Taking Norma Home
“I want to go home,” she says impatiently, as if we've been dawdling on our way toward some really vital destination. “Let's go. Let's go,” she urges. I wonder if she's dreaming.
The elements of dreams have always fascinated me—not because I think they foretell anything but because they reveal things that have affected us but which may never have risen to a conscious level. And, yes, I have heard of Freud, but I'm not talking just about the manifestations of traumatic injuries. I also mean the sleep-transformed residue of everyday minutiae, like tripping over a shoelace or seeing a marble on the ground.
“I want to go home.”
Listening to Norma speak—haltingly and elliptically for the most part—I'm beginning to wonder if Alzheimer's isn't just a dimming dream from which the victim never awakens, but which nonetheless makes sense on a deep level. Sometimes when I emerge from a dream, I hastily jot down everything I remember from it. And when I do, I find I can trace virtually every twisted component to something that's happened in past day or so, quite often things that were marginal at the time. Could it be that dynamic that tugs at Norma?.
“I want to go home.”
Telling her we're already home means nothing to her. Asking her where home is yields nothing, Is it a place, a time, a feeling too vaporous to grasp but too solid to pull back past that needle's eye through which her life is now threaded?
She's had so many homes during our long, ragtag trudge toward oblivion. She was born and grew up in the idyllically named village of Apple Grove, Ohio, right at the edge of the Ohio River. Her parents owned a little grocery store that sat directly across the two-lane country road from the Apple Grove Locks. That's where all the boats and barges plying that section of the river had to pass through, Some of the river traffic was especially memorable to her, such as the the circuits of the showboat Majestic and the massive Delta Queen passenger palace.
When we were first getting to know each other, she regaled me with tales of going to sleep to the myriad sounds of the river. She was only six years old when World War II ended, but she recalled the time a boat stopped to lock through and several men in military uniforms came up the embankment to the store to buy snacks. Even now, when I prompt her about it, she says she remembers. The store, the locks, a white one-room Methodist church and a few dwellings constituted the whole of Apple Grove. But the locks have long-since been closed, the grocery story and church torn down and many of the dwellings consumed by a deep an ever growing gravel pit.
Is that the home she longs for?
Or is it the home in the college town of Findlay, Ohio, to which we brought our first child? Or the courtrooms in Bowling Green, Ohio, and Charleston, West Virginia, where our two sons and a second daughter were declared legally ours (having been emotionally ours from the time we first held them)? Maybe it's the elation she felt when she sold her first photographs or published her first book.
Perhaps it's something like “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane—an object or experience outlived, cast aside and apparently forgotten—only to emerge from the dark at life's last breathing. A mother's song that lulled her to sleep. A dog that always met her at the door. A ring that fit like a vow.