Erwin Mortier - Stammered Songbook - A Mother's Book of Hours

The calm and serenity with which she awaited the end of her life are moving and in an odd way also consoling. The days I spent alternately working on the novel and with her, and while I was writing in the garden I felt strangely “embedded” in existence.

My mother is very upset, which for us in itself, strangely enough, is reassuring; although there are days when a real conversation is no longer possible, she is more “intact” than we might sometimes think.

The funeral, after six days of not really profound grief, was more full of poignant melancholy — one can hardly call eighty-nine a case of cot death. Only after the service, in the cemetery, when the coffin lay there so alone, sunk in the grave, in the pouring rain, did I break down for a moment.

Now she rests beside my grandfather, which is a consolation, near the avenue to the château. A very beautiful part of the village where I grew up — one of the landscapes that are very dear to Lieven and me.

After the funeral meal we toured the area a bit, the woods of Alter, and the old arable lands around the Bruges canal. The rain had washed away all the dust from the previous warm days, a bluish mist hung over the countryside and everything looked so green. Ancestral ground too, because at the foot of the embankment of the canal there is still the farm where my grandmother was born. After lying empty for years the house and the animal quarters are now being restored. It did me good to see it all again. In the last few years I have gone home frequently, but almost exclusively to provide sick-care, without taking much time for long walks or thinking things over.

Now we are left with boxes and cases and the always-too-scanty messages on posthumous paper.

It comes so easily to us, speaking and writing. One word brings the next with it, one silence splits like a shell around the next. If I am in the kitchen chopping vegetables, I think of her garbled language and wonder: what must it be like in that head of yours? Do all those cells sometimes accidentally intermesh again, and is self-consciousness suddenly created? Who am I and who are you? What do I still mean to you, and who are you to me? I can no longer remember when you were still well. That’s why I hack away so recklessly at that leek.

At table, as she is drinking a glass of lemonade, it goes down the wrong way and she coughs.

I hear the timbre of her voice in her coughing.

I recognize her.

It gave me a fright, says Lieven afterwards. I suddenly heard Nelly again.

She hasn’t said anything for months.

When we told him, when we had to tell him that his wife had Alzheimer’s, he said: I want to look after her myself for as long as possible.

We’ll sort that out, we said. And we also said it was better if she herself didn’t know. Unless she gave very clear signs of an awareness that something was wrong with her.

Our doctor said: in my experience it’s better not to give relatively young Alzheimer patients the diagnosis. It’s highly likely they will develop a serious depression on top of their dementia. It’s better if she can enjoy the lucid years she has left.

We shall have to face it, we said, and together try to make the best of it.

He was silent.

Later I rang him.

We’ve eaten and now we’re watching TV, he said. Mum is lying on the sofa. She’s had a bath and already has her nightdress on and she’s nice and snug under a blanket on the sofa. Aren’t you, Mum?

Only now do I realize: the days when I call him and she stands behind him prompting him what to say, what to ask, are over.

And only now do I remember that I called her one day and she said a letter had arrived for me, and that I asked her to open it and see what it was. And that she said, yes, I will, wait. And that she hung up and never rang back.

We thought: she won’t get over it. In quick succession her father dead, her only sister dead. She herself has had cancer, fortunately detected in good time, and operations on her intestines and womb. She who prided herself on looking ten or fifteen years younger. She hadn’t been herself for a while — what does that mean, not being yourself?

When we suggested she have an examination she thought the cancer had come back and that we knew and were keeping it from her. So when I said: you haven’t got cancer, but you must realize you sometimes forget things, and that it wasn’t that bad, that there were certain to be pills for it, she was so relieved that she never thought about anything else again.

I’m glad that she had another two or three years’ carefree existence, although it leaves a bad taste to see someone disappearing into oblivion with an unsuspecting smile. We are the ones who are constantly saying goodbye to someone who is still there, and yet not.

The illness rages on. We have arranged for home care. The days of mental fog are beginning to gain the upper hand over the increasingly rare moments of relative lucidity. My father still wants to look after her himself. The disease is also wreaking havoc with her biorhythms, so that he sleeps with one eye open at night, which is untenable in the long term.

I can deal with it — or so I like to tell myself — while maintaining a warm-hearted distance, as it were. I have already said goodbye to her old self, to the woman I knew and who was my mother, once. Now I try to see her as a lively, sometimes restless, sometimes fearful child, who is playing in the recesses of a woman in her sixties and is growing back towards the very beginning.

How superficial life is. What more is a body than a handful of surfaces, piled in cavities, hung up from ribcages, bones? Iron out all those folds, lung tissue, intestinal tissue, all the convolutions of the brain, and you’re not left with much more than so many square metres of self-aware slime, a wafer-thin membrane that breathes, digests, desires and thinks.

He calls. To say she’s had a fall. She was walking behind him while he was vacuuming and tripped over the lead.

I think: why on earth are you still vacuuming, someone’s coming in to help, aren’t they? But I ask: did she hurt herself?

A nasty gash in her forehead, which needed stitches. Now she’s all black and blue, and she’s crying.

She’s been crying for a few days. When she gets up, at breakfast, when the nurse comes to wash her hair, she is quiet. Once she’s dressed it starts up. She squeaks, a soft moaning. It never stops. She comes in whining, gets up from table whining and leaves again whining on my father’s arm. She whines while she drinks lemonade. Still whining, she pushes the biscuit into her mouth.

How long will the place here in the house mean biscuit to her? It has long since ceased to mean her son, or the cats or Lieven.