This is not a memoir: Jasmine

My MA program had regularly Sunday presentations of writing. In Santa Fe I participated every Sunday all three years I was there. I liked it because it was a regular reason to write. I was often in the computer lab rushing to print out my story just minutes before the evening readings were supposed to start. 
I was more productive over those summers with my personal writing than any other time.
I did not participate as much in Vermont because, like everything that summer, it was more pretentious.

This story is part of two different ideas. The first is this is not a memoir. The second is one of a bunch of vignettes set in a fictional southern town called Dogstar.
One of the reason I wanted to merge all my blogs over the last ten years or so was to focus more, and get back to, writing regularly.
So here you are.

Jasmine

If you ask people what the South smells like in the summer they will probably all tell you one thing- jasmine. For years, if you had asked me, I would have said the same thing. I wouldn’t say that now though. Now, I would have to say that it smells like death.

For Southerners, it’s easy to get the two smells confused. The sweet, cloying smell of decay can easily be confused with the sweet, cloying smell of jasmine wafting on the wind.

That summer was one of the hottest anyone could remember and people literally ran from one air conditioned building to the next. No one could stand to be out in the heat, there wasn’t a breath of relief to be had through a breeze and there was no shelter in the shade, although mentally you may have felt better for about ten seconds. It was also the summer that the air conditioning went out in the house. When faced with the dilemma of whether to pick up Mom’s prescriptions or pay R.A Hoy to come out and fix it, the drugs definitely won the battle. Although, looking back, Mom was so out of it, I don’t know if not having the drugs would have made a difference.

She lay in the darkened bedroom, with the shades drawn, and the ceiling fan making an annoying whomp sound every rotation. There were days when I envisioned standing over my mother on the bed and ripping the damn thing right out of the ceiling. These types of thoughts entertained me as I sat there day after day watching my mother melt away- both from the heat, and seemingly, from herself. We were long past the point where she knew who I was, or what I was doing there or even who or where she was. Her entire existence seemed to consist of this mental fog that kept her insulated from everything around her. She made no human noises, only grunts, or whimpers. I sat there by her bedside and simply waited. I knew I was simply waiting for when her chest would cease to rise and fall, but in the days that I sat there, it seemed as though I didn’t know why I was there.

I remember being struck by the fact that she seemed to have shrunk, with all that metaphor implied. The woman who had raised two children and managed businesses was not who lay before me. The crazy, adventurous hippie with a love for life wasn’t there either.  The person who lay before me, almost hidden under the covers had long ago ceased to be my mother who read me Peter Pan as a child and laughed, but always complied, as she left the window open for him to visit some night. My mother had disappeared long ago, in a ten year battle with a disease her doctors still had no explanation for. What was before me was simply a shell, a duty, and although it seems cold, an obligation.

The smell of that darkened room will always be twined with the smell of jasmine for me. It grew like a weed all over our property and the smell swept in through the windows I had opened in the hopes that the heat would be lessened. That summer, I remembered hating that smell. It seemed to soak into everything- the curtains, the sheets, my clothes, my hair. Even for the brief periods when Dad would relieve me I felt as thought that smell chased my all the way down the hall and outside.

Taking care of her had become like jasmine for me. It looks good on the surface, but you realize that it chokes you, clings to you, entwines you and won’t let go. Somehow, a visit home six years ago to see how Mom and Dad were doing had resulted in this tableau.

A 34 year old woman, with a fair amount of education who sat and waited for death. A woman who had not progressed, not moved forward, not lived for six years.

I knew intellectually that this was not my mother. I knew that in fact, when death came to claim her, it would be a mercy. A mercy to my father who had stood by as he watched the woman he loved become paranoid, delusional, mean until even that faded away. Myself, who couldn’t help but see that when she died, I would be free to live my life again. Of course, I no longer knew what that meant. I couldn’t comprehend a day that didn’t involve bedpans, and medicines and sitting in this small, dark room waiting. 

I refused to look past the moment. I couldn’t. I counted them as I counted her breaths- with the rise and fall of her chest. I seemed to exist in a place that was outside of the stream of time. As though we were being passed by in this small, darkened room that reeked with the cloying smell of jasmine and death.

My mother had always been my best friend. Even when I went to college and then moved away for jobs, our phone conversations stretched for hours as we kept up with each other. She’d only been sick a few years when that was taken from me. Her memory went, and she could no longer remember what I’d just told her, or why I was suddenly home when it wasn’t a holiday. Later she became angry and mean and paranoid, and as Dad walked outside or went for a drive, I was the one who stood there and took it. Who listened to delusions about us trying to kill her, steal from her, make her seem crazy. In those days, her hold on me was suffocating and strangling. I didn’t see a way out, and I had no time to try and deal with what the loss of my best friend meant. I could only deal with each day, and each new world I woke up to as she began to get worse every single day. There were no good days anymore, just worse and worse.

As I sat there, I tried to remember things we’d done with her growing up. I tried to imagine trips we’d taken, or holidays we’d shared. But it seemed as though every time I tried to call up an image one from the last six years would pop up- 

Her passed out in her closet, bleeding from where she’d hit her head. Her ranting and throwing dishes at me.

Her setting the kitchen on fire.

This was worse. This was so much worse than having a police officer come to your door and tell you something horrible had happened. This was not how it should be. This was not an accident, or horrible twist of fate. This disease that had robbed my mother of her life and my Dad of his love had subtly robbed me of my mother. Not only was she taken from me, far sooner than she should have been, but the memories, the feelings I had for my mother were lost.

I remember sitting there and crying when I realized I couldn’t recall anything about her that was not the last six years. Not a single experience, emotion, hug, laugh, memory would come. I sat there with my head bent, eyes unfocused as I willed my brain to recall a single thing. Nothing came. No amount of wishing or wanting made any difference. There was only the whomp of the fan and the smell of the jasmine. 

As I looked up, after I don’t know how long, I realized that there was no need to count the minutes. I no longer had my measure of time- there was no longer a rise and fall to her chest. Everything was still. Just the whomp of the fan and the smell of the jasmine.

In trying to hold onto my memories of her, I had lost my last moments with her.