The Studio

Come for the COVID, stay for the dementia. A scene from the long middle of forgetting.

Six years ago I flew to Albuquerque from New York City to visit my parents. I was in graduate school and had a week off for spring break—an indulgence at forty-three.

I stayed with my friend Alicia for the requisite two weeks of quarantine and then moved into the small guest house in my parents’ backyard—a casita in New Mexico parlance, though we always called it the studio.

My parents moved to Corrales in the mid-1970s, after two years on the Navajo Reservation in Crownpoint, where my dad worked for the Indian Health Service and my brother was born. They bought a simple adobe house on an acre and later built the one-room casita behind it themselves, laying bricks by hand.

The studio held my mother’s life.

Her silversmithing tools. Her pottery. Later, her writing—plays, reviews, poems, a novel. Her desk faced the window beside a small potbelly stove.

Years later, I finished my graduate degree on Zoom at that same desk.

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It was around that time that her dementia began to show itself.

Or maybe I am assigning order to something that never offered it.

My father and I understand that timeline differently. His is marked by precision. Mine is marked by feeling.

He is an extraordinary diagnostician. I admire that, but I do not envy it. Given the choice, I will take emotional vagueness over clinical clarity.

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So, to mark 6 years we did what you do when you are marking a global pandemic, a return home, and the quiet beginning of something you don’t yet have language for.

We took a bath.
We got pedicures.
We ate Chick-fil-A.

(And then, as we always do, we donated the same amount to the Trevor Project.)

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And then the Oscars.

Because my mom was a movie critic, this used to be the Super Bowl of our house.

Before streaming, she would receive DVDs of all the nominated films in the mail. She watched every one. She cataloged them. And—quietly, methodically—she lent them out to friends.

She took this responsibility very seriously.

You signed the DVDs out.
You signed them back in.

No exceptions.

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Before the show I texted my brother:

I don’t think I can watch the Oscars.

He wrote back:

I haven’t been able to for probably four years.

Funny how grief is communicated—how we say the thing without saying it.

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We are finding the space to honor my mom while my mom fades right in front of us.

In this liminal space I grasp recognition of self wherever it presents itself.

I am not sure if this is the wisdom of grief or its underbelly.

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I ended up watching with John and the dogs.

I lost a Toblerone on a Best Picture bet.

I cried at the music.

And when Autumn Durald Arkapaw, making history as the first woman to win Best Cinematography, asked all the women to stand, I stood in my living room, our sweet, graying dog Storm at my feet.

No one was keeping track.

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Thank you for reading.