Writing to a Mother Who Can't Read Anymore
The letters pile up beside her bed, and I keep writing them.
Every Sunday night I write a letter to a woman who stopped being able to read in March. Every Thursday it arrives at Sunrise Care Home, Ward 2, and joins the pile beside her bed, because neither of us knows how to stop.
My mother taught fourth standard for thirty one years. She was the kind of teacher who corrected the milkman's bill for grammar. When I was seven she returned a birthday card I made her with a red pen mark on it, because "birthday" had lost its h somewhere, and then she stuck it on the fridge anyway, error and all, where it stayed for a decade as either a lesson or an apology. With her it was always hard to tell which.
She is the reason I write. She read to me before I understood words, in that voice teachers keep for after school, softer, off duty. She used to say reading was the one country nobody could deport you from.
Then, three years ago, the recipes started coming out wrong. Salt twice, sugar never. Then names went... mine among the first, which everyone tells you not to take personally and everyone who tells you that has never watched their mother introduce them as "this nice girl who visits."
Reading went last, and it went strangely. She didn't forget the letters. They stopped holding still for her. "The words are birds now," she told the doctor, matter of fact, a teacher reporting a classroom discipline problem. "They won't sit."
The doctor wrote something down.
I went to the car park and screamed with the windows up.
I started the letters that same week... I am not entirely sure why. Phone calls had become weather reports from a country she was leaving, and visits had a way of ending with her polite and puzzled, waiting for the nice girl to go home. But a letter is patient. A letter doesn't need her to perform recognition on a schedule. A letter can sit beside the bed and wait for a good hour, and dementia does still hand out good hours, at random, like a broken vending machine that occasionally gives you back your coin.
So I write to her about the weather like a Victorian. I write about the mango man who overcharges me exactly the way he overcharged her. I write about my daughter's exam results, her granddaughter, whom she calls "the small one" on good days... and nothing at all on the others. The nurse, Priya, reads the letters to her when the ward is quiet. Sometimes my mother listens the way you listen to rain. Sometimes she corrects Priya's pronunciation, thirty one years of fourth standard rising up through the fog like a lighthouse that doesn't know the war is over.
I assumed, for the first year, that the letters were for her.
Then last winter, while looking for her spectacles in the cupboard she insists on keeping locked, I found the shoebox.
Forty or so envelopes, rubber banded, unstamped, unsent. All addressed in her schoolteacher copperplate to my grandmother, who died in 1994. "Dear Amma," they began, every one of them. The earliest was dated two weeks after the funeral. The latest was from four years ago, just before her own words turned into birds. Thirty years of letters to a woman who could not read them, written by the woman I was now writing to, and I sat on the floor of her old bedroom and understood that I had not invented anything. I had inherited it, the way I inherited her nose and her temper and her habit of correcting menus.
In one of them she told her dead mother she was afraid of exactly what is happening to her now. In another she apologised for things I never knew about. She wrote to Amma the things she never said across a kitchen counter, and I recognised the move, because my letters had been drifting the same way. Less weather. More confession. Somewhere in year two I had stopped writing news and started writing the things you only say to someone who can't flinch: that I was sorry for the silent years in my twenties, that I understood her better now that I packed lunches myself, that the red pen on my birthday card had made me a writer and it had taken me forty years to say thank you for it.
You do not write to be read. Some letters are just a way of keeping someone's name warm.
A therapist would have things to say about my family, two generations of women posting letters into the dark. Let her. I have read about families that shout and families that write, and I know which house I grew up in. We were never good at saying things across a table. We were always good at ink.
One of the letters refused to stay a letter. It kept compressing itself, losing its "Dear Ma," turning into short lines about her hands, the red pen, the birds. I typed it up and posted it on a community wall for poets, mostly at midnight, mostly to get it out of my chest. By morning there were replies from strangers. A man in Kerala who writes to his father's photograph. A girl of nineteen already writing to a grandmother who forgets her. I had thought we were a private shame, my mother and I...
It turns out we are a genre.
The pile beside her bed is taller than her water jug now. Priya offered once to clear the older ones away and I heard myself say no so sharply that I apologised twice.
The letters stay. All of them. That is not negotiable... and I couldn't have told you why until last month.
Last month I visited on a Tuesday and she was sitting up, holding one of my envelopes, unopened. She wasn't trying to read it. She was running her thumb over the front, over the handwriting, slowly... the way you check if a currency note is real.
"My daughter wrote this," she said.
She did not know my face. My face sat there in the visitor's chair being a nice girl. But her thumb moved across the loops of my handwriting, the handwriting she built, red pen stroke by red pen stroke, in a fourth standard classroom before either of us knew what it was for, and something older than memory stood up in her and testified.
"She has my hand," my mother said, to me, about me. "I taught her that."
Then she asked if I would read it to her, the one from her daughter.
So I did. I sat in the visitor's chair and read my own letter out loud to my mother, and my voice held until the last line, which was the same last line every letter has and the reason none of them can ever be thrown away. Seven words she once wrote forty times to her own unreachable mother, and which I will apparently keep writing until one of us runs out of Sundays.
"I'll write again next week. Sit still."
On the way home I bought stamps. A whole sheet. The words are birds now, but I know my mother. She would want them fed.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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