VALEDICTION
Speech has asked to take a break from me, while I plead like a lovesick co-ed for it to stay.
This breakup is happening as my devoted mother has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Like, I admit uncomfortably, her devoted mother before her.
Meanwhile, as a corollary of sorts, the words I once would have used to share this news
are leaving too.
Every day a new word gives me it’s two week notice. Bags packed, they wait by the door. The ebullient, effortless chatter of youth is gone. The tireless banter of halcyon days is slipping away from my mother’s only daughter.
Specific word necessities —
bifurcate, paradox, hypotenuse,
important pronouns —
Elie Wiesel, Pangaea, Liz Lemon,
and English language jewels —
jitterbug, sassafras, nincompoop
— are no longer around mid-sentence when I need them.
Language, it seems, is breaking up with me. Not only the inability to adopt new or specialized language —
firewall, rubric, sepsis
— but the unconscious ability to draw on the basics quickly —
speakeasy, jump ball, Christmas cracker
— evades me.
No amount of Omega-3 supplements or Sudoku puzzles will help me recall specifics on the spot. Never have American Exceptionalism, B.B. King, or Jamoca Almond Fudge been so troublesome.
Words aren’t asking for a divorce, but syllables are evasive and distant when I open my mouth. I am pretty sure they are seeing 542 million English speakers on the side.
Those days when I don’t get enough sleep, it seems like language wants it’s favorite sweater back. The quick articulation of storytelling or clever bon mots is leaving and taking the dog with it.
Confusion clouds faces when great pauses park themselves in my sentences. No tête-à-tête or public speaking is safe from the gaps between, mid-thought, my words. Sometimes I strain and reach for a synonym. More and more, people offer a word —
from impatience? pity? fear of contagion?
— to allow the flow of conversation to begin moving again. As if remembering names at cocktail parties wasn’t already enough work.
At first, being stood up by my own vocabulary mortified me. I retreated from conversation with an air of “busy” to cover my tracks.
But in truth, at school pick-up and at the water cooler at work, I am becoming the crazy cat lady of small talk. I can no longer blame pregnancy brain or nursing brain or early onset menopausal brain.
More and more, I avoid public displays of foggy speech. I concede that all that remains to do is track down and collect elusive terms —
rubbernecking, tweetstorm, Paul Giamatti
— like identifying and gathering endangered species in a wildlife biologist whirlwind. Using a search engine, I stalk language, and poor, unsuspecting Paul Giamatti.
If speech is fast and fickle, then writing is a luxury, chaste and dependent. Unhurried, I pinpoint precise words. On the backs of envelopes, in a nightstand notebook, within laptop files of secret lists of gorgeous terms, I catalog words with curio cabinet wonder and fine art museum reverence. Keeping alive the hope that these treasures —
nom de plume, valediction, bittersweet
— might reconsider the break-up, take some pity on my spouse and children, and stay a bit longer.
Of all the things that go missing —
the car keys, the ability to do a carefree cartwheel, our dearest loved ones
— if words leave me, my heartbreak will be complete….before any incurable illness can ever harm me.
Memory loss is a normal course of aging my doctor assures me. If she is right, my hope is that language and I can choose to remain good friends.
Whatever the outcome, may these words gathered here…
should I forget
…serve as notice:
may my husband never question my adoration, despite a browser history full of Paul Giamatti searches,
may I someday earn the description of devoted,
and may I remember the lifelong secret love affair I had with words.
Said or unsaid, language and I both agree that we once brought out the best in one another.
For when we lose our favorite people
all at once
or
bit
by
bit,
grief is that place where sometimes there are no words.