WHEN WE FADE
Scarlett Anderson
My mother and I have never been alike. She is a force of nature; I am an observer of it. In the middle of December 1993, two months before I turned thirteen and three years after I stopped believing she could magically fix everything, she divorced my dad and took me to the beach to celebrate. We swam further from the shore than I’d ever been; her keys and wallet created a small lump beneath my towel – the kind that doubled as a hooded dress that I was far too old to own, but it meant a lot to her that I wasn’t growing up too quickly. I kept my eye on it, but we were at least 200 metres out, and I don’t know what my plan was if I saw someone poking around. Things like that didn’t bother Mum. Most things didn’t seem to bother Mum, except Dad.
She wore a hot pink snorkel and one flipper – she’d forgotten to bring hers, so we were sharing mine. She told me we were looking for mermaids and, despite knowing better, part of me believed her. I wasn’t completely sure she was going to turn back until she found one. I’d tugged on her flipper, struggling to keep up. Really, I was scared, but she was in denial of my differences at this point in our relationship; she was trying to scratch them out before they were set in stone. She turned to me and grinned before sinking beneath the waves.
She didn’t come up for a lifetime.
That was her magic; she could defy nature as though she were a part of it. She could hold her breath forever, run faster than her frail body should have permitted, live fearlessly. Every law of physics seemed to bend to her will, every version of reality I built had to be reworked each time we spoke. I’ve been asked before if I turned to science as a way to cope with her disorder – a way to explain her existence. My family tends to believe I’m controlling as an overcorrection to her. Truthfully, we were never that interlinked. I am who I am – she had little to do with it. And it drove her insane.
When my mother returned from beneath the waves, I was nearly in tears. Convinced she had been dragged deeper and drowned by dolphins, and partially considering the possibility that she actually had found a mermaid. Dad had just shown me Jaws for the first time, propelling me into a marine biology frenzy, but understanding the ocean had made me more afraid of it. Only a handful of years later, I would sit in front of my laptop and have to decide between marine biology and medicine for the rest of my life.
Mum didn’t notice my distress. She might have dismissed the rogue tears as seawater, but I got better at hiding my emotions after that day. She passed me an abalone shell, the size of my hand. To this day, I’ve never seen anything more beautiful. It was iridescent, mesmerising. It had lines that mimicked the waves it belonged to, and perfectly spaced holes lined one edge – I remember thinking they were too perfect to be natural. The back of the shell was rough in my hand, easy to grip. I clung to it and met my mother’s gaze in amazement.
She smiled at me. ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’
I nodded.
She extended her hand. ‘I’ll put it back.’ She must have noticed my expression falter. ‘We have to leave nature how we found it.’
I couldn’t understand why my mother would think the ocean floor deserved something so beautiful more than I did. I couldn’t understand where I fell in her hierarchy of importance.
I handed her the shell. ‘I want to go back,’ I said.
I’m pretty sure the only exception to Mum’s mantra of leaving nature alone was me. The only thing she would shape, fold, bend, was me. I have always wanted to leave an impact, to show that I was here. Mum wants to disappear and be forgotten; I want a legacy. I picked medicine as my future, thinking it would never scare me as the ocean did that day. I left my parents behind and replaced them with treatments.
*
I remember my grandmother vividly. She was like me; she called me my mother’s karma. Her hands would curl around mine, and she’d whisper the names of the bones that touched through our skin. When she developed dementia, she was swallowed by the world.
Once, towards the end of her days, she grabbed my wrist with a trembling hand.
‘I’m disappearing.’
‘I know, Nan.’ I was fifteen years old.
‘I’m not scared, Val.’ My mother’s name.
‘I know. You never were.’
‘Magic won’t comfort you, Val. You need to face the truth. Everything’s fading, even you.’
‘I know there’s nothing left for you, Nan. You told me.’
There was silence then. I watched her shallow breathing and traced the wrinkles on her hand, avoiding her gaze.
‘Don’t let them pray for me, Henry. Not in my name.’
I looked up and she was looking in my eyes, and I couldn’t fathom how her brain was contorting my face to look like my mother’s and my grandfather’s. I remember thinking that science was failing her and me.
‘Isn’t this magic, Nan?’ It was a moment of weakness, she didn’t respond. I’m not sure she heard me.
*
On the day my grandmother died, I watched my mother cry and considered that the same fate would take her someday. I wished then that I had siblings – I didn’t want to handle that alone. I then considered that the same fate would take me, and I pinched myself for being selfish. I was always concerned about the things I’d have to deal with in the future. When I was very young, I would lie in bed crying in preparation for my parents’ deaths. Both of them are still alive. Sometimes I wonder if I grieved them so much that I don’t know how to love them anymore.
She was buried in a cemetery by the beach, where she had done most of her fieldwork. Mum had stopped crying by then.
