Gudrun (Part II)

When last I saw her, she was nothing like the jovial embodiment of compassion and mischief, integrity and abiding faith who had helped me emerge from adolescence more intact than when I entered. She could no longer bake or hold a long conversation, but she could go for walks (accompanied); she could be gracious and loving (also confused and preoccupied).

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They saved me because they spoke frankly: about the world, themselves, me, what was happening, what was possible, what was not. They were a salve to a bright becoming-young woman raised in alcohol-infused secrets and extended entanglements of violence and boundary crossings. They weren’t always right, but they were always there.

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I remember watching her get lost in the grocery store we had visited scores of times together. Her adoring and dedicated husband of 35 years was only ten feet away, yet not the five she required to recognize her place in the world. I remember her panic rising, my inability to be a reassuring point of reference: I was no longer beloved adopted daughter, but one of the myriad swarming mass of humanity whom she had once embraced, but who now terrorized her with our disturbing strangeness.

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Have you ever seen the hole a lit cigarette makes when pressed to unfolded rolling paper? Just at first, it is the exact size of the round embered tip. Then it grows, orange hair-line trim expanding the circumference unevenly, persistently, burning away the once-wood pulp, once-virgin forest, forever.

So it was with her brain damage. A little at first: lack of word retrieval, inability to recall unimportant facts. Then important facts, difficulty following multi-step tasks, like baking her delicious marbled pound cake. Then as simple as boiling water or remembering that one must turn off the stove burner after one turns it on. Refined rolling paper, wood pulp, virgin forest: all clear-cut.

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Years she spent in this decline, descent,degradation, desecration, fragmentation. She became a simple nest of primal emotions, no discernible intellect left to sculpt her animal essence. Her bodydeath came much later than her soulloss. This cleaving apart calling into question God’s benevolence.

Now, finally this cleaving together: her death, a welcome relief to her suffering, and ours.