I remember the first moment that I knew my dad had a neurological disorder. I was the assistant director at my summer camp in Vermont and Dad had brought my nephew up to be a camper for two weeks, driving out from Indiana with him. 

We were living in a two-story cabin at the time on the shore of Lake Fairlee. I was on the porch and saw Dad walking up to our place at a shuffle, his arms hung at his sides not swaying. 

I knew something was wrong, but it was a few months until he was diagnosed with atypical Parkinson’s disease, which was a catch-all for a series of possible disorders. Not until about four years later did we learn that he had Lewy Body Dementia. 

Mom and I were at the neurologist together when we learned she had mixed dementia just under two years ago. 

In both cases, I had no idea what was coming for them. Honestly, with Mom, I still don’t.

I can’t say that I decided to start writing poems about dementia intentionally. The poem “Even I” just happened, the way many of my poems do–I start writing and the words coalesce around the thoughts in my head. 

And that day, one week ago today, it was the whole idea of saying goodbye to someone and wondering if it was the last time. 

When Dad was in his nursing care facility in Indiana, we were only able to see him two or three times a year. The drive was six hundred miles, which, at sixty miles per hour was a trip of at least ten hours, though usually longer. 

It feels like one minute Dad was living at home and then he wasn’t. One minute he could talk and laugh, and then suddenly he couldn’t. 

But that’s how I experienced his decline. My sisters who lived closer felt it differently. My mom experienced it every day. 

In all cases it was excruciating. 

The second poem in this series, “not just the forget we suffer through”, is about the loss of shared remembrance–that when two people no longer remember an event together, that is a separate kind of loss, especially because you are both still together.

In the case of both poems, I have chosen to write in the first person, but I am not necessarily writing from my own personal experience, not entirely.

“not just the forget we suffer through” relates memories that are somewhat mine. The lines about the piano and singing and gardening and being on the phone are all things I have memories of, but they are not the singular memories that dominate when I think of my mom and dad. 

I don’t want to write that poem, though. That’s too personal, which seems a strange thing to say now that I write it. Of course the poem is personal, I just don’t want to dive into my own memories. There is the idea that in giving my direct experience the reader might better understand what I felt and feel.

But that isn’t what I’m trying to do. 

I want to make something that is personal speak to something that is universal–the suffering that we feel when we experience someone losing their memories.

In this poem, though, I also want to talk about another side of memory loss, something my mom went through with my dad–when his personality changed as he lost his memory. Which made him have sharp mood swings. Which made him angry. Which my mom took the full brunt of.

Dad never got violent, but he didn’t understand what was going on and thought he should just be able to get up and leave. He also had hallucinations and became confused about money. 

Mom had to deal with this. 

When we visited our three times a year we didn’t experience these things. As time progressed, it took Dad a while to realize who all was there. And he would start grinning even when he could no longer talk. 

Those moments meant the world to me and our family. But we left after a few days and mom continued to visit him every day, to spend time with him and to lose him over and over again.

When I finished each of these poems I cried. Each time I re-read “not just the forget we suffer through” I am sure I will always cry. 

Those last three lines sum up so much of what the pain feels like, my own, and what I feel the pain of having dementia feels like. 

And to even begin to understand this well enough, I tapped into not just the loss I’m feeling right now, but all the loss I’ve felt through my life, my pets, my family members, my friends. 

That’s where I’m not sure how successful the poem is. On a personal level, I knocked it out of the park. If I can’t read my own poem and not cry, then I reached something important.

Which brings me to a discussion of the style of these poems and a decision I made –probably because I wrote both of these within the last week–that I’m not sure about: the decision to use rhyme.

I’ve spoken about what makes poetry work in our world and rhyme isn’t considered, in a general sense, sophisticated. Of course there are exceptions. I just don’t know if I’m qualified to be one of those exceptions.

On the other hand, that isn’t what makes me cautious about rhyming. In this case, it is because the subject matter is grief, and I do not want to disrespect how it feels to grieve.

I do not, though, think that these poems are in any way disrespectful. Not that the rhyming is tasteful–I’m not sure there are any poetic techniques that are more or less serious. 

In one sense, I wanted these poems to have rhyme because I am trying to speak to the reader beyond the words, for the sound of the poems themselves–the assonance, the alliteration, the repetition, the rhyme, the cadence–I wanted the poems to be, in a way, songs. 

Our society does not talk much about grief, not as much as we talk about other things, at least not from where I sit and write. That’s ok, though I doubt this is a decision more than a reality caused by a multitude of forces.

I have several favorite lines and phrasings in each poem. In “Even I” the lines

the next and next and next–
again, again, again–
grief snaps back to grief–

the line “again, again, again” repeats in “not just the forget we suffer through”, as does the word “snap”. I will claim here that it was intentional, that because this is a series of poems, there should rightly be words and themes that tie all of the poems together. The truth is, I just noticed that right now. 

A careful read of many of my poems, but especially these two, will show how fond I am of repeating ideas in threes. In “not just the forget we suffer through” I repeat the word “narrow” in three consecutive lines:

your roads once taken now gone narrow, all
more narrow, now
more narrow still

Sometimes I repeat a word more than three times, as with the word “all” in “not just the forget we suffer through”. 

In these cases, though, the poems grew this way. And because I am writing these poems as a blog, with a limited amount of time and a posting long before a traditional poem might be seen, they didn’t get a lot of editing.

I’ll end with this–the best three lines of these two poems, of perhaps all of my poems, save AT, are the last three in “not just the forget we suffer through”:

not just the forget we suffer through
but more that you lose me
as I lose you

I cried as soon as I wrote them–they were just right, the right ending, the right sentiment, the thought the poem was trying to express now condensed to just three lines. 

They also work because the last five lines all rhyme–”too”, “you”, “through”, “lose” and “you” again. And the two words “lose you” and “you lose” make such a nice sound together. 

But that sound only enhances the meaning. And that’s what I love about the lines. 

I want to write a few more poems in this series, but not many more. 

These are the poet projects, after all–all projects, all diverse, all in verse.