The Minutes Before the Day: A Caregiver's Meditation on Being Awake

Time is an Illusion

My mom has Alzheimer’s.

Caregiving for my mom in a sense is caregiving for my very soul. My identity. It rips me from my habitat and drops me in a place so eerily familiar, but somehow totally foreign, a hologram of what was mine. Where the veil of linear time is lifted so unceremoniously. So plainly exposed. None of these seconds are connected to each other, not really. Every moment is its moment.

Memory is an allusion to the illusion of time. Our souls are absolute.

On the surface, I experience caregiving for my mom like spending a weekend in a stranger’s home, doing a job I didn’t interview for, but simply found myself in.

Returning Home

But it’s not a stranger’s home. It’s where I grew up. My childhood home. The collection of physical space and energy that cradled my most visceral and delicate and formative first eighteen years of my life. Everything that makes up the very foundation of who I am and how and why I move in the world today.

And the person I felt the most connected to during that time in my life

Is right there with me and

Doesn’t know my name.

The Fractured Seconds

There is a schedule, and there are chores. And then, there are all the sacred little flashes of fractures of seconds in between. The fractured seconds. The stroke of the back of a hand. My fingers in her hair cause her shoulders to drop subtly. The hint of a sigh escapes. We dance in the kitchen. Her body answers my moving body by swaying along.

Love you. … yeah.

It occurred to me that her state is similar to sleepwalking. She is completely elsewhere. A different reality, in total. A complete and fully featured parallel reality that makes perfect sense only to those living within it—and a reality which does not allow anyone else to join. She’s stranded in there, an orphan, finding her way. I reach out through the seam of fog curling in the space between which our realities nestle together—near, but separate. Extending my hand, hoping she takes it without thinking, only feeling. I’m given no static set of rules, no prescription for the right thing to say or do, to connect to her in that place where her consciousness resides. No rules, because they continually change. What works, what reaches her, and what doesn’t, changes from one moment to the next.

Memory in the Body

But I find that, while her linear memory is “broken,” she does have an indelible and corporal sense of memory, of who she is. Because the essence of who she is and knows herself to be doesn’t live in her failing neural processes. It lives in her body. She is experiencing her identity as a cumulative sum of past experiences—but not in the way we experience this accumulation as a timeline. Not ordered, from the child we were to the adult we became. She is simply all of herself, all of the time. She is simultaneously an inquisitive toddler, a playfully defiant teen, a career educator, a mother. A grandmother. Lynne Lee. All of it, all of the time. The order doesn’t matter.

She tried to eat a feather today.

She’s been in good spirits, and saying cute things.

I gave her a goofy little dance and a wink, and she said I remind her of Eric.

The Seam of Fog

And so we find our fleeting connections through that seam of fog between which our realities nestle together in a different kind of memory. Not this prefrontal cortex thinking about existing. The existing itself, in the body. I can ask Mom to sit down, and I may as well have asked her to solve the Hodge Conjecture. But if I sit in front of her, and gesture just so, at just the right time… if I place my hands on her hips and gently draw her downward… her body responds. Her muscle memory persists. Who she is and has always been exists, in each fractured second, in each of her cells, imprinted on amino acid chains spiraling in double helix, spinning within her, here, now, free of the painful illusion of linear time.

The memories that persist aren’t stored in or drawn from that same place, as we raise our hand before our foreheads and gesture at the swimming air just there, where we might pull a recollection. They are stored in our very cellular structure. They immerse in you, and they immerse you. The first sandcastle you ever built isn’t a recollection of a photo, an image of a moment. It was that moment. Immersively, soaked into your senses. It was the sun prickling at your left shoulder, sea breeze sweeping across your cheek as wisps of your hair whipped against your eyelashes and tickled your nose. The wet sand sticking in lumps between your toes, the way the roughness of that shell-riddled sand scratched at your elbow as you reached your bare arm across the cool earth. The smell of seaweed slapped across the driftwood as you gazed up to find your father lifting it to build you a fort.

Mom still has all of those fractured seconds and sensations, cumulative, flowing through her, holding her up in the world as she continues to be. Lynne Lee.

And so she reminds me to be.

Morning Reflections

She sleeps in most mornings. Those golden mornings, where your time, whatever that is, belongs to you again for a couple of savored hours. Enough time to smell your coffee on a breeze of petrichor against damp concrete while sitting on the back steps. Gazing at nothing, pausing before standing, ordering your thoughts. Enough time to turn the page, literally in the caregiving log: a new day of meds, of chores. Tidy and reset. A deep breath before it’s time to help her out of bed again.