Purple Prose by Liz Byrski

remembers something is irrelevant. We all assume something like an inner camera recording experience and laying down memories is what makes an experience worthwhile. That is not really true. Long before the capacity for language or explicit memory develops, a very young child feels pleasure at a mother’s embrace and the warmth and bright pricking light of a sunbeam, long before they can put a name to the sensation or canremember what happens. The
feeling
of what happens – benign, pleasurable, vibrant, or angry, cold, hard – can be enough. For an older adult losing their memory, the ‘feeling of what happens’ is again enough, even as they may not remember actual events. Our relation to experience can even be corrupted by the idea we must remember what happens or it is not worthwhile. And yet the consequences of good experiences are there. Without exactly being conscious of it at the time, I realise later my visits have been not only busy with practical aspects of care, but purposive in another way. I want my mother to inhabit that part of herself where she experiences being fully alive to the world. The best way, I have discovered through trial and error, is to give her music and take her out into nature. Out here in the vast, unending landscape of the Whipstick forest, there are no complaints.
    If I were on an imaginary psychoanalyst’s couch, doing a word association, the word which would fly out of my mouth at the prompt of the word purple would be
fidelity
.

    The next word would be
grief
. I first really knew when she held up a standard kitchen grater that she had been using for eighty years and said, ‘What
is
this?’ I paused from packing away the shopping, lifting my head out of the vegetable drawer of the fridge. I was staring at it, staring at her. The world wheeled sideways and for the briefest of moments the shock made time slow. The room went dark and then came back into focus. She was still waiting for my answer. Then I mustered a frozen smile and deliberately changed my voice so it did not register the inward shock, the
‘Oh no,’
and instead spoke in the rueful tone of humorous indulgence we might use for a loved one’s everyday foibles. ‘Mum,’ I said, as if amused, ‘
that
is a grater.’ I made light of it. But later sitting in the car I covered my face with my hands and wept, giving full recognition to the meaning of not just that moment, but all the other moments of her growing thinner and thinner before I took over meal production, of sand torepel ants spread all over the kitchen benches, of multiple phone calls and visits to sort out leaking roofs and simple maintenance, of minor car accidents and getting lost trying to find the street of her book club that she had been going to for many years. My highly intelligent mother was losing her memory.
    Old age is a whole other countryside. Like small children at the beginning of the life cycle, people around an old person need to mobilise for their care and, as I have done many times in my life, I swing my full attention to my mother. In old age, however, it is more a case of un-development – of growing backwards, as one capacity after another becomes compromised, attenuated or disappears. I found myself open-mouthed, astonished, taken by surprise yet again as, one by one, an ability – to pay bills, or drive safely, or clean or clothe herself – disappeared. Long before the grater incident, I tried to stop my mother from doing much driving, especially long trips. We lived hours away from her, so I either travelled up to the country town where she lived or she came down by train to see me. The train trips have ceased. The reason is that, one day, outside the huge Southern Cross station in Melbourne, rather than wait for me to park and accompany her, she suddenly leapt out of the car, and scampered across the peak hour traffic in Flinders Street against a red light, taxis and cars