The Long Hello: Memory, My Mother, and Me
By: Cathie Borrie / Narrated By: Jill Tucker, Cathie Borrie
Length: 3 hrs and 32 mins
Sometimes lovely, sometimes heartbreaking—Bits and pieces strung together; it’s Life in all its desperate and gorgeous glory…
When she saw the Tour de France cyclists on TV: “I did that. Yes, I did, we did that back then and times were hard. It was tough, and the mangoes kept falling on the ground, the juice ran down our arms. So sweet, so very hard to do”
… My mother in law…
When you love someone and watch their decline from dementia, you’ll find there’s a Glorious Period where, if you listen, if you ask the right questions, that person’s language is like poetry, is like turning a key into a door whereby the past, and the future into the Unknown all come together. When she lost her depth perception? “Oh look, the plane is walking on the rooftop, dragging the clouds with him.”
The Long Hello’s number one review over on Amazon said it was too confusing, jumped around too much.
You’ve GOT to be kidding me, and dude, hang onto your hat because chances are that you’ll become oh so very acquainted with the poetry of those with a body in this world and a mind dancing somewhere else. Author Cathie Borrie chronicles some of the conversations she recorded with her mother as the two took the Alzheimer’s journey, and lemme just get one thing out of the way: I’m a trifle jealous.
Cuz the poetry period is just a blip, a very brief bit of time sandwiched between the realization that something is so wrong, is getting worse, and (Perhaps, in our own case…) screaming, fighting, spitting, biting at the other end. Oh the beauty of the elder cuddling a baby doll; it’s all over tooooo quickly.
But every case is different, or so I’ve been told, and while we hear Cathie breaking down, falling apart, trying to keep pieces together of something that is shattering to pieces one day, gilded in gold the next, mostly we see the absolutely breathtaking beauty of a mother and daughter who’ve loved greatly. A daughter who asks all the RIGHT questions when Mom is rambling, who crafts the queries to coax the gentle thoughts of her Mom’s mind, the genius of her Mom’s soul. She asks Mom if she prefers darkness or light? Gets a glorious answer. Asks why? Another little gem that makes one feel a sense of wonder. Cathie’s Mom stayed verbal for a really long time, a period of gibberish, then a very verbal End. It’s lovely, and from Beginning to End, there’s the simple joy of watching ships going by the harbor, of hearing birdsong, watching and naming and appreciating and loving each little feathered creature. Birds all the way through. Eventually, when all is said and done, when Mom’s remains are just over three pounds of ash, Cathie’ll get a tattoo of one, much to the horror of her friends, much to the quiet relief of her soul.
I s’pose there is a trifle jumping around in time as Cathie tells us the story of her family, from drunken birth father to the early death of a much-loved brother to her sad days at a boarding school. Follow this with her studies, her career that doesn’t follow a traditional path, her searching for a man to just hug her as she carries the weight of a mother in a decline, and you have the padding, the ins and outs of life in between Always Being There, of Answering the Phone Thirty Times a Night. Nobody is there to help care for Mom, nobody is there to give Cathie the Mama Hugs that we need so desperately during hard times.
Don’t come into this expecting plot or form. These are thoughts and snippets of beauty even as Life continues and things get worse. Here are the histories we all carry with us, and we’re shown how they’re shaped and come to a single point when there’s no hope for tomorrow but only beauty in the now.
Jill Tucker turns in a magnificent performance, capturing Cathie’s laughter when Mom says something particularly earnest and ironic, capturing Cathie’s tears as she misses her Mom while Mom is still there but so very elsewhere. I kept going back to see if this wasn’t Cathie herself, but nope: It SAYS Jill Tucker, but let me tell you, this is like being in conversations with the one who did the very living, the hoping, the crying. We hear the grief in her voice when all is over, she tells herself her Mom is free from suffering, but now she knows her own suffering will be borne all alone. I can do nothing but sing Tucker’s praises—
—Because this work absolutely sings with life and love, and it helps me forget the grimmer phases of such a relentless disease. It reminds me of a little hunched woman, who once loathed me, but who now smiled when she saw me and told me I’d grown so big.
UPDATE To Totally Laugh at Myself: ApPARently, this was actually CATHIE AND Jill Tucker doing the narration honors. Oh my good golly gosh! No WONDER I was sooo charmed with the sense of being in between two people having a dear conversation. My review stands, but pleeeeease KNOW that I’m very much laughing at m’self over here, and I shall continue to do so until the day I die. Haven’t laughed so much in yeeeears…!
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