This is a poem to remember August evenings, summer, travel, dreams, hope, death, grief, rebirth, longing, flight, sunsets, and my mother’s imagination and spirit which live on in me and which I hope will infect/inspire anyone who reads this and the words that follow.
On an August night in 2015, as I ate supper on the porch of the house I rented at the time, I glimpsed a white line above the sunset horizon. A tsunami of emotion swept through me and I began to cry. It was one of those chest-heaving, choking kinds of cries, the ones accompanied by lots of fat rolling tears.
I was reminded of the many summer evenings Mom and I had sat on the deck at the back of her big red brick house on the hill eating salad made with greens fresh from her garden. A steady stream of night flights to Europe invariably flew overhead as we dined. She always remarked on the planes, and when the dementia began to take hold each one of the dozen or so that crossed the twilight sky became the one to London, the one I would take when I left to go back to Dubai.
In the years before my 2011 return to Canada, I spoke with Mom almost daily on the phone. At the end of every call she would ask me when I was coming “home.”If my visit was imminent, she would be ecstatic: “I can’t wait to see you!” Otherwise she would rue: “Oh. Not before then? I’d hoped it would be sooner…”
When I saw the stream of vapour on that August night in 2015, I was flooded with sadness for all the times she must have looked to the sky when I wasn’t there, thought of me and prayed for my safe return. I imagined all the times, as the dementia progressed, that she was terrified to be alone in the big house by herself.
Eventually she got her wish, but not in the way she would have wanted or expected. After the tears abated, I wrote this poem:
night flights to london
by punkie
tonight as i ate
shrimp salad on rye
i noticed the streak
of a jet in the sky
i choked on a thought
and started to cry:
“life! leave me alone,
let sleeping dogs lie.”
i remembered the days
when we supped in the back
with the sun sinking low
until all had turned black
we drank and we laughed
and we had a good crack
“look punkie,” you’d say
as you gave me some flack:
“there’s the night flight
to london up in the sky
i wonder who’s on it
for what, whom and why?
i wish we could go there,
do you think we might try
to travel afar one day
you and i?”
“that would be fun mom”
i agreed in reply
while i sipped on fine wine
with a tear in my eye
“we’ll go in september,”
i told a white lie,
“your birthday is then
and a ticket i’ll buy.”
a moment passed close
then a lifetime, then two
as we sat in the dusk
with the deer and the dew
we pretended in silence
our dreams might come true
how else could we manage
to make our way through?
“look punk, it’s there!
look up in the sky —
the night flight to london
that goes on to dubai
i can’t help but miss you
when i see it on high,
why can’t you just stay
right here by my side?”
god granted your wish
though not how you thought
dementia delivered it
then left us to rot
but we turned the tables
and twisted the plot
to find healing and joy
in the battles we fought
now it’s just me
with chablis and blue sky
my appetite lost for
shrimp salad on rye
i weep at white tails
of night flights that fly
all headed for london
then on to dubai
My Alzheimer's Story 