The Woman who Forgot Him

 

There are places that smell of bleach, antiseptic and hell. They are where the broken minds live.

Hospitals know how to make hope sound possible. Within reach. They soften words until they no longer resemble the things they describe. 

They don't speak of electricity passing through the brain. They speak of treatment. They don't speak of memories being washed away. They speak of temporary side effects.

Temporary.

What an elegant word.

Dr Jimmy's mother believed salvation lived inside a machine. And the house of God.

Schizoaffective disorder. 

Bipolar type. 

Labels written neatly inside a folder while something immeasurably human sat across the desk, exhausted. 

She, his Mother, had fought her own mind for so long that when they offered her oblivion disguised as relief, she reached for it with both hands.

She wanted silence.

Who could blame her?

The voices had stalked her for years. They whispered that she was filthy. Worthless. Unlovable. They criticised every breath she took, every room she entered, every mirror she dared to glance into. She wrote about them in secret, as though placing them onto paper might finally convince someone they were real.

She spent a lifetime asking the same question.

*Why do they hate me so much?*

Nobody ever answered.

So one morning they travelled together.

The hospital was impossibly bright, as though light had become another instrument.  Dr Jimmy remembered waiting. Waiting is the cruellest occupation. You measure time not by minutes but by fear.

Eventually they wheeled her back towards him.

She was sitting in a wheelchair.

Her eyes...

He searched for the words grand enough to contain that moment, but there were none.

She looked through him.

Not at him.

Through him.

Her head tilted gently, like a curious child examining a stranger.

"Who is this?"

The sentence was an almighty punch to his gut.

"Mom... it's me."

Nothing.

No recognition.

No smile.

Only confusion wearing his mother's face.

He was assured memories often drift away before returning.

Bits and pieces first.

Then most of them.

Then life resumes.

Except life didn't resume.

 It simply continued without the person who once inhabited it.

She never came back.

She died believing he was still a teenager.

The man he became never existed for her.

Every achievement disappeared before he could place it into her hands. Every heartbreak remained untold. Every joke was heard for the first time, over and over again. Every coffee became an introduction.

He was mourning someone who was still breathing.

He watched himself become a ghost inside his own mother's mind.

That is a peculiar kind of bereavement.

The dead eventually stop changing.

Memory loss keeps killing the same person repeatedly.

People asked whether he knew his mother.

The truthful answer was..

Not really.

He knew fragments.

He knew diagnoses.

He knew medications lined across kitchen counters. Empty whisky bottles hidden beneath the cushions.

He knew appointments.

He knew disappearances.

But he didn't know the girl she had been before illness colonised her thoughts. He didn't know what made her laugh when nobody was watching. He didn't know who had broken her heart, what dreams she buried, who she wanted to become before the voices convinced her she deserved nothing.

She remained an unfinished book.

Only after she died did she begin speaking.

Boxes appeared.

Journals.

College essays.

Children's stories written in looping handwriting.

Words she had hidden from everyone.

There she was.

Not the patient.

Not the diagnosis.

Not the woman disappearing in front of him.

Just... his mother.

Brilliant.

Whimsical.

Terrified.

Funny.

A writer.

He recognised himself inside those pages long before he recognised himself in the mirror.

The inheritance she left him wasn't money.

It was sentences.

And buried beneath every paragraph was the same invisible plea.

*Please understand me.*

I think he finally does.

Memory is an untidy thing.

It carries shame beside joy.

Trauma beside tenderness.

Love beside grief.

We spend our lives trying to escape painful memories without realising they're stitched to the beautiful ones.

Pull hard enough at one thread...

...and the whole tapestry begins to unravel.

 Some people reach a point where every door has closed.

 Memories are not simply recordings stored inside the skull.

They are where mothers live.

Where children remain children.

Where love recognises its own face.

Electricity can quiet a storm.

Sometimes...

It also extinguishes the lighthouse.

And somewhere, in a room that no longer exists except inside him, a woman looks at her own Son and asks,

"Who are you?"

And he has been asking himself that question ever since.