On Runaway Horses

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One of my most cherished photographs is of my mother. She is standing in front of a white picket fence, her arm outstretched as she reaches for the neck of a horse, its chestnut coat resplendent in the brilliant light of the noon-day sun, its eyes fixed forwards towards the lens. Her face is bathed in shadow, eyes closed gently, her mouth pulled into a beatific smile; she is gazing at the horse with a degree of affection so immense as to be palpable across decades, across time. She is young, beautiful. My father told me that he calls her “deerest” because her gentle nature and soft features remind him of a doe. Looking at her here, I can see her as she must’ve appeared to him 30 years prior, graceful and innocent, a resident of a world more serene and peaceable than our own. 

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Two winters ago, my mother was formally diagnosed with dementia. It had been apparent that she had not been well for some time. How long remains unknown, but I can first recall entertaining the idea as far back as the beginning of high school. It took until my freshman year of college before the countless batteries of tests, conducted furtively by a revolving cast of neurologists and other medical professionals, provided some semblance of an answer. The five years in between were marked by countless conjectures and anxious speculation though, when the actual diagnosis came, it amounted to an anti-climax, producing nothing more than a sense of exhausted resignation. Shortly afterward I left school, citing a ‘medical leave’ as my reason, though I didn’t specify the ailment. When your world hangs on a simple admission, there are limits to what you can disclose.

Dementia is a disease that rarely seems to be discussed openly, reserved instead for somber exchanges conducted in hushed tones, one for whom clandestine recognition seems to be more appropriate than any kind of candid acknowledgment. I can recall gingerly attempting to broach the subject with close friends, expecting nothing more than a solemn admission of understanding, hoping not to provoke any outward display of sympathies or sentimental comments.  In retrospect, I view this as nothing but a futile attempt to forestall my own acceptance of my mother’s condition though, at the time, the sheer enormity seemed to be enough of a deterrent for it to remain concealed. 

During high school, when it was not yet wholly evident that she was sick, I was able to escape the confines of my house by exploiting her deteriorating memory, constructing and maintaining an elaborate, shifting mirage of lies that almost always resulted in securing my departure. I would go off and either get drunk or high, though oftentimes both, confident that any indiscretions would be completely ignored, if not forgotten entirely. Each successful dupe only served to further embolden me and I began bragging to friends about how my mother’s inability to recall my location was a tremendous boon, a fail-safe means of assuring access to the sheer ecstasy of youthful ribaldry. Parties, drugs and the allure of unbridled hedonism suddenly opened themselves to me and I dove headfirst, seemingly oblivious to any repercussions I might face or indignities I might endure. 

My father, a professor at a local university, did his best to intervene. I can recall sitting silently in the ochre armchair in our living room, my face flushed with shame, as he attempted to caution me about my future. If you continue down this path, he would say, his tone stern, your aspirations will escape your grasp. My only response was to nod my head glumly in disgrace; he knew I sought to emulate his career and figured, rather astutely, that the force of confrontation with my failings might do more to discourage me than meting out punishment.

Whatever sense of shame these conversations conjured never lasted long. Within the week, I was back to engaging in the very behaviors I had sought to swear off, yet the ecstasy that once accompanied these escapades grew dull and exhausted. At times, it would disappear almost completely, leaving me vulnerable to those suppressed anxieties and existential crises associated with the realm of adolescence. I vividly remember a morning in early October, sitting in the back of a friend’s car in a drunken stupor, while he and another friend cried hysterically outside in the cold, hugging each other, all of us overwhelmed by our newfound impotence in the face of an increasingly uncaring and capricious world. Never in these moments did I ever consider my mother, only the fear that, upon returning home, she would see through the mirage and that I would finally be held accountable for my duplicity; I, of course, never was. 

If I was not seeking to take advantage of her memory lapses, I was berating her for them. I remember trips to the supermarket, where her inability to recall the contents of the grocery list would prove so exasperating that I would eventually take to admonishing her, my voice rising as I picked up item after item, occasionally thrusting my arm out as if to emphasize to her their presence. All of it was in vain; the inquiries would begin again no more than thirty seconds later. Our disputes could become so contentious that, on the car ride home, the only sounds that could be heard were the soft electric whir of my mother’s Ford C-Max or the soft babble of the radio; rarely did either of us attempt to apologize.

