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  • Shine On
  • Floyd Skloot (bio)

When Beverly and I enter the nursing home, its doors always close behind us with a sigh. I know it’s a good sound indicating regular maintenance and a firm seal against the weather. A facility in superb condition. But I hear it as a muffled gulp all around me, like being swallowed.

We sign in at the front desk, where the phone rings with a soft chirp and the receptionist whispers a greeting. As usual, a man named Clarence sits in his wheelchair before a bin of cookies, chewing solemnly. A middle-aged man wearing a wrinkled linen jacket stands beside his mother, patting her shoulder as she nods in sleep. We put on visitor tags and approach the locked doors of the Memory Impairment Unit to punch in the security code.

As soon as we enter the unit, we’re swamped by a woman’s high-pitched shrieks. “HELP ME! SOMEBODY HELP ME!” Without being able to see her yet, we know it’s Charlotte, who sits in a recliner by the solarium’s windows at the far end of the hall, footrest cranked up, hands gripping the armrests, eyes goggling in terror. Since she was admitted six months ago, Charlotte’s cries have been a steady accompaniment to our visits with my mother.

At ninety-five, mind and memory destroyed by dementia, my mother has not seemed to notice the noise or the chaos it rained down around her. As never before in her life, she’s calm. She doesn’t lash out at Charlotte or try to drown her out with a blast from her own well-trained voice. There’s usually a whimsical smile on my mother’s face, the look of someone enchanted by an inner music and oblivious to distraction. As indeed she is. The only way she communicates now is through songs, a patchwork of tunes and fragmented lyrics that emerge in place of conversation or coherent thought. The former “Melody Girl of the Air,” who had her [End Page 220] own radio show in the 1930s Bronx, will croon a few phrases of an old standard, maybe a line or two stitched together with scat. But she won’t be able to sustain the briefest conversation, or answer questions about the life she lived. She won’t know who I am.

The last time we visited, her inner music was Jimmy Monaco’s classic “You Made Me Love You.” Over and over as we sat with her, my mother gazed in my direction and sang about how I made her love me, though she didn’t wanna do it. Didn’t wanna do it. Her song selections during these visits often have an eerie resonance, as though chosen to deliver a message to me. I know that can’t be true, of course. Organic brain damage has left her incapable of such sophisticated cognition. She can’t plan. She can’t hold thoughts in mind or make the sort of fully conscious decisions that delivering such hurtful messages would involve. Her most commonly used phrase is I don’t know, something she never would have admitted in her life. But given the rage, volatility, and cruelty that once dominated her intimate behavior, this woman was not only capable of, but often did say things like I never loved you. I never wanted you. So when she sings “You Made Me Love You,” I am engulfed by a sudden sadness.

It’s nuts for me to continue holding on to this outdated version of my mother. I’m fully aware of that. It’s also nuts for me to impute meaning or intent to her choice of songs. But this is still her familiar voice, this is still the familiar delivery of a lyric snippet laced with meaning, and I react physically, react immediately and without logic. Just as I hear the soft sigh of a door’s tight seal as the sound of being consumed.

Today, as we reach the solarium where my mother should be sitting, we can’t find her. We’ve already looked in her room, so we know she’s not there...

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