W<\/span>e drive down the ridge in the late afternoon, rounding the bend of the Shoreline Highway and there, below us stretches the white sandbar of Stinson Beach, like a crescent moon, a comma, the last breath before the great Pacific.\u00a0 Michael has gauged the trip carefully, so we\u2019d arrive at the motel in time for him to get in a few shots as the light changes over the water.\u00a0 I wait in our room, lounging on the bed, which nearly engulfs the entire space. Lying in its center I can reach out my hands and feet and touch all four walls.\u00a0 The ceiling is painted the blue green of the Mediterranean and a cluster of Bougainvillea blossoms spill in the open window, the magenta so vibrant against the bare white walls of the room, it feels like applause.\u00a0 I am giddy from the bottle of Chardonnay we shared over lunch.\u00a0 After just one glass, I had slipped my sunglasses over my eyes and leaned in to kiss my old sweetheart.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I am naked.\u00a0 I\u2019ve taken off all my clothes in anticipation of making love and now dive under the sheet and swim about like a slippery little fish.\u00a0 The blue ceiling floats above me like an endless sky.\u00a0 I am also tired, having flown out the night before from New York then driven down to Stinson Beach this afternoon with Michael.\u00a0 Arriving at the motel he\u2019d said, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you nap while I take some pictures?\u201d At the same moment I\u2019d suggested, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you take some pictures while I take a nap?\u201d\u00a0 We\u2019d laughed, finally in perfect harmony after so many years: photos need to be taken, I need rest and we will make love soon.<\/p>\n

Outside, I hear a cat meow.\u00a0 Rolling across the bed, I lift my head and peak out the window, over Bougainvillea blossoms to the courtyard below.\u00a0 A calico sits in a bank of purple sage, swishing her tail.\u00a0 Light streams down the mountain and puddles on the stone pavement.\u00a0 I love the odd compressed feeling of the landscape here, the ridges that surround Mount Tamalpais looming in the distance, the ocean thundering just across the road, and the off-balance feeling I get every time I come to this cove at the edge of the world.\u00a0 It\u2019s like riding an unsteady boat at sea.\u00a0 The light, when it broke through the fog earlier this afternoon, was clear and bright and invincible.<\/p>\n

Just then my cell phone rings.\u00a0 \u201cHello,\u201d an unfamiliar voice says.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m the nurse on duty at The Windsor Nursing Home.\u00a0 We wanted to let you know that we\u2019ve sent your mother back to the hospital.\u201d I put the phone down and watch the cat outside sniff the air then stretch out lazily, on the warm stone.<\/p>\n

This will be my mother\u2019s fifth hospitalization in the last month. I knew when I flew out here that there was a distinct possibility that she might be hospitalized again while I was gone, perhaps even die. Still I left, telling myself that I have to get on with my life.\u00a0 There is only so much grieving I can do.\u00a0 Over the phone, the nurse explains that even after trying ten different antibiotics, her pneumonia still isn\u2019t under control.\u00a0 Because my mother has Alzheimer\u2019s dementia, she\u2019s forgotten how to swallow and keeps aspirating her own salvia back into her lungs and re-infecting herself.<\/p>\n

Ever since my mother\u2019s diagnoses a few years ago, I have craved sex like I was the one who was dying.\u00a0 Her slow deterioration has corresponded with my greedy desire for carnal pleasure, for the feel of a hand between my thighs, hot breath in my ear, mostly for the moment of penetration, which deafens all other thoughts.\u00a0 Then I listen to his steady rhythm and our cries, and that is all I need to think about.\u00a0 I know I\u2019m afraid, and it\u2019s both this fear of death and my desire to feel intensely alive that compels me.<\/p>\n

