92 year old Mrs. Grace Farley sat nested in her mossy brown suede-covered recliner chair – electric remote in hand to raise or lower her legs or back. In a second floor room with large window high above the garden lawn that sloped away from the home, her bright intelligent eyes darted to me as my figure darkened the door frame. Although I had not seen her in a year, she knew me immediately — pale mid-afternoon sun and pleasure softening her face.
Prominent as if in the center of the room and of her experience, her leg skin was stressed taut from edema, dry and red from infection. Although her discomfort would have been an obvious point of entry into a conversion, she declined to repeat to me her litany of physical woes. “I already lived them once. Why would I want to live them again by repeating them now?” I would have listened but she chose to focus on the spot of joy offered by a visit and not alloy it with shadow and complaints.
The mother of a friend and a friend of my mother. She was a brilliant woman – an early pioneer in science and one of the rare women graduates of college decades before women were admitted to the Ivy League colleges, national military academies, or other seats of power and had to manage strong bias against a woman being “too educated to get a man.”
Always a great cross word puzzle solver, she did want to talk about how words seemed to “flee from” her – retreating away and down a narrow, twisting tunnel. Never catching, always running and reaching for the words . . but then, the words evaporate, the trail goes all to dark, and she is still wondering what it was, why she ran, how to . . . recover? One part of her watching another part run into an evaporated, blank space and then . . . accepting.
Like Thomas Wyatt’s poem
“They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber. . .
It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness . . .”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45589/they-flee-from-me
Wyatt wrote as a love poem what I now take as an embrace and a farewell to parts of her and of me that once were young, keen, and acute.
Like Mrs. Farley, I have also experienced one part of my brain watching another part softly relax and fall apart. Mental muscles loosening, forgetting to strive and to tighten, to bend toward an anxious goal. In my youth I was intimidated by her – I was too colorful, too flighty; not serious enough.
But now I shared a quality, if not yet quantity, of the experience of loss and we were peers on the tilting planet – in the moment in pale afternoon sunlight, a small bright wren in a brown nest and a rainbow finch experiencing fading colors.
Susan Olmstead Wang 