I Dreamed About Mama Last Night

I’ve had the difficult task lately of going through my mother’s medical records. She died a year ago September 12 of ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Disease, which includes dementia as one of the symptoms of the rare variant that she had: in short, I watched my mom — a woman with three Master’s degrees, in library science, comparative literature, and management and public policy; a woman who was fluent in French and German and did her Stanford undergraduate senior thesis on Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger — lose her mind over the course of two years. She was 58.

I write a lot here about the intersection of technology and writing. In going through her medical records last night, I came across an observation she made early in the course of her illness to one of her doctors that she had noticed her spelling getting worse because MS Word’s spell-checker was catching more errors in her writing. This was before she had received an accurate diagnosis, when there were conflicting suggestions of psychological and neuromotor problems, and when she still didn’t know what was wrong, only that her speech was getting slower. She’d always taken pride in her writing, and it chilled me last night to realize that the first sign she got that she was losing her mind was when Word’s spell-checker started flagging more errors, when her writing somehow started getting inexplicably worse. I try to imagine myself in her place; imagine what my reaction would have been. The same as hers, I think: confusion and fear.

I hadn’t thought I’d have much to say here about my mom, but this morning I had another surprise when I was looking for a book at Amazon. A few years ago, I bought Lydia Davis’ novel The End of the Story there, and I suppose Amazon’s memory for reader preferences looked at that purchase this morning and decided to throw me a curveball, suggesting that I might also enjoy Davis’ collection of short stories, Almost No Memory. And there on the screen was my mom’s name, under the review of the collection she wrote for Library Journal.

So: hi, Mom. Yeah, I’m thinking of you, and I’ve got Hank’s “I Dreamed About Mama Last Night” on the stereo.