Your mother works at her computer standing up while listening to Slavonic Dances. This should improve her posture and strengthen her lumbar spine, but it hurts her feet. She looks for images of isiXhosa text books for blog posts. She drops the hashtags #Setswana and #Sesotho in social media designed to titillate the woke without blowing up.
She has bitten her nails and the tip of her index finger is bloodied. It will grow out if she stops picking at it for a day. She clicks the laptop shut with more force than she intends, glad to have clients who think she’s good at what she does.
She wonders if the Chinese stem cell research team can develop a vaccine to stave off Alzheimer’s. Some days she says “clapped” when she means “chapped”. Words that sound the same come out when she speaks. Sometimes she writes things that don’t make sense. This is the first sign. She wants to believe that the spelling errors are due to her too rapid typing.
She practices bassoon. She meditates. She wears a light-blocking eye cover to improve her sleep. She sets her alarm for 4am to scull by moonlight, eager to retain fitness and muscle tone, to keep her weight down. Her partner is 25 years older than her. He says, Be careful, Darling. There are cowboys out there. They have guns and no ethics. In the dark she looks for cop cars parked at the end of the peninsula. She’s seen the arrest videos of joggers and surfers breaking lockdown – but hopes they only patrol in daylight.
Four mosques surround the lake. When the imams call the sleeping to Fajr she gasps at the shooting stars on the dark horizon. She tells herself she is lucky. She tries to memorise poetry. She tells herself the future is unknown.
As the chant ends she heads home. The dawn sky turns orange and she hoists her boat onto her shoulder and across the lawn. Pelicans fly overhead in silhouette against the dark mountains. Then come the flamingos and the distant cry of the fish eagle. She chants her own mantra as she washes down her boat, a prayer for neuroprotection: May there be self-renewal, proliferation, differentiation, and recombination…
Your mother buys Vitamin B and Omega-3, wanting to give you a bottle to protect your brain. She buys you a China coffee mug with a cartoon cat catching fish. She hopes you will visit. She is almost relieved that you do not. When she burps after swallowing the fish oil capsules, she wishes she could afford salmon.
Your mother has heard that no individual is responsible for another person's disease or recovery from it. If that is true, who is responsible for preventing her own neural decline?
Liesl Jobson freelances in the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra and is a communications consultant for JumpStart Foundation, a maths education NPO in Johannesburg. She has a MA (Creative Writing) with distinction from Wits University and is the author of Ride the Tortoise (Jacana, 2013) and 100 Papers: a collection of prose poems and flash fiction (Botsotso, 2007) which won the Ernst Van Heerden Award. She coaches novices at the Alfred Rowing Club, Zeekoevlei. Twitter: @LieslJobson