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This chapter is excerpted from Sundown: A Daughter’s Memoir of Alzheimer’s Care (Branden Books, 2014). The final section of the book, where this chapter appears, takes the form of essays meditating on the issues raised in earlier sections: memory, identity, family legacies, spirituality, and critique of the market-driven healthcare system in the United States. Judith Harway Memento Mori I was raised to be too skeptical to believe in ghosts, but still the dead haunt me. My mother whispers from the folds of her old polyester blouses that I wear like tunics. She nudges my ribs, an unsettling sensation that eerily registers along the same spectrum as feeling a baby kick inside the womb when I drive past Morana Hospital, which is where, in many senses, she lost her life though she did not die until two weeks after discharge. She prowls the corridors of my sleep, trying every door, and wrings tears from my heart at unexpected moments. I cling to what she wore, to what she made, to what she left me, as if the things themselves embody memory. “You should have this to remember her,” my sister says, handing me a bulky parcel wrapped in tissue paper. “I think Mom would want you to have it.” It’s late on a December evening, shortly after our mother’s death. We are sitting in my living room drinking wine with our childhood friend Kathy, daughter of my mother’s best friend. I chalk up the fact that I’m habitually drinking more than I should be to the stresses of caregiving, and I’m approaching the too-familiar buzz that both numbs me and keeps me from feeling completely numb these days. As I tear open the wrapping, my sister asks, “Remember when Mom took up rug-hooking?” She’s got me there. I remember our mother’s embroidery, crocheting, knitting, sewing. I remember her drawing, making puppets, creating Halloween costumes and throwing the best birthday parties our neighborhood had ever seen. I remember her gardening, canning, and baking. But rug-hooking? The paper falls away. The throw pillow in my hands is about eighteen inches square. On the hooked side, the background is bushy cream yarn with deep pile, and the design is an orange and brown sunburst that looks vaguely regal. There’s a circle at the center, and sort of a fleur de lis form worked in around the outer ring. The other side is plain white cotton, perhaps cut from an old pillowcase. My sister gazes at me expectantly, mistaking my blank expression for a poor memory. “Don’t you remember? She didn’t do it for long because it was so tedious. This was supposed to be a whole rug,” she laughs, “but Mom ran out of steam and turned it into a pillow. I’m pretty sure she drew the design herself.” I turn the pillow over a few times, feeling too tired to speak. Besides the fact that it is plug ugly, I vividly remember making this thing with my own hands. It was a kit someone had given me, probably in high school, and yes, the process of rug hooking was so tedious that it took an effort of will and several long evenings of TV watching to finish just this small square. Mom may have sewn the backing for me, I don’t remember. Not long ago I took my son to Goodwill to buy kitchenware for his new apartment. When he wandered off to try on a couple of shirts, I began leafing through racks of textiles: towels, placemats, curtains, random remnants of cloth clipped to coat hangers. Growing up, I paid little attention to my mother’s attempts to educate us in the domestic arts. My sister learned to knit and crochet, to use a sewing machine, to iron properly, skills I never mastered. And yet, because I am drawn to textures and colors, to nubby, rough-spun yarns, to shimmers of gilt, to speckly tweeds, my hands and eyes immediately found pleasure in the selection of fabrics they clicked through in the Goodwill store. Halfway down the rack, I found six hangers bearing identical crocheted placemats, each one an elongated hexagon of synthetic green, white, and purple yarn, unappealing and sloppily constructed. Their very awkwardness made me feel as though I was holding the hand of whoever made them. She – for she surely was a woman – would have been middle-aged, perhaps trying to develop new interests or hobbies as her children left home, a woman with creative impulses but little aesthetic sophistication. I could see her sitting before the television on a dark plaid couch, crocheting her way through the ten o’clock news and maybe Johnny Carson, as her husband dozed nearby in his recliner. At Christmas, her family members would receive another set of placemats, another winter scarf, a throw pillow, an afghan. Whether or not they liked the colors, the family would smile and praise her craft; after that it’s anyone’s guess which articles got used and which spent years in a drawer somewhere before a day of spring cleaning sent them to Goodwill. Those placemats undid me. Tears sprang to my eyes as I fingered their erratic loops and whorls, their concentric circles of colors that no one in their right mind would juxtapose. In their imperfection, I saw a crooked reflection of the far more skillful workmanship of my mother’s afghans, which she began producing in almost alarming numbers while my sister and I were in college. At first she followed patterns to the letter, but eventually she started developing her own, with results that can only be described as mixed. Along with many beautiful creations, I still have a particularly hideous double spread pieced together of enormous black and white rectangles meant to look like dominoes; another, intended for her mother-in-law, is a jarring mash-up of browns and yellows, clearly an effort to use up remnants of yarn with no regard for appearance. My mother’s artistry grew through many evenings of sitting before the television on a dark plaid couch, crocheting her way through the ten o’clock news and maybe Johnny Carson, as her husband dozed nearby in his recliner, until each of her grandchildren, when they finally arrived, was swaddled in one-of-a-kind baby blankets designed with just that child in mind. The fine, soft infant yarn of the first blanket was replaced by bolder colors and more interesting textures in the second. As each child graduated from crib to bed, he or she received a full-sized afghan. When my son was ready for his first full-sized afghan, Mom wrote a story to accompany the gift. Because she had raised only daughters and he was her only male grandchild, she never quite knew what to make of him; this storybook was possibly an attempt to mitigate the domesticity of the gift, to make it more masculine and appealing to a little boy. Stapled inside a manila folder and illustrated with awkward line drawings, it told of a native child named, with a disarming lack of political correctness, “Little Indian.” When given his first blanket, Little Indian rides his pony out on the prairie to camp under the stars, wrapped in the colors of the sunset. My son loved the afghan, with its wavy horizontal lines of cream, mauve, and dark blue; not enough happened in the story to hold his attention. I was tempted to buy those ugly placemats from Goodwill, but at this time of my life divesting makes much more sense than accumulating stuff, and it seemed unfair to inflict them on my son. He moves lightly through life, and prefers to avoid sentimental attachments to objects. Even his “Little Indian” blanket has been left behind to take its place as one of many afghans filling our closets. He can have it back any time he wants, but I will never get rid of it. Mom stopped crocheting when her eyesight began to fail, back when time still made sense to her; Alzheimer’s caused her to forget that fact. “I haven’t been crocheting much lately,” she would comment every time someone complimented her handiwork, extending the meaning of “lately” to include more than a decade. It was something she was just about to get back to, right up to the end. When we moved Mom into Cascia Hall, everyone advised us to decorate her room with familiar things that would make her feel at home. I framed dozens of pictures of family members, hauled over photo albums, hung two huge, framed embroideries she designed and stitched when I was a child, placed some of her jewelry in a box and some of her china tea-cups in a chest in the corner. And, of course, I brought in afghans. There was a cream-colored throw with matching pillows on the loveseat, a heavier granny pattern for winter in the closet; also, because it’s light-weight and no one was using it, “Little Indian’s” first blanket. This last was a favorite of the nursing home staff. When they straightened up my mother’s room, they were fond of spreading it like a coverlet, oblivious to the irony of smoothing “the colors of the sunset” on an elderly patient’s bed. But it looked good there, and it added a homey touch. The morning she died, I arrived to find her room tidied and my mother laid out in the bed, the afghan tucked up to her chin as if keeping her warm as she slept.

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