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We scattered my father’s ashes on a wind-blown day in early summer, standing on a bluff overlooking my parents’ home and the surrounding red rocks of Sedona, Arizona. The clouds raced by overhead, casting moving shadows on the arid landscape below. The immediate family huddled together on the hillside. We each said a few words. When her turn came, my mother recited a lovely little poem called “The Chambered Nautilus,” which I suspect she had been made to memorize as a schoolgirl. The relevant lines were contained in the final stanza:
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!
I remember being surprised that my mother had been able to unearth this treasure from the depths of memory, since she was normally quite forgetful and was becoming more so as she grew older. Her forgetfulness became alarmingly evident some months later when my wife and I brought her along on a vacation to the West Coast. In a boutique hotel in San Francisco, with a lobby not much bigger than her living room, my mother could not remember which way to go to get to the elevators. Circling around to find a parking place in Golden Gate Park, we twice passed the Japanese Tea Garden there, and each time my mother reacted as if she were seeing it for the first time. She seemed disoriented the whole trip.
Back home in Sedona she settled into her old routines without problem, so we assumed we were just seeing the temporary effects of her bereavement. Then I began receiving calls from her friends that my mother was getting lost while driving around town. Sedona then had a population of barely 10,000, with only two main roads running through it and a handful of traffic signals. It was impossible to get lost, even for someone with my mother’s notoriously poor sense of direction.
The day came when she called me from across the country after having fallen. She was on the floor with her phone but couldn’t get up. I told her to call 911. “How do I do that?” she asked. It was clear she could no longer live on her own. We moved her to an assisted living facility not far from my home in Connecticut. A gerontologist performed some tests and determined she was suffering from vascular dementia, a progressive neurological disease similar to Alzheimer’s caused by tiny strokes that shut off the oxygen supply to parts of the brain. Her brain became like Swiss cheese; if her mind hit a hole, she became befuddled, as when she asked me how to remove the cap from her fountain pen or how to run the hot water in the tub.
With dementia, the arrow of time is reversed. The forgetting starts with short-term memory and gradually works backward until much of one’s life has slipped into oblivion. In the end, little remained of my mother’s past beyond the schoolgirl who had been made to memorize “The Chambered Nautilus.” Her personality unwound as well, and there was an eventual reversal of our respective roles as parent and child.
The poem she recited from memory the day we scattered my father’s ashes was about a sea creature that grows its own spiraled shell, moving into progressively larger compartments, or chambers, as it outgrows the smaller ones. Over the span of its life, which can last 15 to 20 years, the chambered nautilus may occupy as many as 30 compartments in succession. These are the “stately mansions” that the poet refers to, a metaphor for the human mind’s progression through life – except that in my mother’s case, the process eventually worked the other way, her memory retreating into ever-smaller chambers until, in the end, she was little more than an empty shell.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., “The Chambered Nautilus”
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