Dear Mama Shellie #3

A letter to my mom who died of early-onset Alzheimer's in 2016

Hi Mom. Me again.

I’m just launching in right about where things left off in my last letter—just at the point where I went to Jacksonville and everything changed. It’s so strange to me that I’ve never told you any of this.

I remember several things before my trip to Jacksonville quite vividly even though at the time they were non-moments—quotidian parts of my day.

Loss does that—it allows for retrospective significance.

One of them was going to the doctor and the doctor saying “well, you are almost 40…” and me being so taken aback by that, like, GOOD SIR, I’m a mere 37 years of age, HOW DARE YOU. (Now that five years have passed and I am 42, my fears about turning 40 seem overblown, but at the time it was quite jarring.)

(Related: I remember getting home from my mission in 2002 and going to the eye doctor with you. You were only five years older than I am now, and I remember the eye doctor letting you know that you needed reading glasses, and your stunned amazement that you were already at that point in your life. I remember thinking, “ope, I guess Mom is starting to get a bit older…” or maybe you yourself said as much. Strange that you had already likely started showing unrecognizeable symptoms of the disease that took you, and neither you or I could yet see it. (That wouldn’t happen for four more years.) Anyway, turns out that I badly need bifocals myself already, so you had me beat there!)

Anyway, the memories. Before Jacksonville.

The most tender ones involve Lolly.

It’s so strange to think of these memories and to remember how clueless we truly were about what was coming. Looking back feels like watching a fateful scene in a movie. Or like the little child happily sitting at the doctor’s office completely unaware that the doctor is about to plunge a needle into his arm, though everyone else in the room knows what’s about to happen

I remember sitting with her on the living room couch debating whether I would go to Jacksonville. Ever-supportive of me, ever-loving, of course she thought I should. There was no question! I remember sitting by her side as we booked the flight.

More vivid, even, is our drive to the airport. So simple, so calm, so seemingly-mundane, so pleasant: us in our white mini-van driving and chatting—the slight nerves that accompany a flight, the early morning and our tiredness. I mostly just remember laughing with her. I can sometimes remember snippets of the conversation we had that day but right now the content eludes me. Nothing noteworthy—just idle musings and tiny jokey comments. (Oh, it just occurred to me that the reason I remembered that moment at the doctor’s office was because that was one of things I was talking to her about on the drive. That makes sense.)

I remember feeling completely peaceful. There wasn’t a hint of distress in either of us that morning—which seems so odd to me now looking back.

We got the airport. I hugged her goodbye—the last time I would ever hug her in the total simplicity of our 16-year marriage—and then I boarded the plane.

We just had no idea what was coming.

The night I got to Jacksonville, Zina was already at her sister’s beach house, and after I stashed my luggage she convinced me to put on swimming trunks and took me out to the ocean in the dark of the late-summer. The water was very warm—unexpectedly so. I’d been doing a lot of research into our colonial ancestors (through you mommy—the many settlers of Newbury Mass. we descend from) and I thought about how it was my first time feeling the waters of the Atlantic. She and I sat on the warm sand and talked for a long time. It was amazing to see her again. She told me to take my phone out and shine it on the sand, and as I did, tons of crabs scuttled away from the light and into the water. They were bright white, and the child in me found this to be so cool! We waded into the warm water for a while, then made our way back to the house.

The next morning, Zina and woke up and ate breakfast, and before we got to our writing projects (at the time we were both working on memoirs that had been on submission with agents, but hadn’t sold, and we had both ended our relationships with said agents and were re-working our respective materials) she had us do a sonnet race, which is something she and her sibs used to do as children. (Of course the Nibley kids did things like had sonnet-writing races as children!)

It was so fun! I really, really loved it and I wish there were other people in my life that enjoyed doing sonnet races because my brain just loves the adrenaline of it.

Anyway, here was my first one along with a little description I wrote about it in a letter to Grandy not long before she, too, passed. (Those were such weird years, mom—the years where you had left, but your own mommy was still here on Earth.)

We start the day by having a sonnet competition where we each try to write one as fast as we can while obeying the rules of convention. (Well, I tend not to write in iambs, but I still stick strictly to blank verse and follow the rhyme scheme perfectly). Here, I'll show the one I wrote the other morning, which I based on having arrived the night before (this one is Petrarchan, though I decided on an ABAB CDCD rhyme scheme instead of ABBA):

Coming Out

She snags me from the airport in a white
Hyundai the size of a boat and we sail
to her sister's house on the beach. The night
is tar black & warm as blood & a trail
of lofty palms welcomes us as she sings
along to The Grateful Dead. "What a long
strange trip it's been," she croons & I'm thinking
"how true that is for both of us. Great song."

When we get there I strip off my sweaty
clothes for swim trunks & we walk to the beach.
The sand is buoyant, impalpable, soft
as refined flour. The white crabs freeze, ready
to bolt at the light from my phone, then each
scurries back to the sea it came out of. 

As you can see, each line contains ten syllables, and the rhyme scheme is followed quite perfectly. (The only slant rhyme is soft with of, and that's not nearly as slanty as slant rhymes get.) Yet, I really like to convey a sense that this could be nearly conversational, not stuffy or formulaic. Not sure how well I achieve it here, but I think it is getting there, especially for a poem dashed off in a race!

Even in this poem, you can see the theme emerging from my subconscious.

It’s like the universe was trying to communicate to me through me yet I still couldn’t see it. This part of me that wanted to scurry back into the sea I’d come out of. To retreat. To not come all the way out. To go back to the perceived safety of those waters as the blaring light of this world shined on all I am.

My memories of this day still have that strange sensation of ignorance—Zina and I laughing and chatting and sharing youtube videos and eating yummy food, both unawares of what was about to happen to each of us the very next day—that thunderclap of 24 hours that would change both of our lives, in distinct and yet similar ways, forever.

It was the Fall Equinox. And it occurs to me only in this moment as I write those words how fitting that name is.

In my next letter I’ll tell you all about it.

I love you and miss you every single day.

Joshy