Wheaton College Alumni Magazine Winter 2014 | Page 45

I listened to her tell this story, alternately
worried and awash in admiration for her.
“I’d have panicked,” I confessed.
“I wasn’t a school nurse all my life for
nothing!”
Thank God the couple at Rita’s Water
Ice didn’t turn out to be ax murderers.
He might have been the archangel
Gabriel disguised as a middle-aged Dallas
businessman. But next time might turn
out differently.
I call Julie for a dose of candor.
“What will she do if she doesn’t drive?”
I ask.
“Oh, she’ll still take her car out in her
own neighborhood.”
“What about garden club?”
“Her friends will have to pick her up.”
“She was always the one who gave
people rides.”
“I know.”

“It made her feel important.”
“It’s the end of an era,” Julie says sadly.
“And my life has just gotten significantly
harder.”
“I know,” I say.
But the truth is, Julie will not be able to
take Mother where she needs to go. Julie
leaves for work at seven in the morning
and doesn’t get home until after five.
Mother will have to find friends who can
give her rides. I spend an hour and a half
researching taxi services in Mesquite, the
suburb of Dallas where Mother lives. I jot
down numbers.
Then to gain a little perspective, I stand
at the window and gaze at the birds flitting
around the feeder. I feel bewildered and
orphaned. The woman who built my
identity is losing her own. One by one
the struts and timbers of herself are falling
away. How will she live without driving?
She’ll dwindle away like a sweet potato
vine in October, one leaf browning at a
time, sinking into the earth until finally
she will become invisible. It’s intolerable,
unthinkable. I dig my fingernails into my
palm and walk around my study like a
zombie, fiercely focused on how to halt
this.
I learned from Mother the fact that
when a person is distressed, she should
make lists.
I will start calling her every day.
I will visit her three, no, four, no, five
times a year.
I will find her rides (though I don’t
know how).
I will. I will. I will.
I don’t even know what all I’ll do for
her.
Why? Why do I care?
Because she raised me. Because after
the preacher chanted earth to earth, ashes
to ashes, and they lowered my father’s
casket into the black Midwestern soil,
my mother, who was wearing a red-

and-black houndstooth hand-me-down
suit, squared her shoulders and walked
away from his grave, calling her children
to follow, and we did, we followed her
down that hill into the rest of our lives.
Because she stood in our living room,
one hand on her hip, and glared at us
and said, “I will never make you live in
this house with a stepfather!” Because
she sent us to college with every last
dollar she had. Because she told us we
could do anything we put our minds to.
Because half of what she said was wrong,
but I believed it, feeling lucky to have
timber to build a world. When I stopped
believing what she said, and told her so,
she stuck b y me but still fought for her
own truths like the Champion Mother
of the Earth. She stood so firm that I
could measure the distance I had traveled
from her.
Yes. All that. But I have a husband, a
job, children, a house, neighbors, a church.
I live half a continent away from my
mother and maybe it’s sick, maybe I’m sick
in the head to worry about her the way
I do. Why do I? Maybe because I can’t
imagine doing anything else. I’m like a
duck flying south for the winter without
knowing the way, without guessing how
long it will be or how hard it will be to
find food. I worry about her as naturally as
I worry about myself. However strangely
she acts, whatever weird things come out
of her mouth, I know her life and her
stories. I am remembering more all the
time, and who else, besides my sister, does?
What if we who know and love her desert
her? Who will she have?

Excerpted from the book The Geography
of Memory: A Pilgrimage Through
Alzheimer’s, by Jeanne Murray Walker.
Copyright © 2013 by Jeanne Murray
Walker. Reprinted by permission of Center
Street. All rights reserved.
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