In the last year, I\u2019ve flown across country six times to see Michael, to meet in Las Vegas, Utah, Colorado and New York and twice in California.\u00a0 What I want is to be lost in a world of flesh, a world of bodies, of touch, scent and taste, a world where I can drift under a canopy of a sheet like a boat in the sea.\u00a0 And Michael, because he is familiar, because he is a piece of my past, linked to my history but not to the recent part of my life with my mother and her disease, is perfect for these encounters.\u00a0 He\u2019s a confirmed bachelor, an artist who has shunned commitment.\u00a0 In the past this drove me crazy, but now, divorced and in my 40s, I relish it.\u00a0 In Big Sur we had sex at Phiffer Beach kneeling in the dunes, our jeans down around our ankles.\u00a0 Michael lost his camera and sweatshirt, but not, thank God, his shoes which were still on his feet, when a wave suddenly swept up the sand and enveloped us, the cold shock swirling inside and around us, the thrill still a memory that excites me.\u00a0 In Utah, we made love after climbing up a sheer cliff, my legs so swollen and tired from the hike they were as immovable as tree trunks. Still, we managed.\u00a0 In Colorado, we\u2019d snuggled under a pink ruffled sheet in a friend\u2019s daughter\u2019s bed, American Girl Dolls pushed to the side. Remembering my own childhood bedroom with its row of Little Women Dolls, I\u2019d suddenly burst into tears. Michael had been there to lick my damp cheeks and kiss my breast.\u00a0 In these moments, hot and slippery with this man between my legs, moaning, weeping and even laughing, I am able to grieve for my mother.<\/p>\n

But today feels different.\u00a0 The phone has rung.\u00a0 I am alone and the ceiling above me is painted her favorite shade of blue.<\/p>\n

When I was a child my mother painted the ceilings of all her bedrooms Mediterranean blue.\u00a0 She built a bed as high as the one for the Princess and the Pea, with not just a box spring and mattress, but a fluffy feather bed, as well.\u00a0 It had its own stepping stool. Climbing up into my mother\u2019s bed felt like climbing aboard a ship.\u00a0 Across the top she spread her Spanish Shawl.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s called a Manton,\u201d she told me.\u00a0 \u201cA piano shawl.\u201d\u00a0 Embroidered across the surface was a wild bouquet of roses, the fringe hanging so low it reached the floor.\u00a0 I was an anxious sleeper and crept into my mother\u2019s bed until nearly high school, at which point she decided that I was too old to climb into bed with her and locked her door, barring me from her room.\u00a0 Still, I curled up in my sleeping bag and fell asleep across her threshold like a faithful dog.<\/p>\n

Then, when I was fifteen, a stranger gave me a hit of windowpane at my first rock concert.\u00a0 I came home only to discover that I couldn\u2019t find the nail polish remover to take off my bloody red nail polish, which was beginning to scare me.\u00a0 So, I told my mother.\u00a0 I walked into her bedroom and announced that I was on an acid trip and had to get the blood off my nails or I would claw off my own fingers.\u00a0 My mother rose to the occasion. Getting out of bed, she asked me if I would \u201clike a piece of chocolate cake?\u201d\u00a0 After we\u2019d had our cake, she let me climb up onto her big bed, under the Spanish Manton with the wild roses twining over the surface, and we lay side by side, through the night while I described to her what I saw trailing across her ceiling\u2014vast tunnels, a dust storm, a sunset.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve never been inhibited in my family.\u00a0 My grandmother wore black negligees to bed well into her nineties and had dreams about my grandfather descending down from Mount Olympus, a Greek god on his chariot, into her bed.\u00a0 My sister practices nude yoga, and my mother once told me she, too, had made love on Phiffer Beach. It was there in the sand, under the natural bridges, where she conceived me.\u00a0 But my mother was still a lady until Alzheimer\u2019s eroded her frontal cortex, impairing the executive functioning of her brain, and she became disinhibited.\u00a0 She began to talk about sex explicitly, in a dirty, nasty way.\u00a0 \u201cI want it,\u201d she told me, \u201cfrom a young one.\u201d\u00a0 We were at the local car wash, and she licked her lips and made a vulgar gesture, a thrust upward with her hand, to the boys toweling off our car.\u00a0 I had never seen her doing anything like this before, and I quickly handed over a big tip and peeled out of the car wash.<\/p>\n

