Tag: dementia

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Excited Utterance

We’re in CVS, picking up lipstick and Fig Newtons and suddenly my mother shouts: “HOW MANY DAYS DO I HAVE LEFT?” Her voice is piercing, frightened, all caps.

It wasn’t her first startling outburst. She’s living an unfiltered life lately: half-disrobing in a parking lot; loudly commenting, mid-sermon, on how cold church is. In her pre-dementia days, she was outspoken, airing her conservative politics at the island general store where she’d shopped for decades. When Alzheimer’s took root, she withdrew from the community, aware she was—as she put it—“less than her brilliant self.”

I was alarmed at first, at this recent return to speaking her mind. Yet, last week when she shouted, “WHAT SHOULD WE DO RIGHT NOW?” the pastor never missed a beat of his sermon. I held her hand and, like everything else these days, rolled with it.

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Free Fall

Second in the series “A Trilogy of Morning Pages”

“What should I write in here?” a girlfriend asks, of the blank journal I’ve given her to celebrate six months of sobriety.

“Something. Anything. Everything,” I respond. “Write as if no one were reading. Hate. Love. Anger. Gratitude. Write as if your life depends on it.”

This is how I write each morning, as I begin the Morning Pages.

Aside from brewing a pot of French press, I do nothing, read nothing prior to writing. Freedom flows best when you’re propelled by the unconscious rather than down the avenues of distraction.

Fall awake in your Pages. Transform an overheard conversation into dialogue for a short story. Describe a character that didn’t exist until this moment. Write from the lens of your six-year-old self; from the tangled mind of a demented mother.

Write not for accolades or prizes. Write to understand.

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Write On

You write because you can’t imagine life without writing. You write because you can’t imagine life as a writer. You write because at eight years old, you told everyone you were going to be a writer. You write because you don’t think you’re good enough. And then you write because you are enough.

You write to give meaning to a life beyond sales calls and quotas. You write to quash self-doubt. You write 140-word blog posts to remember who your mother was before she forgot who you were. You write a novel because fiction creates a world of escape.

You write because you dream about writing and the story awakens you.

You write when you can’t wait to write, and you write when you don’t want to. You write in notebooks with different colored ink marking your mood, after a shot of nicotine courage in pre-dawn darkness. You write on your laptop. On your phone. On grocery receipts.

You write because you’re an addict and the page is now your bottle. You write every day now that you’re sober, because when you drank you wrote shit, if even at all.

You write to help others. You write to give purpose to passion. You write because that is what a writer does.