Alzheimer’s Duet
"Hills around the Bay of Moulin Huet, Guernsey" Auguste Renoir, 1883
by Geoffrey Babbitt
“Using logic and reason to explain… is likely to make them agitated…. Instead, the best thing you can
do is not try to bring them back into reality.”—dailycaring.com
I:I remember looking out our car window on the way there. It was early summer, and a whole meadow
was covered with blue wildflowers.
Father:I want to go to the cabin now and sit on the back deck.
Not sure whether they were blue flax, bluebottle, or baby-blue eyes.
I want to watch the sun rise over Sawtooth Peak, light spilling in through the ponderosas.
So much blue, and the blue so very blue, I thought it was a lake, the petals splashing in the wind.
I remember those flowers. I remember drinking them with my eyes.
In no time we’ll be driving past a lake of blue wildflowers on the way to your cabin.
I’ve always wanted to swim in flowers.
I’ll bring the girls to your cabin, where they can swim in the lake.
But the sun is going down now, so I’ve got to get them to bed.
Geoff, please don’t leave me here. I am scared of everything.
Just think of the summer, breathing in the cold pine air when you sleep with the window open, the sound of the lake lapping against the sand, against the docks.
Plash.
A new moon rising over the lake, so still it’s like glass….
I want to go there. Right now.
The cabin’s almost ready, just a few more days, so close.
I could die and you would be happy.
Of course not. The highway is snowed out for now. We’re all working hard on getting the cabin for
You.
Maybe I am worth something.
Once the storm blows over, we’ll drive you up.
The day my mother left me it was snowing. Christmas Eve. I was five.
You remember that day?
I remember the snow—big dry flakes carving themselves out of the sky
.What else?
Gin on her breath. Smokey hair. The way her hands smelled. Like sunshine. Her hands on my face, then in her pockets. Her shadow’s heiligenschein so bright in the snow.
I never met her.
Her shadow had pockets of deeper shadow.
Don’t go.
Snow will fall when the light falls.
I’ll see you in the morning, Dad. I’ll bring Remi and the twins.
Just please don’t leave me here.
You’ll be living in the woods tomorrow. I’ll take you in the morning.
Once,
I was a freefalling flake of snow.
I landed at the top of a pine tree.
Every manner of light passing through me.
Geoffrey Babbitt is the author of Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light and A Grain of Sand in Lambeth, which won the 2023 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Prize in Poetry and is forthcoming from University of Nevada Press in late 2025. Babbitt’s poems and essays have appeared in North American Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Notre Dame Review, Washington Square, Guesthouse, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA and PhD from the University of Utah, is an Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing and Writing & Rhetoric at Hobart & William Smith Colleges, and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Seneca Review and Seneca Review Books, for which he founded the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book prize. He lives with his partner and their three children in the Finger Lakes region of New York.
