Collage

         

            My father’s words of wisdom were that we experience life three times:  in anticipation, in the moment, and in memory. 

            I hoped that my memories of what I was anticipating in the moment would be good ones or, barring that, bearable ones.

            I love photos because I can choose what I want from a scene, and later I can choose which scenes I want to remember.   I make collages, too, which means I get to cut and paste—literally.  I do it with scissors.  Once I cut out the little roll of fat around my midsection for a collage I made for friends--of them and me at a picnic in Paris along the Seine.  After performing surgery on my paper self, I pasted the photo down over another picture, but I didn’t quite get away with it.  When an observant French friend examined it, she said, “Tina, I can see the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur through you!”  Most of the time, though, I don’t get caught when I improve on reality.

            Now though, it wasn’t my own vanity or cherished illusions that I was protecting.  It was my mother’s.            Even though I couldn’t grant her wishes, I wanted to make the move from her home of forty-five years as painless as it could be.  I wanted to reassure her of our love and admiration.  I wanted her to know that if she couldn’t be here, we’d be there.  And wherever we were, we would be her family and her fan club. 

Collage for the Mom Nani Nay Fan Club

Founding Members of the Nay-Nani-Mom Fan Club

            Here are some of the people who love and admire Na-Nani-Mom for her warmth and wit—her way with words, her piano playing, her political concerns and idealism, and many other characteristics…As we put this together, I think of Mom’s love of clouds and cloud formations and her influencing us to appreciate things like that, and I also think about the beautiful Joni Mitchell song:

Bows and flows of angel hair

And ice cream castles in the air

And feathered canyons everywhere

I’ve looked at clouds that way

Thanks to my mom, who looks like an angel herself with her long white hair in the picture with the equally white clouds…

In the vacant space, I had  put the picture of my mother that I took the day she first got the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.  She had forgotten the diagnosis by the time we got outdoors.  When I told her how beautiful she looked against the backdrop of the blue sky and white clouds, she posed for me.  She had been heavy for decades after five children, but she was now very slender, and it was such a relief to see her smiling confidently, proud of the smile she had with her new dentures.  I read over the words on the collage.

            When we members of the Na-Nani-Mom Fan Club meet, we’ll gather around the piano so Mom can play for us with her incredible hands—arthritic but still able to reach those keys and bring brightness and beauty into the world the way she does by being all the wonderful things she is!

            This was my collage for my mother, illustrated love and reassurance.   Her move would not be a move away from love, support, admiration, her “usefulness,” something she wanted so much to still have.  I’d had it laminated so that it would stand up firm in her new room.
            I’d been writing tributes to my mother for years, first in song—new words to old melodies—and then in verse.  When she was eighty,  I wrote Eighty Reasons to Love and Admire My Mother, then the next year it was eighty-one—some of the reasons new, some recycled, but the total number kept increasing with her age.    Then came the years when she would read it, thank me profusely—maybe whisper to me that it was her favorite present—and then a few minutes later, she would see it again, and say, “What’s this?  Oh, how nice!”  She’d read aloud, and thank me again.   It was the gift that kept on giving, and that’s what I wanted this to be.