My mother was diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer’s the same year I graduated high school. I spent my first two years of college watching her lose things: her keys, her phone, my father’s birthday, my middle name, my brother’s face.
I took care of her for eleven months when I moved back home during March of 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. It was my junior year of college. I was twenty-one. During the day, before I had to sit in on my Zoom classes, I poured her cranberry juice into a small glass cup and counted her pills, watching her swallow them down.
I squeezed her hand while we walked in a single loop around our neighborhood. The setting April sun bled papercut-thin pink streaks across the sky. Spring muddied the ground beneath our sneakers; soon it would be summer, and in another breath, winter.
***
Second grade. My mother takes me out of school early to buy birds. She tells me to fake being sick, so I make it midway through my morning lesson before going to the nurse. I wince and point to my ear. Is it my right one? Or my left one?
***
My mother was born in the month named after the god with two faces: January. She was an Aquarius. She told me freckles were angel kisses, and all over her olive skin were splattered galaxies of love. She swore when she drove. She got hit on by the grocery store cashiers. She was always singing; along to the radio or to commercial jingles or just to herself, just because. She pushed her big sunglasses up into her hair, her jean jacket slung over her shoulder, and she smiled at strangers.
I absorbed everything she told me through my skin: say thank you to adults, don’t open the door for strangers, I almost lost you in the NICU, did I tell you that story already? You wanna hear it again? She told all our neighbors that I had an old soul, and I didn’t know if I believed in the kind of God that was an old man, but I believed in my mother.
When she died, this twin-headed fear devoured me:
What if no one will ever know me in the same way she did?
What if I’ll never be loved like that again?
***
Second grade. My mother takes me out of school early to buy birds. She tells me to fake an earache. I go to the nurse and my mother comes to get me as she planned.
But do we hold hands on the way out to the car?
***
I read articles on the internet about how to reverse Alzheimer’s. A cure to eat away at the amyloid proteins growing on her neurons. I had this manic hope that her medications were working, that they would cure her. I stayed up at night teaching myself all there was to know about neuroscience and brain degeneration and the chemical components of Rivastigmine.
In the months after my mother passed, the scientific research behind amyloid proteins as a cause of dementia was discredited, and all I could think about were the pills I shook out of the bottles and placed so tediously into that color-coded organizer. The pills I placed into the palm of her open hand.
***
As autumn of 2020 crawled in, I dug my forehead into the grout lines between the tiles on the bathroom wall while my mother took a reluctant shower. Steam rose around the freckles smattering her naked body as she cursed at me. I closed my eyes and chanted silently: if this is the worst she’s going to get, please let this be it.
I was not ready for her disease to progress as rapidly as it did. When I came home in March, during the beginning of the pandemic, she was doing better, or at least, my brother and my father and I convinced ourselves she was. She wasn’t the person we remembered, but at least she was calm, at least she was happy.
But by the time my senior year of college began on Zoom in September, my mother stopped taking showers. She wore the same clothes everyday. She only wanted to eat ice cream. She stared blankly at her mugs of tea that I set in front of her until they grew cold.
Sometimes though, as my mother refused to put on her pajamas, as she stomped up and down the stairs, as she talked to the walls, she would stop and turn her head to look at me frantically and ask, Where’s Sydney?
I reached for her arm. I’m right here.
She touched my cheek. My whole face. Her eyes were two weights.
You’re such a good girl, she told me. I mean, a woman. A woman? A mother? A girl?
Who was I, anyway, anymore? I didn’t recognize my own face in the mirror during this time of being stuck inside. All I knew was how to be my mother’s daughter. The thought of being someone without her was like asking myself to breathe without lungs. I told myself I would do anything to keep her alive, even if she wasn’t herself, just to keep her with me.
But in those final months of 2020 that I spent with her, sometimes I was not able to face myself. Because sometimes, as I helped my mother take a shower, as I listened to her cry, I mouthed this other prayer into the tile grout:
If things are going to get worse, please just let her die.
***
In January of 2021, my mother was placed in a long-term care facility, and because of COVID-19 restrictions, I saw her only three times in the ten months before she passed.
