After a Month, My Family Sat Chipped and Vacant, Eating Live Insects — My Father Called It 'Wellness'
A long time later, I sat on a weathered wooden bench overlooking the vast, placid waters of Lake Superior. The sun, a soft, hazy disk in the sky, cast a shimmering path across the waves as they gently lapped against the rocky shore of Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. The air was cool and clean, carrying the scent of pine and fresh water.
I held a well-worn copy of my mother’s favorite poetry book, its pages soft beneath my thumb. She had loved these verses, found solace in their quiet beauty. I opened it to a familiar poem, a simple piece about enduring love.
Sarah and Elaine now resided in a specialized long-term care facility, a place designed to offer both therapy and peace. Their progress was slow, agonizingly incremental. They still struggled with full memory recall, the gaps in their past vast and often disorienting. I visited them weekly, reading aloud from this very book, the cadence of the words a familiar comfort, even if the meaning remained elusive for them.
Sometimes, during these readings, Sarah would look at me. In those rare, precious moments, a faint glimmer of recognition would surface in her eyes, a shadow of the old mischief, a soft, knowing smile that was undeniably hers. It would vanish as quickly as it came, but it was enough. It was a beacon, a fragile promise that the sister I loved, the mother I cherished, were still there, somewhere, waiting.
“She would have loved this view, wouldn’t she, Mom?” I whispered, tracing a finger over a line of poetry.
My mother, even with her faded memories, had found moments of contentment in the facility. She hummed old tunes sometimes, melodies from a past life, though she couldn’t name them. Elias, now old and broken, served out his sentence in a federal prison, his name a forgotten stain on the history books, his twisted “Harmony Protocol” a cautionary tale in medical ethics. He had disappeared from my life, and the world was safer for it.
The memory of his cruelty would never fully fade, a permanent scar on my family’s history. But sitting here, in the quiet beauty of a world free from his twisted harmony, I found a different kind of peace. It was not a complete victory, not a perfect restoration, but a profound acceptance. The faint glimmer of my family’s true selves, and the enduring love that bound us, was enough to build a new life upon.
I closed the poetry book, its leather cover smooth beneath my touch. Standing from the bench, I walked slowly down the sandy path towards the water’s edge. I bent down, picking up a handful of smooth, colorful pebbles, turning them over in my palm. They were simple, natural, imperfect, yet beautiful. A tangible, concrete gesture of moving forward, of embracing the world as it was, with all its imperfections and its quiet, enduring hope.
Some memories, like true love and genuine freedom, are too primal to ever truly be ‘cleaned’ away; they merely wait for a chance to flicker back to life.
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