Darkness

My eyes danced between my son and the doctor several times. They rested upon my son’s young, vigorous face, searching for a trace of hope, but my only findings were a pale face, a mouth, too stunned to utter a word.

“Dementia? How did this come about?” he asked the doctor. “It’s usually passed on genetically; does your family have a history with dementia, Mr. Lewis?” I looked up into her piercing blue eyes; she resembled a teacher, smiling with sympathy, yet her brow creased with worry, knowing I would get the answer wrong. I smiled melancholically as I said: I don’t quite remember.

In truth, that joke was simply trying to hide my disbelief towards the fact that I could not remember how my dad’s face looked like, that I forgot my wife’s beautiful smile, or if it was beautiful at all, and most of all, that at a respectable age of sixty-three, I was a resident at Burlow’s Home for the Elderly. My mind was fundamentally a dark room. I forgot most of the major events in my life, or I only recalled small details. I remembered the wooden cabinet above four wooden supports. The cabinet lay next to a bed which I could not place the shape of. It would contain heaps of useless clutter that never fit in the house; a small portrait of the Fjords in Norway; skilfully drawn, a letter opener, a locket with a picture of me in a khaki soldier’s outfit, a gold plated compass, with the words “You lead, I follow” engraved on it, and countless more items.

Upon this cabinet lay a lamp with a green shade and a metal rod leading to a black circular base. Apart from a number of used, crumpled tissues there were three empty bottles; two standing upright and the other had rolled gently to the edge. A ray of sunlight, highlighting every dust particle, clearly outlined the word ‘Analgesic’, painkillers, written on the horizontal bottle. However, I failed to recall the shadow of death upon my wife’s limp body, on the bed adjacent to the cabinet.

That was why I never bothered to try and grapple with other memories, because if I was left with that vivid image, I shuddered to think what else there was to remember. “You always told me you had a tough life”, he’d tell me, hoping I’d reveal a slight detail, but I’d be in the dark as much as him, with the difference that I wouldn’t share his curious nature. Suffice to say that my promise to tell him about my life when he was older was now empty.

I grew accustomed to the darkness in my mind, with only that one image, abating my thirst for knowledge. My father’s face wasn’t worth remembering, my wife’s beautiful smile was void. All there was were three bottles of Analgesic, and everything else dark. Doubts came afloat, whether the three bottles, were simply there by coincidence, suggesting a much darker proposition.