***
After she passed away in October of 2021, my understanding of time became warped. One second there were mottled leaves crunching under my sneakers, and the next I stood in my snow boots in front of my mother’s grave, a Christmas wreath laying there, unsure if I was really awake. Everyone I knew had their booster shots. The restaurants and bars had all reopened. Even those COVID-19 alert commercials stopped.
Back to normal, everyone said, and I dug my heels deeper into the earth to pause time. I never asked for this normal. This is not the normal I was promised.
All I’m left with are my memories. I spin backwards.
***
My mother takes me out of school early to buy birds. She works part time a few days a week at International Pottery, a store on South Street full of wrapping paper and glass bowls and large decorative utensils that are strung from the walls. She buys me birds made out of softened styrofoam; their bellies are round, their wings are bits of feathers expertly glued to their sides. Their faces have two black dots of paint for eyes, two rosy smears of blush on their cheeks.
I hope that she wrapped them up in flowered gift wrap for me. What’s a memory for if not for hoping? Later, she lets me play with them on the window sill in the living room. I lift up their bodies and stroke the feathers of their flightless wings and I sing songs of made up words to them that will make them fly.
***
I eventually lost each of those birds she bought me; their feathers fell out and speckled the carpet in indigo and bright orange fuzz. But my mother saved their nest for me. After she passed, I found the womb of wicker twigs sitting in the cupboard, speckled with tiny pale gray paper eggs.
She told me she would send me a bird. Did she, though? I don’t remember it specifically, but I believe I remember it. I want to believe it. What’s a memory for if not for believing?
I traced my fingers through the sky and I asked her for birds. I counted hawks in twos, threes. I squinted for cardinals. At the cemetery, a hurricane of grackles swooped from one bare tree to the next, their bodies bristling smears of black ink.
***
A week before my twenty-fifth birthday, almost two years after my mother’s passing, I sit in my childhood bedroom on a Zoom call with a medium.
I’m here because I’ve spent most of my summer break crushed by the grief I shoved down since her passing. I’m here because I’ve been driving to the cemetery almost every week, sitting at her grave and pressing my head to my knees and quietly screaming through clenched teeth.
I tell her the same thing each time: I tried everything to save you and it didn’t work.
In my head, I think we’ll have this somber conversation about her passing, that we’ll dig up the last five years and she can tell me what I need to do next to avenge her life.
But instead, the medium tells me my mother wants me to buy flowers for my new apartment. She wants me to blast music. She wants me to go to concerts with my friends. She tells the medium that I don’t give myself enough credit for how far I’ve come. That I’ve stopped writing. When am I going to start writing again? She tells the medium how I’ve been crying at the cemetery. How she wishes I would see myself like the way she sees me.
“And birds!” the medium smiles. “She’s going to send you more birds!”
“What else does she say?” I ask.
“She keeps saying I love you and thank you.”
I have to sit on the floor afterwards and laugh until I gag on a sob. I love you, thank you? I try to find a way to make the answer more complicated for myself, because it’s safer for me if things are hard, because if you can fear something, you can plan for it. I love you, thank you. I imagine the words written in her handwriting and it reads like a parting signature at the end of a card. What she’s telling me is simple. Should it be this simple? I have to be twenty- five. I have to live my own life without anticipating tragedy. But what about what she lost? What about what I lost? What about wanting it back?
I untangle all my memories with my teeth and come up spitting feathers. How do I accept everything that I don’t understand, that I’ll never get answers to?
I love you, thank you.
This is her telling me to let it go.
***
One time in second grade, my mother took me out of school early to buy birds. I complained of an earache to the nurse, pointing at my left ear or maybe my right one, but either way, my mother came to get me like she told me she would. I believe we held hands on the way to the car. The sky was robin’s egg blue. Her hand was warm. It was a work day. It was a school day. There was no urgent reason why we needed to spend this specific afternoon together.
And yet, my mother had me get in the car with her. She told me to put on my seat belt. She told me how much she had missed me, and I remember being filled with this ocean of relief, because I had missed her, too.
Sydney Quinn is an emerging writer living in Madison, New Jersey. Her work has appeared previously in Ponder Review and Everyday Fiction. She holds her bachelor’s degree in English literature from Drew University.
ELEVENTH HOUR LITERARY 