Tides and Wells

I know they can't even be an ounce, but the weight is so much more.

Two five by seven glossies, printed in a tourist trap kiosk. I paid a far higher price than I should have, but the cost hasn't yet been tallied.

Money is a tide, but memory is a well.

Wells sometimes run dry.

Her well isn't as deep as it once was.

I'm stricken by how much she looks like her grandmother. What strikes me even more is the possibility that she'll live as long.

I'm ashamed to admit that I hope she doesn't. Her independence is already gone, her mobility a thing of the past and her thoughts have started trailing after.

My great-grand was with us into my early twenties. She lived long enough to wither on the vine, mind as sharp as a razor but a body fragile as glass. When the light in her eyes began to dim, when her memory began to slip, her body had already started to go. It was an easy thing for her to follow.

My mother's mind started slipping by inches, and her body has declined by miles. Now it's a race to see which one will be gone first.

She knows she's in decline. She's fighting it, but she's losing.

Dialysis starts soon.

I took her on a bucket list trip last week; we originally had it planned for late summer.

Late summer will be too late.

The water was too cold, but she went anyway. She'd never stepped foot in the Caribbean, and now she has.

When I told her about the trip, the first thing she asked was if she could swim with dolphins.

"Absolutely you will," I told her.

And she did.

She hates having her photo taken, so while she was distracted with my step father, I moseyed over to the photo center.

She never asked what I had in the bag.

Two photographs, professionally captured, have her kissing or petting her very own personal Flipper. She watched that show when she was a kid, and half a century later, she finally got to swim with a bottlenose.

When it's her time to go, I'll probably be tasked with building an electronic photo reel. It will be hard to do, because she avoids cameras when she can. She always has.

I knew when I bought these pictures that eventually they'd be displayed in memoriam.

Carrying these photos back to my hotel room, I know they can't even be an ounce, but the weight is so much more.