Forgetting

The recognition of her children’s faces
and grand children’s names
slipped slowly into oblivion.
No ability to use a phone
or remember yesterday
but she talked of Bill Clinton
calling her when ever he was in town.
Went to school with his mama, you know
she remembered back about 7th grade
and maybe Elvis’ mama as well.
In the Alzheimer’s wing
she’d introduce me as her brother
and look blankly at my wife.
Photos of her great grand children
passed by her eyes without a glimmer
of understanding but she remembered
the one room school house
where she learned to count by twos,
the cypress trees her father cut
in the Arkansas Delta
and foot prints dried in mud
beside her little brother’s grave.
Then she lost the power of speech
altogether; at least in any coherent
form. Stage four for four years,
I came and went more anonymously
than the care givers.
I smiled, said inane things and
ask question to which I knew she
had no answers. Sometimes she’d
look with questioning eyes
as though she needed a response
to her unintelligible ramblings.
I had no answers either.
I wondered if she was even there
or if her spirit had gone on
to her reward leaving only an
electrochemical form that struggled on.
She finally called it quits last year,
the day before Thanksgiving.
I buried her back in the hard rock
ground of a backwoods cemetery
in the Ozark hills where she started
beside my father, my sister,
her father and mother and generations
of nameless stones amid the oak and pine.
with her memories.

by David Arnold Hughes, age 60, Kansas City, MO