The Days She Does Not Know Your Name

Twenty to four on a Wednesday, and the sun is coming in low across the day room floor, and Marion is doing the thing where she reads her mother's face before she sits down.

She has got very good at it. There is a version of her mother that looks up and the eyes go on like a light, and there is a version where the eyes travel over her the way they travel over the tea trolley, politely, without landing. Today it is the second one. Marion knew from the doorway. She knew from the doorway and she came in anyway and put the tin of sweets on the side table and said, brightly, hello you.

Her mother says hello back. She is perfectly pleasant. She has always been pleasant to strangers; it is one of the things Marion loves about her and today it is the thing that is quietly taking her apart.

They talk about the window. They talk about a woman across the room in a green cardigan who is apparently a nuisance. At one point her mother pats Marion's wrist and says, kindly, are you one of the girls who does the afternoons?

Marion says, something like that.

She has stopped correcting her. She used to correct her. She used to say Mum, it is me, it is Marion, and watch her mother's face work at it and go frightened, and then she would have to spend twenty minutes settling somebody down whom she had frightened for the sake of being known. She stopped doing that about a year ago. It was the right decision. It cost her something she has never put a name to.

At half past four she gets in the car and does not start it for a while.

And you are already ahead of me, because you have sat in that car park.

You know the reading of the face from the doorway. You know the particular exhaustion of being warm and cheerful at somebody for ninety minutes while a small clean grief goes on underneath it. You know that you are mourning a person who is sitting up in a chair eating a boiled sweet, and that there is nowhere to put that, and no casserole comes for it.

You have driven home wondering what the point of you is, if the one person you are doing this for cannot tell that you came.

Somebody is holding her when you are not in the room

I am not going to tell you this gets easier, and I am not going to tell you what happens to your mother. I do not know, and I would not trade your trust for a comfortable sentence. What I have for you instead is written, and it is older than that ward and steadier than my sympathy, and His Spirit is what brings it into a day room at twenty to four in the afternoon.

Let me name the pit first, properly, because you have not let anybody do that for a while.

You are grieving without a funeral. Everything that helps a person through a loss is unavailable to you: there is no date, there is no service, nobody brings food, and the world quite reasonably assumes that because she is alive, nothing has happened. Meanwhile you go every Wednesday and hand over ninety minutes to someone who cannot receive them, and then you drive home and there is no one to tell, and you cannot even say you are sad because saying it out loud feels like a complaint about your own mother. None of that is a failure in you. The written word does not call a griever with no funeral a lesser griever, and the Spirit has never once looked at those ninety minutes the way you look at them on the drive home.

And underneath all of that there is a question you have not asked anybody, because it sounds monstrous. Does any of this count if she cannot remember it?

Here is God, speaking to a whole people who had gone past the point of holding themselves up.

Even to old age I am He, and to grey hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will surely carry and I will deliver.Isaiah 46:4

Four verbs in two lines, and every one of them belongs to Him. Made. Bear. Carry. Deliver.

Notice who is doing the work in that sentence, and notice who is not being asked to contribute anything at all, not even memory. The people He is talking to have nothing left to bring. That is the entire point. He is not saying hold on and I will meet you halfway to old age. He is saying: I carried you out of the womb and I am carrying you into the gray hair, and the carrying was never yours.

That applies to her. And read it again, slowly, because it applies to you too, and you have been reading it only for her for a long time. Isaiah 46:4 was spoken over the carriers as much as the carried, and His Spirit is pressing it toward the one who is still sitting in a car park at half past four, not starting the engine.