Monday, September 5, 2011

The End

The transformations effected, in the women particularly, by the white hair and the other new features, would not have held my attention so forcibly had they been merely changes of colour, which can be charming to behold; too often they were changes of personality, registered not by the eye but, disturbingly, by the mind. For to "recognise" someone and, a fortiori, to learn someone's identity after having failed to recogise him, is to predicate two contradictory things of a single subject, it is to admit that what was here, the person whom one remembers, no longer exists, and also that what was here, and also that what is now here is a person whom one did not know to exist; and to do this we have to apprehend a mystery almost as disturbing as that of death, of which it is, indeed, as it were the preface and the harbinger. 

The narrator here is returning to Paris society after years spent in a rest home. As he walks through the rooms crowded with the fashionable people he had mingled with long ago, he has trouble putting names and identities to faces, which have metamorphosed from those of blushing beauties and distinguished gentlemen into the decrepit visages of old age. It's as if he were attending his fiftieth high school renunion and were unable to fit the haggard face with the name tag.

I thought of these lines when I visited my mother in the Alzheimer's facility yesterday. She was in a back room sitting with other residents in a circle and singing a song that went "Holy, holy, holy." I couldn't locate her at first, and then finally, (was this my mother?), I saw a woman dressed in loose clothes I didn't recognize and who had the slightly tired, immobile expression of someone who has been institutionalized. This happens every time I visit.

Happily, as soon as she saw me, she recognized me, and came out to give me a big hug. Her hair had been cropped "Jean Seberg-style" (a link she would have appeciated since Breathless used to be her favorite movie), and and the extra weight she was holding, in addition to her plain, scrubbed face, made her look anonymous.

Is this still my mother? Who is this woman who looks so different from her former self? She eats her lunch--a turkey sandwich with chips and then cake with ice cream--with obvious relish. This is my athletic mother who starved herself to fit into extra small, fashionable clothing. She would have been horrified to see this new version of herself who no longer looks like my strikingly beautiful mother.

What is she thinking? I've learned to avoid questions and stick with positive statements. Questions lead to dangerous, uncharted territory and usually are answered with a blank, frustrated stare. I miss her so much. Her lively sense of humor, her love of literature (and the mystery novels she used to go through like water), her attention to nature and the changing of the seasons, her endless delight in various neighborhood dogs, and her green thumb. I wish I could tell her things about my life and get her reaction and advice. Like Proust's society friends, she has in one sense disappeared forever.  

I still have her in a sense, but I'm not sure who she is anymore. She has changed so much since I started reading Proust. This year's journey has been about my mother and my gradual loss of her--first to a higher stage of Alzheimer's and then to a facility. Just a year ago, she was violently in love with Paul McCartney. Now she is almost without affect. There's something frozen about her that I would love to nurture and thaw out.

I will always associate Proust with my mother. Now that I have finished In Search of Lost Time, I will return to it with a whole set of associations stemming from the loss of my mother: her love of songs, the diapers, and her fiery crushes on everyone from Jean-Paul Belmondo to the Beatles to the group leader at our visits to MOMA.

Proust's narrator explains:

...a thing which we have looked at in the past brings back to us, if we see it again, not only the eyes with which we looked at it but all the images with which at the time those eyes were filled. For things--and among them a book in a red binding--as soon as we have perceived them are transformed within us into something immaterial, something of the same nature as all our preoccupations and sensations of that particular time, with which, indissolubly, they blend. A name read long ago in a book contains within its syllables the strong wind and the brilliant sunshine that prevailed while we were reading it.

For me, tackling In Search of Lost Time isn't about turning forty or making up for lost time. I'll reread it with thoughts of my mother who lost her memory while Proust was delving into special sensations set in time. It has been a year jammed with crisis and joy--like any other year in my life. It's ultimately a book about finding a vocation and becoming a writer. My only hope is that soon I can put pen to paper and come up with something half as personal and euphoric and lovely as Proust's book. And perhaps there will be a piece of me set in a red binding that someone will pick up in a used bookstore many years from now and that will become part of her inner vocabulary.

Proust's ending links back to the beginning. I hope to spend the rest of my life tracing and retracing that loop. Because there is no end to In Search of Lost Time until the Final End. What a friend I have in Proust--just as one might sing, "What a friend I have in Jesus!" In fact, I wish every motel in the country had a copy of Proust on the bedside table. A map, a poem, a dream. And above all, how beautiful this life is and how quickly it passes! Yet what we find in art rests infinite and renewable and everlasting.