\u201cMom,\u201d I said aghast.\u00a0 But by then she\u2019d already forgotten the incident.<\/p>\n

As time passed and the simple tasks of balancing her checkbook and adding spare change confounded her, she began to call me names, as well.\u00a0 Then, she propositioned the man who came to fix her front steps, and he refused to return and finish the job.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve since read about hypersexuality in Alzheimer\u2019s patients.\u00a0 Most authorities contend that it is a myth, meaning that the afflicted pull off their clothes not because they want sex, but because they no longer know any better.\u00a0 The same is true about public masturbation; they have lost the ability to remember social customs. It isn\u2019t uncommon for an early onset Alzheimer\u2019s patient to have an extramarital affair, forgetting for the moment that she has a spouse, perhaps has had one for years, waiting at home.\u00a0 As a child will try out bad words because they have not yet internalized the appropriate behavior signals, my mother could no longer read or understand the cues in the world around her.<\/p>\n

Yet, even with dementia lying unspoken between us, my mother and I remained close.\u00a0 She was the person I always wanted to talk to.\u00a0 After her diagnoses and confinement to a nursing home, I came to visit, took her out to lunch and confided that my husband and I had decided to divorce.\u00a0 She listened intently as if she were hearing my troubles for the first time.\u00a0 I told her my plans, that I wanted to move back to San Francisco and would bring her with me.\u00a0 She became excited remembering all that fog.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019d like that,\u201d she said.\u00a0 A few minutes later when I came back from the bathroom, she folded her napkin, setting it beside her plate, smiled at me and said gently, \u201cI\u2019ve so enjoyed our conversation.\u00a0 I rarely meet anyone I have so much in common with.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMom,\u201d I said.\u00a0 \u201cOf course you have so much in common with me.\u00a0 I\u2019m your daughter.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh,\u201d my mother sighed.\u00a0 \u201cThat explains it.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than the angry outbursts or vulgar gestures, this sudden lapse in knowing me as the daughter who had slept vigil outside her bedroom door, the daughter who had been conceived on Phiffer Beach, hurt and confused me.<\/p>\n

Now, staring out at the calico rolling about tummy up on the stone courtyard and yawning with her whole body, I think of my mother and her bed.\u00a0 She must have understood something about wanting to get lost, to be rocked by a man like the sea rocks a ship, and to float away under a blue sky.\u00a0 Some twenty years ago, she\u2019d flown out to visit me in San Francisco, curious about Michael, this man I was so enamored with.\u00a0 She\u2019d camped out on my living room couch like a fellow student, draping her shimmering scarves over the lamps and stacking up novels on the floor around her.\u00a0 One night, Michael sneaked into my apartment–right past the living room where my mother snored with a pair of pink ear plugs poking out of her ears like pig snouts\u2014and into my bed.\u00a0 In the morning he slipped out again before she awoke.\u00a0 Or so we\u2019d thought.\u00a0 Later, in the kitchen, my mother greeted me with a mug of fresh brewed coffee and the comment, \u201cIt makes me happy to hear you making love.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not to be outdone, I asked calmly, \u201cWhy?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI like it when you\u2019re happy.\u00a0 I want that for you.\u201d\u00a0 Then she added, smiling slyly over the rim of her mug.\u00a0 \u201cBut don\u2019t waste your youth and beauty on that man.\u00a0 There are other possibilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

