, she would have no idea who I was and wouldn’t remember our plan to look at my photos, I wondered how long she would continue to live like this…