Where oh where is dear little Jimmy?
Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch.
Come on girls, let’s go find him.
Pickin’ up paw-paws put ‘em in your pocket.
He came in from yard work one day
and said, “I’m done.” and never again
rode the lawnmower around his acreage
nor planted a garden next to the house.
The old vegetable patch laid fallow.
The smell of decay so faint only carrion flies sense it–
like a bruise, the paw-paw blossoms– deep maroon.
She wondered where he went in the dark,
after he learned to outsmart every alarm
when she could no longer hold sleep at bay.
She woke to find him at the kitchen sink–
his large hands scraped, forehead bloody.
Surrounded by briars, the trees grow slow. Shoots sprout
from radial roots, in the bottomland where they grew up.
No one tells him of his wife’s death,
afraid his heart will break again
every time her name is mentioned.
Her last visit was way back at Christmas,
But he doesn’t ask after his honey.
With its natural repellent, rabbits and deer pass
the plant by. But the zebra swallowtail eats the leaves.
He loses more and more of his words
in the nursing home, able to tell
you he is fine, some days able to ask
what you’re are up to out there in California,
where Santa Ana winds set wild fires.
Like the ones his daddy was paid to watch
for in the tower that rose above the trees.
Sensitive to ultraviolet rays, new trees won’t grow
back on land cleared for crops or housing developments.
He loses faces, yet knows your voice
on the phone. You find it difficult to fill
silences with tales of your ordinary days.
He hands the receiver to the nurse when you
ask. What you really want to ask how paw-paw tastes.
The green skin of ripe fruit turns black in a day or two,
such a short shelf life for a fruit so rich on the tongue.
Do you live with, suffer from, or exist alongside it subsumed by dementia? The time arrives for me to ask for cognitive screening. Let’s get a baseline reading on mental functions. Recently anxiety is my companion when I go somewhere new. I have trouble following the directions I print out. Or if I decide to take the train rather than the bus; the directions won’t work from that location. I’ve made some questionable decisions.
Whatever or wherever the state of dementia is, my father lived inside it during his final years.
Evelyn, his wife, mourned the man he had been, as if he were dead. When she visited him at the nursing home, she treated him tenderly. The conscientiously clean, well spoken, considerate person he had been was often missing. He shunned bathing, was violent with a nurse’s aide who tried to bathe him, tried to touch women in the nursing home inappropriately.
I want to believe that the essence of who he was still existed, still exists. Was he lost in a dark maze? Separated from the person he claimed to be? So much of the lives of the people we care about are inaccessible: Not just the taste of paw-paws, but all those family stories that I didn’t hear because I wasn’t listening or wasn’t there. Or because he shielded himself behind books the way I learned to.
This evening, as I experience a renewal of grief for my father: All I can offer you is words. I am sorry you are missing someone you love, someone who loved you.
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