You’ve written “How to Mourn Your Mother” in the imperative mood. Why did you settle on the second person point of view and present tense?
Second person provided distance from this emotional material … lifting it away from myself onto the shared shoulders of readers.
But also, for me, writing second person point of view accomplishes two key story strategies simultaneously. First, it draws the reader into story as accomplice, sometimes even as character. It’s a forced intimacy because the reader becomes (slips into?) the imagination and viewpoint of the narrator, they become the protagonist, collapsing the narrative distance to bring the reader into the internal thoughts of the narrator. Second—what I love most about this POV—the forced intimacy enables a writer to play up and draw attention to absurdities a narrator and a reader can share together, as if they’re colluding with each other, witnessing unfolding story events together. Simply by starting with the line “you know when …,” it mimics that same retelling of shared memories, “remember that time when we ….” In this story, I’m relaying memories about my mum, a unique person with many quirks, but because we all have mothers (present or absent and with every variation between those two poles), the use of “you” pulls the reader right in, pats them on the back and reassures we’re all the same but then goes on to play with the reader’s suspension of disbelief to unfurl a story of grief that is far from usual and, nevertheless, universal.
There are many poetic elements at play here: imagery, anaphora (in dementialand), and the volta (magical clementines!). Have you written poetry about your mother’s dementia? Did you ever think at any point that this piece wanted to switch genres?
I practice poetry but, so far, I’ve not written a poem about Mum’s dementia. My prose often incorporates poetic elements, though with this piece, I didn’t consider switching genres. For me, a poem is super focused to an experience, an emotion, an idea … with this piece I wanted to explore my own conflicting experience of mourning my mum: Her body “lives,” but the spirit and soul of mum diminishes and disappears. There are occasional sparks of “her.” It’s a special, torturous experience, grieving this way, in real time, and it’s this complexity of emotion I wanted to render, the multiplicities of feelings (humor, sorrow, bitterness, fear, joy, etc.) collaged together; a poem might not capture or wholly render this experience. Humor of course is essential for lightening the subject matter.
The anaphoric elements in this piece encompass the narrator’s journey trying to understand her loss, posing the question, almost as a call out, “Where is the mother?” and providing the answer, “In dementialand.”
There’s a lot of nudity and implied nudity in this essay. Hooray! Did you realize that you were going to be writing about so much flesh when you started?
Oh, my goodness this made me laugh! I hadn’t seen this at all until you pointed it out! But yes, it’s all over the piece isn’t it. Sometimes, with creative nonfiction, the obvious hides behind the images and metaphors and I don’t always catch them in my own writing. Thank you for noticing! I can only think this might be a metaphor for “exposure” … the narrator is being exposed to her mum’s death, but unlike the culturally accepted norm of “death” as a sudden and immediate event, the “naked truth” of dementia is that losing a loved one is slow, insidious, drawn out.
I’m curious about how much time elapsed between your mother’s being committed to a memory care facility and you writing about it. Often, memoirists are advised to let emotionally heavy events settle before writing about them. Was this the case for you?
My first reaction (with light laughter): Does life ever stop being emotionally heavy? Writing, for me, has always been a way to process my emotions and my thinking. It’s as if I need to get the intangible elements of emotion and ideas out of my body onto the page where they can be observed and queried. I admit, my ability to question my writing and accept answers revealed on the page (the “nakedness” mentioned above, for example) improves with distance from actual events.
Now that I think of this, though, it’s less of a temporal distance and more of an emotional maturity coupled with life stability. When we are safe and supported as artists, we’re able to risk deeper explorations into our pain. That’s our role … to boldly meet our pain, dialogue with it, and render it with love and attention so curious others might experience it (Prepare for it? Resonate with it? Heal with it?) from the benign safety of their recliner, chesterfield, kitchen table or bed.
Mum’s cognitive capacity declined rapidly during Covid-19. She entered long-term care in 2022. It is a tremendous relief for me to know she is safe, bathed, dressed in clean clothes, following scheduled eating and sleeping. The first draft of this piece was written in spring 2023, less than a year after she entered the dementia ward. I continued to refine this piece, off and on, into the fall of 2025, getting better at focusing my attention to its movement of emotional energy and practicing playing with that to craft the experiences for readers.
Throughout the essay, you dispense advice that the reader infers is self-given; the narrator is also the “you,” being addressed. As you went through the process of mourning your mother, where did you find advice that helped you? How could we do better at supporting dementia patients and their families?
I could write a dissertation about how we could improve support for dementia patients, their families, starting by investing in prevention. Helpful advice for this special type of mourning? Be sensitive to it … open space for grief, begin a conversation, ask, How are you? so the grief-stricken don’t endure this living loss in isolation with stoic silence.