She leaned down and whispered in my ear, ‘Don’t let them shove me in a box in the dirt, Sophie.’
I looked at her, confused. We were in the middle of the service, her mum had just died, and this was what she was thinking about?
‘Burn me, spread me, send me back to nature.’
‘What’s more natural than decomposing?’
She shook her head disapprovingly and turned back to the coffin, as though I had interrupted the event, committed some great act of disrespect. I bit my tongue; I always bit my tongue. She drove me crazy.
On the drive home, she told me, with a seriousness that I had only seen when she announced the divorce, that it was my duty to see that she would be cremated and spread on the rocks of the same beach. She made me promise. I hope I remember.
It was the first time my parents had been in the same car since Dad moved out, and Mum was ignoring his presence. He had insisted on being there for me and for her, but neither of us really needed him. A few months later – not nearly long enough to be deemed respectable – my dad married a woman who was not even a decade older than me. I received an invite to the wedding, but Mum didn’t let me go. I didn’t really want to, anyway. He had two daughters and a son with her, and, as far as I’m aware, they’re still the picture-perfect family. I wouldn’t really know, though.
*
I open her door, and she looks young, too young to be this close to the end. The rest of the retirement village tell their stories to their grandchildren. Not Mum, though. My fault. She’s much younger than my grandmother was when she reached this stage. I introduce myself as though she weren’t the one who named me.
‘Soph- Possum, what are you doing here?’ It’s a good day.
‘We’re going to the beach.’
She smiles. ‘I love the beach.’
‘I know, Mum.’
Something about the ocean is healing. Medical school has not convinced me that the Victorians were wrong to trust the sea air to ease illness. The salt in the air oils my mother’s joints, and she moves as though she is young again, facing her truth with defiance. Though she stumbles, she runs to the waves. I find myself shrinking into her shadow. I am twelve again, and I am realising for the first time that my mum belongs to nature more than she has ever belonged to me. I don’t resent her for it this time; I am grateful to be a witness to her spirit.
She swims out a small distance and shifts to float on her back, face to the sun. Unbothered by skin damage to a wrinkled face, she offloads the weight of her body to the entire Pacific. Her hair dances like seaweed around her head, her eyes shut, and she looks like magic.
When she returns to shore, smiling and panting, she looks into my eyes with simultaneous exhaustion and rejuvenation.
‘I’ll be back here when I’m gone, you know?’ she says, drying her hair with a towel. ‘I asked my daughter to spread my ashes here.’
And suddenly she’s gone.
‘Mum, I am your daughter.’
*
We sit beside each other on the sand. I run my fingers up and down my legs, feeling the wet goosebumps develop under my touch. Mum is still; she never used to be still. She asks me to tell her what’s wrong with her in a whisper which matches the volume of the waves. She’s asked me this before and I’ve always lied to her – medications are making her delirious, she had a stroke she’ll eventually recover from, she’s just tired, everything’s ok.
‘Your neurons are dying.’
She doesn’t respond, so we sit quietly. I have told countless patients that they are dying. I have had to refer children to oncologists, academics to neurologists, athletes to cardiologists, and I sat with my mother when she was told she had dementia; I explained what was happening as I drove her home, but I don’t know how to tell this version of her now that her big, beautiful brain is disintegrating.
‘Dementia?’
I nod.
‘How long?’
My fate is claiming me faster than it did my mother and her mother, and I find myself wondering what purpose my life served if I could remember none of it. What good is my intellect if it no longer belongs to me, but to the papers marked with my name? Do I still deserve that name? I wanted to leave a legacy, but I have no children, no husband, no one who will tell my stories. I’ll be forgotten before I’m even gone – by myself, by my mother. I was forgotten by my father on his second wedding day. The world will be left as I found it. But my grandmother wasn’t afraid, and neither is my mother, so I think that I will be fine.
I don’t think Mum will make it to the end of the week, but I don’t tell her that. And I don’t tell her that I probably won’t make it to sixty. She doesn’t understand me anymore, even less than she did when I was young. All she understands now is the movement of the waves.
I realise now that science wasn’t failing us by taking our memory. It never has – it isn’t capable of failing us. Science is not good or bad; there are no ethics in nature nor magic. Aren’t they synonymous anyway? I cannot blame my brain for declining any more than I could blame a rock for eroding. And my mum is a force of nature; I cannot blame her for the way she moves through life any more than I could blame a shell for belonging to the ocean. This is who she always was. I think she’s happy this way.
There’s an abalone shell rocking on the shore; each wave nudges it further in.
‘Are you ready to go, Mum?’
Scarlett Anderson is an emerging writer and psychology student living on Dharug land in Western Sydney. Her writing seeks to capture the reverence she has for the natural world and the quiet intricacies of human connection.
