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Saved: September 23rd 2022
"Why do you want to write about my hands?” Mom says. “They’re not my best feature.”
I look at them and she is right. Her fingers are stubby and blunt-nailed with wrinkles that bunch over her knuckles.
“I always wanted piano-playing hands,” she says, with a sigh. “The kind with really long fingers.”
“That didn’t stop you,” I say, remembering how she played us to sleep with Debussy and Brahms. Feeling generous, I decide a little compliment is in order. “I like your manicure. It matches that dress.”
She swipes her turquoise nails in my direction. I think they look pretty, shiny as scarab beetles in the morning sun.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about manicures. The whole time growing up did you ever see me get a manicure?”
She is right again. She was never one to be concerned with appearances. But, stubbornly, I can’t let it go.
“It doesn’t hurt to look pretty,” I say.
“I’m wearing a diaper.”
I decide it’s best to change the subject. “What do you want me to say? Help me out here…”
“You should write about my heart instead.”
We consider this, but only for a minute.
“Okay,” she says. “Then write about my brain.”
Finally this: a subject we can throw ourselves into.
“What would you like me to say about your brain?”
“That I was one of the first women to get my Masters of Psychology at UBC… that I advocated for early childhood education so single mothers could work… that I was handing out birth control pills to girls on campus before pills were legal… that I was a member of the Right to Die with Dignity Association and its charter was signed in our living room… that I attended lectures on campus until I was 87. That I travelled the world! Saved our rivers!”
Having said her piece, she drifts off like an astronaut on her personal orbit. Dementia has long ago stolen her away. I go back to writing about hands.
My mother’s hands were not the best. But once I watched her at the kitchen table, stretching strudel dough as thin as a butterfly’s wing. Another time, she showed me how to make a bed with hospital corners. The palm of one hand could tell a fever from a false alarm; both hands, working in tandem, clapped at a thousand concerts and plays. She could coax a raspberry, ripe as a ruby, off its stem. Usually they smelled of Palmolive dish soap, those hands. When tucking me into bed one night, they smelled of something peculiar.
“What’s that?” I said, wrinkling my nose.
“Formaldehyde,” she said. “I was in the dissecting lab today. We each got a skull.”
And there you have it, my most enduring memory.
I look up and see my mother glaring at me from her one good eye. I scratch out everything I just wrote.
My mother’s hands, I write instead. They smell like brains.
Marcelyn Mary Smordin z'l 1927-2022
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Raydene
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Such Great Hands
I love this blog entry Liz. My mother had dementia as well. Always interesting where their thoughts/brains would travel when a specific question was asked. Mums are so special and miss mine everyday. I just want to pick up the phone and chat with her. A missing piece in my life for sure. ❤️