The Sun Is Shining In My Eyes

Margaret is remembering the past

I sat at the breakfast table with my mother, Margaret. She was doing it again.

‘Are you okay, Mum?’ I asked, but she didn’t hear me. I didn’t expect her to because she’s somewhere I can’t reach her. Nobody can. We’ve been to see the doctors so many times. I don’t know why I bother taking her there just to be told the same thing.

‘It’s her dementia, Rachel, she’ll probably get worse,' they say.

I can’t accept that. It’s those episodes when Mum becomes unreachable which scare me. Where does she go?
I ask her, when she comes back, but she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. But I always know when she’s going to that place where I can’t go, because she mentions the sunlight. I’m concerned it’s a brain tumour which is being dismissed because of her age.

‘The sun is always shining in my eyes in this house’—that’s what she said to me one morning. I looked out of the window. It was raining. I even had to turn on the kitchen light to make the kids’ lunches.

When she’s “normal,” she’s okay. Yes, she forgets a lot and puts things in odd places, but you know, that’s okay, it's actually quite funny sometimes. A few weeks ago, when she unpacked the shopping, she put a frozen chicken under her bed! It took us ages to discover where the smell was coming from.

We were in the supermarket last week when she stopped dead in the middle of the dairy aisle. ‘I can’t see a thing with all this sunshine,’ she said and refused to move.

‘Mum, we can’t stop here. Look, this lovely lady needs to get past.’ It didn’t make a bit of difference and I had to gently move Mum to one side and wait it out. We were certainly getting some odd looks, I can tell you. Eventually, it must have been twenty minutes later, Mum started walking and shopping as if nothing untoward had happened. It’s doing my head in, I can tell you.

It’s been seven years since my dad died, but Mum came to live with us only this year. She seemed to cope quite well after his death, although I know she still misses him dreadfully. They’d been married for almost fifty years. Can you imagine the memories she has? Perhaps they’re the times she goes to.

I came home from work one day and the dining table was set with the best China, which Mum had brought with her when she moved in. She was bustling around, wearing a frilly apron over her good dress.

‘Are you expecting visitors, Mum?’ I asked.

‘Auntie Beryl and Theresa are coming dear. I’m sure I told you.’

She looked so happy I didn’t have the heart to say Auntie Beryl, Dad’s sister, had died years before him, and Theresa, well, I never met her, but she was Mum’s bridesmaid. I guess she’s long gone too. Anyway, Mum never seemed to notice when no one turned up.

One evening John and I had been having a nightcap in the lounge room, just talking about the day, when Mum suddenly appeared in the doorway. I thought she’d gone to bed, but apparently she’d decided it was a good time to look for something she’d lost.

‘What are you looking for, Mum?’ I asked.

‘I can’t see, dear, the light is so glaring in here.’ The only light was coming from the standard lamp in the corner of the room.

‘Can I help you find it?’

She frowned, tipping her head a little to one side as if she’d heard something in the distance.

‘Mum?’ I said quietly, but although she still stood there in front of me, wearing her long flannelette nightie and nothing on her feet, she’d gone somewhere I couldn’t follow.

But gradually I began noticing something which made some sort of sense. Whenever Mum complained about the sunlight, she wasn’t confused. She was somewhere else.

One afternoon I found her standing in the hallway wearing her old church coat, staring at the front door with tears in her eyes.

‘Mum?’

She answered without turning. ‘He’s late.’

‘Who?’

A pause. ‘Your father. He said he’d be home before sunset.’

Dad died in 2018.

She finally looked around, disoriented, as if waking from a dream. Then embarrassment crossed her face.
‘Oh,’ she whispered. ‘I thought… never mind.’

After that, as the episodes increased, I realised sunlight had different effects on her, according to the time of day. One bright afternoon, she was twenty-three again waiting outside a cinema. Once she spoke as if she was in the maternity ward where I was born. A glorious sunset trapped her in a summer from fifty years earlier, when she and Dad drove north with the windows down and the radio humming between them.

The past was no longer something Mum remembered. It was somewhere she visited. And each visit left her more reluctant to return.

Soon I began finding evidence of those times Mum thought she was somewhere else or in another time. Teacups laid out for dead relatives. Photographs scattered across the table and horrifyingly, the gas stove turned on but unlit, because she was cooking dinner for Dad. Still, the saddest moments were the lucid ones, those rare evenings when Mum understood exactly what was happening to her.

‘The trouble is,’ she told me softly one night, 'the past gets brighter every day.' We were sitting together on the back patio—the sun was leaving the sky and shadows lengthened. Mum sounded so rational. So...like my mother.

‘I remember things now that I’d forgotten for decades. Tiny things. The smell of your father’s cigarettes. The sound of my mother hanging sheets outside, the exact colour of the dress I wore when I had my first kiss.’ She smiled faintly. ‘The memories are so bright I can hardly see through them anymore.’

I didn’t know what to say. We both looked toward the setting sun, Mum’s eyes filling with tears. ‘When you’re young, you think forgetting is a tragedy,’ she said. ‘But it isn’t.’

‘What is?’ I asked.

‘The day the past becomes more real than the present.’

As autumn passed into winter, Mum began losing entire days. Sometimes she believed I was a neighbour she’d just met. One day she became frightened by her own reflection, unable to understand why an old woman stared back from the mirror. But occasionally she became startlingly clear.

One stormy night, the wind howled, tree branches struck power lines, and inevitably the lights went out. Plunged into darkness, I spoke calmly to her, 'It’s okay, Mum, just sit still while I find candles.’

The candlelight flickered, causing restless shadows on the walls. I was expecting panic and confusion, but instead the low light seemed to calm her, and when she spoke it was as if everything was as it should be.

‘Ah, it’s gone,’ she sighed.

‘What’s gone?’ I asked her.

‘The harsh sunlight.’ She looked straight into my eyes and smiled as if she really saw me.

The look told me she knew who I was, and for the first time in months, I was sure too.

‘You know what I think memories are, love?’

I shook my head, hardly daring to believe my mother knew what she was saying. ‘What do you think they are, Mum?’

‘Memories are places we keep living in after everyone else has left.’


Written for "The One-Line Lyric Challenge" Motorcycle Drive By
Prompt: "The sun is always in [my/her/his/their] eyes"
1268 words