My mother labors to speak. Given the ravages of advanced dementia coupled with the paralyzing effects of “long Covid”, her words are weak and warbled. Yet I am struck by her determination to make language work. As I sit by her side on the small stool by her bedside, I lean on my forearms, one hand cradling her heart, the other the crown of her head. Mostly she sleeps, drifting on high like cirrus clouds late in the afternoon. And vanishing. But occasionally she is motivated to say something. Garbled words tumble from her mouth, and I feel like an anthropologist, working to decipher the meaning of buried content. Like bubbles breaking loose from the bottom of a pond and floating to the surface before escaping, her words emerge from some buried recess in her cortex. Amidst her many mumbled utterances, fragments of speech suddenly surface– “I’ll tell you…” or “Anyhow, you know…” or “What should I do?”
It is astonishing how deeply wired in are the mechanics of speech. Ever since we are 16 months old, coached to say “doggie”, or “owie”, “dada” or “mama”, the habit of speech gets cut into our cortex, like the needle tracking round and round in the grooves of the old LP (meaning “long play”) vinyl records. This points to the immense challenge central to the discipline of meditation and yoga to “cease the fluctuations of the mind”. Most words dribble unintelligible from my mother’s mouth. But then this morning, she opened her eyes bright for a half second and uttered one simple word, suddenly lucid and distinct: “Wow”. She spoke with a slight lift of her faint eyebrow. The word had an emphatic, declarative feel, a discovery, like a paleontologist digging in the soil with her tiny chisel and brush and happening upon a remarkable find. “Wow”, a revelation of something outside the ordinary, something never seen before. It speaks volumes, precise, yet exhaustive. “Wow”. One word that captures this all-encompassing mystery, the incomprehensibility of it all. In the Christian faith it is God incognito, the inimitable presence of the invisible. The simplicity of “Wow”, a word that can be read forward or backward– a palindrome—too expresses the inconceivable. It points to that which eludes ordinary comprehension. In the Great Vehicle of the Buddha’s teaching, the Mahayana, it speaks to the vow of the bodhisattva who in the face of great suffering and despair acts out of boundless compassion. When my mom utters “Wow” I am left with only one response, to respond emphatically, and in kind, “Wow”.