Sometimes I would complain to friends, taking the opportunity to voice my frustrations to sympathetic ears but often, in the gentle quiet of my childhood bedroom, I would lay on my bed, my backside cloaked in the soft fabric of my dotted comforter, and reflect silently on our spats, my gaze moving listlessly across the bright blue of my walls. I tended to approach them with a degree of indifference, my thoughts provoking nothing more than a pang of guilt or the brief stirring of the dying coals of my once-fierce indignation. I could sense that her behavior was abnormal though, whenever I seriously thought about it, I could never remember when this wasn’t the norm. It was as if every single moment of my life with her had, in some way, always involved the difficult act of accommodating her absentmindedness, its presence subliminally dictating the contours of our every interaction.

I increasingly found myself struggling to contend with growing anxiety about her condition; the indifference that had initially colored my engagement with her deteriorating memory began to fade, replaced instead by a palpable sense of worry. By the beginning of my junior year, my mother had begun seeing a neurologist. My questions about her well-being were often answered perfunctorily, evasively, hinting towards an internal turmoil that was only just beginning to spill outside the narrow confines of her person. She would exit her home office late in the evening, her face darkened and gaunt, her typically effervescent disposition having long disappeared. Her work life suffered and with it her mood, leading to a pronounced rise in verbal altercations. My father and I struggled to adjust, our exasperation giving way to resignation as her memory issues slowly infected the fabric of our household. At the same time, she began to withdraw into a world lit solely by the images of the television screen, absentmindedly consuming films and reality television, a far cry from the woman who, in my youth, voraciously read Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë. Whenever I looked at her through the door, gazing rapturously at those images, all I saw was someone who looked unfathomably tired, a shell of the person I once knew. 

Despite this, my first impulse remained to berate her. Instead of contenting myself to merely endure these changes, I sought to dispute any possibility that she was truly in a state of decline. I became even more combative than when her lapses had merely provoked an exasperated comment or two. I would vigorously contradict her claims of forgetfulness, an activity that oftentimes bore little distinction from mirthful condescension; If my cruelty betrayed any sense of anguish or distress, it wasn’t evident.

 I remember a protracted verbal assault against her for failing to recall the directions to the movie theater while my friends, whom she’d been tasked with picking up, sat in the back in stunned silence, too horrified to intervene. There may’ve been one tepid request for me to stop, a suggestion that a GPS was a far simpler solution than embarking upon a tirade against a woman made impotent by the capriciousness of fate’s cruel hand, but it probably would’ve done nothing to stem the tide of my indignation. I recall my voice quavering as I admonished her, my belligerence suffused with anguish, my pleas bordering upon hysteria. I was cruel to my mother. I have tried to forgive myself but I can’t. There is still too much guilt, a lingering sense that I can never fully atone for such indiscretions borne of this paradoxical impulse. 

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When I think of my mother now, over two years removed from her diagnosis, it is these incidents that remain fixed in my memory, bobbing gently along the surface of my mind while I struggle in vain to dredge up memories untainted by her condition. My few successes have only ever been fleeting, producing fragments so faint that they dissolve almost as quickly as they cohere. Every other memory is appended with an asterisk, liable to awaken regrets now long buried. 

I believe this is why I have come to cherish that photograph of her petting the horse. I have never known the woman in the picture, but I wish I did. Here she exists without deformity, unblemished by disease, full of a vivacity almost absent from my memories of her. The few photos of her in my phone’s camera roll all possess this quality; here she is, lovingly curled around my father; another sees her standing beside a family friend, the two smiling as they peer over an elaborately decorated wrought iron fence, their faces beaming in the harsh Spanish sun; in yet another, she and I smile while seated atop horses, the mountains of Northern Ecuador unfurling behind us. Every time I look at them I can, for a brief moment, see her as she was before her diagnosis, see her as I long for her to exist for me. 

Yet, I remain resentful, bitter that all those joyous moments do not reside within my mind, that they can only remain on a screen or within the bindings of a photo album. It has been said that the linkage between photography and memory is reflective of its failure. To a certain extent, I agree. We are no longer asked to form memories or even truly required to do so; instead, we content ourselves with digital representations, images indelibly etched in cyberspace yet no longer tangible to our minds. The phone, with its capacity to capture everything instantaneously, has become, even more so than the photo album, our memory bank; all we can recall now is the act of producing the image, nothing more. 

Maybe this is all too cynical, but I am not one to content myself with remembering someone I love solely through pictures. When I was younger, I would ask her to recall moments from her childhood and she vividly recounted episodes featuring her family’s horses, the wooded countryside that surrounded her house in the Catskills, the love she held for her mother, who tragically passed when she was 19. Even now, some word or phrase can set her febrile memory alight and, as if by magic, she will be transported back in time, back to a world I’ve only encountered through images, back to that innocent young woman petting the horse. All I have to remember her by are those images on my phone, images that speak so much but convey so little.