There have been and will be other possibilities, but I don\u2019t think she\u2019d disapprove or begrudge me my choice at the moment.\u00a0 An hour has elapsed since the nurse called, and I dial the hospital to see if she\u2019s been admitted yet, but because of the mountains, I can\u2019t get a signal.\u00a0 I\u2019m not very worried.\u00a0 Somewhere in the mid-stages of Alzheimer\u2019s, my mother began to love hospital emergency rooms, the busy, buzzing energy going on behind each curtain.\u00a0 Last month I\u2019d stood beside her at the Hartford Hospital all day, waiting for a room.\u00a0 We watched in fascination as a man picked glass out of his own face, until the nurse finally arrived with disinfectant, gauze and a long pair of tweezers.\u00a0 It\u2019s all entertainment to my mother and each time they rush her in pale and fading, she immediately perks up, gazes around from her gurney, smiling at the world passing by above her.\u00a0 She opens her mouth obediently for sips of water and sticks out her arm for the intravenous line.\u00a0 As a child, she\u2019d contracted diphtheria, then TB and pneumonia, and had learned how to be a good patient.\u00a0 As for the world passing by above her head, every one of my friends remembers my mother\u2019s small narrow face and the big owl sized eyeglasses that sat across the rim of her nose.\u00a0 How she used to stand off to the side of the room when I threw a party and watch \u201call the action,\u201d as she called it.\u00a0 Even the trolley, going up and down my hill, could pull her to the window and transfix her.<\/p>\n

And then of course there\u2019s the story she told me the morning after my first acid trip.\u00a0 When I\u2019d come down and was sane again, I asked her why she\u2019d stayed so calm and hadn\u2019t freaked out like most parents would have.\u00a0 In the early sixties, she told me, when my parents\u2019 circle of artist and psychoanalyst friends began experimenting with hallucinogens, she\u2019d stayed sober through all their trips.\u00a0 \u201cI was the self-designated baby-sitter,\u201d she told me. \u201cI\u2019ve always been a watcher.\u201d<\/p>\n

Michael is in the doorway, the last of the light shining down on his white, blond hair like a spot light.\u00a0 He\u2019s got his camera out and he snaps my picture\u2014Girl under White Sheet, Stretching.\u00a0 I remember that once, a long time ago, he said that he thought I was a sexually positive person.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat does that mean?\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019d wanted to know.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou make it okay for people to be open about sex.\u201d<\/p>\n

For years I\u2019d attributed this character trait to something I inherited from my father, the parent who married five times and was sexually promiscuous\u2014the true hypersexual in the family.\u00a0 But today I think that perhaps my mother, the parent who raised me, has more to do with my accepting attitudes towards sex than I realize.<\/p>\n

I tell Michael about my mother\u2019s hospitalization and he waits a beat.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m not unhappy,\u201d I add.\u00a0 I tell him I\u2019ve had my fill of unhappiness with this disease and today I\u2019m not unhappy.\u00a0 He nods because he\u2019s known me for so long, and he knows my mother, too. She heard us make love, after all.\u00a0 Sometimes he says he even sees my mother in me.\u00a0 But he doesn\u2019t say that now, which is a good thing because I\u2019m naked.\u00a0 I like the fact that he\u2019s here with me, when she\u2019s in the hospital so far away.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t wasted my youth and beauty on him, but it\u2019s nice to have a touchstone, an old friend, a familiar scent, someone to stroke in the dark when the person I\u2019ve known my whole life is disappearing.<\/p>\n

Tonight, as the sun sets over the Pacific, I gaze at Michael.\u00a0 He has granted me my wish, to come and lie beside me along this slim stretch of coast, embraced by the mountains on one side, eclipsed by the sea on the other.\u00a0 I reach out a foot and a long hand to beckon him under my tent.\u00a0 He pulls off his clothes and stands naked on the side of the bed.\u00a0 His skin is as smooth as marble, as an Olympian.\u00a0 Then he lifts up the sheet so that it flutters above me like a sail.\u00a0 I luxuriate in the moment of recognition.\u00a0 I feel like that cat, lying out on the stone courtyard, belly exposed.\u00a0\u00a0 As our sheet settles, a blue ceiling floats overhead.\u00a0 I think my mother would be happy. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My mother\u2019s slow deterioration has corresponded with my greedy desire for carnal pleasure\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":762,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518\/revisions\/762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}