Canyons of Forgetting

Photo by Anne Reynolds Voegtien

“. . . perhaps there’s no end to the vital impulses and longings that propel us, precisely, towards death.” Gwen Head, interview excerpt

I had visited my dear friend and poet, Gwen Head, in her Berkeley, California, home several times, each occasion a feast of ideas and stories. To glance at her 90-year-old husband, Bernard, as his 68-year-old wife talked, listened, giggled like a young girl, and recounted favorite experiences was to see his aging, beatific face lit by love. In their presence, I always felt warmth and comfort, a sensation so much more than a blazing campfire can offer.

On what was to be our final visit, I listened as Gwen repeatedly told and retold the story of how the former owner of their home had been so impressed by the couple that she simply couldn’t sell the house to anyone else, even with an offer of more money. After listening and smiling at her with each recounting, I felt something was very different this time. As I studied her elegant face, framed with soft graying curls, I noticed how she gazed intently at some indistinguishable place. Forgetting was boring its way into the lovely folds of my friend’s magnificent brain.

I didn’t accept my amateur diagnosis right away, despite words like dementia and Alzheimer’s beginning to surface. Instead, I took refuge in the familiar. We would laugh together more, we would dine on Bernard’s simple dinners, and Gwen would take me on the usual garden tour to see how she and her Vietnamese gardener friend had been creating a flowering Eden. In that garden, her custom was to point her graceful index finger at each blossom, bush, and tree, reciting their long Latin scientific names with the same grace and accuracy with which she crafted poems. There was a beautiful rhythm to her telling.

On the following day of my short visit, California sun shining golden, Gwen summoned me to join her at the couple’s Endless Pool, a churning delight whose artificial current Bernard swam against daily to stay fit. I turned to see an iridescent blue dragonfly, dazzling and within inches of my face. When I turned back, Gwen’s clothing was puddled around her ankles. She stepped out of her clothes, entered the water, waved, and motioned me to join her. She was giddy, like a woman disobeying the rules and choosing naked freedom. She splashed with abandon in full view of her neighbors’ homes. This was utterly out of character for the friend I had known for so many years. I sat on the edge of the pool and dangled my feet in the waves. I was outside her joyous frolicking. Bernard stood by a rosebush and smiled adoringly at his wife.

“You must come back more often,” Bernard confided as he moved nearer me. “Gwen laughs so much when you’re here. You know, she doesn’t write anymore.” Another faint alarm bell sounded within me. Writing was as essential as breath to Gwen. I returned to asking myself what was happening and shivered inside. My brilliant friend was beginning to lose her mind, her extraordinary imagination, her capacity to craft a present and a future. She was swimming in a past that kept her in place, as surely as did this Endless Pool.

At the close of our visit, Bernard insisted on driving me to the BART station, where I would ride to the San Francisco airport en route to home. I sucked in my breath, but accepted his offer, aware that he was perhaps the worst driver I had ever known. The drive was a scary carnival ride, as he veered up cement curbs and clunked back down onto the city streets, seemingly unconcerned about how rocky and dangerous this was. Then suddenly he veered to the curb and stopped the car. “Do you think Gwen is okay?” he asked tentatively, furrowing his white brows. He looked haunted.

I paused. “Well, I think it would be good to make an appointment for her with a neurologist.” Then, because I couldn’t bear to say much more, I added, “You know, things can really change as we age.”

He nodded wordlessly, restarted the car, and dropped me at the station, where we hugged each other for long minutes, knowing that indeed things had changed.

Since that visit more than a decade ago, I’ve witnessed friends and my dear partner tumble into that same canyon of forgetting. When it bubbles up in the lives of people close to you, it feels like an epidemic. Who’ll be next? As witness to this parade of losses, I realize I, too, am thrust into the past, because it is the most vivid part of the lives we now share.

Regardless of whether such decline is achingly gradual or as fast as a runaway train, the sum of memory loss is that the person you have always known becomes a stranger. The once-calm man becomes agitated, even mean. The woman who once jostled your child on her knee and told the most gut-splitting jokes now sits quiet and stony-faced by the window. And should you be in the close company of such a being, you are called to be a guide, a companion. The plaintive song, “Stand by Me,” is perhaps the inner cry of someone in the early stages of forgetting. Answering that call will be the hardest thing you ever do. It was for me.

Gwen’s forgetting and eventual death was my first close encounter with Alzheimer’s. I realize now it was a leitmotif—I didn’t have to stay and care for her. I flew away to my life elsewhere and hoped she would fade gently. I am told it was a hard exit. Her books of poetry live on and remind me of the many years she enjoyed and shared the fruits of her brilliance. I hear my friend on the page as I conjure her lilting, precise recitations. This is hard comfort. But to have her persist beyond death is a gift.

Of course, not everyone we love who spirals downward leaves a legacy of writing that lives on. We who survive inherit the most important thing—remembrance of who they were to us and the ways their very being and departing have changed us forever.

END

Editor’s Note: Marlene Blessing is an author, poet, and fine essayist as you have just read. Her poetry and essays have appeared in various publications. She was the originating editor for the anthology, A Road of Her Own: Women’s Journeys in the West. She is now retired from book publishing where she worked as an editor, and living on an island in her native Pacific Northwest.

If you would like to contact Marlene and do not have her phone or email, send me a quick note at alanbearstark@gmail.com and I’ll send you her email. She would very much like to hear from you.

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I’m alanstark1@substack.com. Thank you for reading Mountain Pasages.