"Crossing the Bar"

One of these days we'll both be fine. Hope is like spotting a leopard in th...

"Crossing the Bar"

One of These Days We’ll Both Be Fine: Conversations with My Mother “Crossing the Bar”

My grandmother was a very religious woman who loved poetry. Tennyson was her favourite. At her funeral, I read Tennyson’s poem “Crossing the Bar”.

My mother is starting to forget her parents are dead.

There’s a lot of advice out there that says don’t tell Alzheimer’s patients their loved ones are no longer alive when they ask for them because it can cause distress.

This is probably good advice for some people with the disease, but I’ve learned, at this moment in time, lying to my mother about her parents is not helpful.

She is between two worlds—the world of knowing and the world of not knowing.

Once when she asked where her parents were, I said they were busy—thinking this was better than saying they were dead.

“Are they even alive?” she asked me disgusted.

“No,” I confessed.

“Well, then why did you say they were busy?” she snapped.

I told her I was trying to not upset her.

She said she preferred the truth.

When she asks if her mother is still alive, I now say no.

This prompts her to remember that I read “Crossing the Bar” at my grandmother’s funeral. She will say, “That’s right, you read that poem, and you read it beautifully.”

We find the poem on my phone and read it together.

Even though I am a poet, sometimes I forget how powerful poetry can be. That one poem tethers my mother to her mother’s funeral in such an important and unexpected way.

I remember rehearsing the poem over and over so I wouldn’t mess it up. My mother heard me read “Crossing the Bar” a hundred or more times before the funeral, which is why it has probably stayed so vividly in her memory.

The other day, when my mother asked where her parents were I impulsively pointed to the sky and smiled.

She looked at me confused.

I said, “They’re in heaven.”

She laughed. “Both of them?”

“Sure,” I said then I asked her what she found so amusing.

“How do you know they are there?”

I told her I didn’t know for sure, but Grandma was religious and that’s where she wanted to be.

Despite being raised in a religious family, my mother did not raise me with any kind of religion. She said I had to figure it out for myself but declared herself “agnostic”. Once during a Christmas dinner when my mother was drunk she blurted to my grandmother, “But the Bible’s fiction. You’re not meant to take it literally.” This sent my grandmother running from the room in tears.

“Do you believe in heaven?” I asked.

My mother rolled her eyes as if I had presented her with the most absurd question. “I did when I was a kid,” she said then asked, “Do you?”

“To be determined,” I said.

“That would be my answer too,” my mother said.

And we both laughed.

Today while she was eating dinner, I played the Poetry Foundation’s audio version of “Crossing the Bar.”

I asked her what she thought the poem was about.

My mother who had majored in English in university said, “It’s a metaphor for death and accepting death.”