1、I have bought food that I hope will please my mother, and that will be easy for her to eat: orzo salad with little pieces of crayfish cut into it, potato salad, small chunks of marinated tomatoes.
2、l have brought her a bouquet of crimson, yellow, and salmon-pink snapdragons. She likes the flowers very much.
3、 As I wipe my mother s face, I see that her skin is still beautiful I hold her chin in my hand and kiss her forehead.
My mother has no idea that her ninetieth birthday is coming up. She has no notion of the time of day, the day of the week. the season of the year, the year of the century. No notion of the approaching millennium. And no idea any longer, who I am. Her forgetting of me happened just a few months ago, after I had been traveling for more than a month and hadn t been to see her. When I came back, she asked me if I were her niece, l said no, I was her daughter. Does that mean I had you? she asked. 1 said yes. Where was I when l had you? she asked me. I told her she was in a hospital in Far Rockaway. New York. So much has happened to me in my life. she said You can t expect me to remember everything.
My mother was once a beautiful woman, but all her teeth are gone now. Toothless. No woman can be considered beautiful. Whenever I visit her in the nursing home, she is sitting at the table in the common dining room, her head in her hands, rocking. Medication has eased her anxiety, but nothing moves her from her stupor except occasional moments of fear, too deep for medication. This is a room that has no windows, that lets in no light, in which an overlarge TV is constantly blaring, sending images that no one looks at where the floors are beige tiles, the walls cream colored at the bottom, papered halfway up with a pattern of nearly invisible grayish leaves. Many of the residents sit staring, slack-jawed, open mouthed. I find it impossible to imagine what they might be looking at.
