Mélikah Abdelmoumen was born in Chicoutimi in 1972. From 2005 to 2017, she lived in Lyon. She holds a doctorate in literature from the University of Montreal and has published numerous articles and short stories as well as several novels and essays, including The disastrous (2013) and Twelve years in France (2018). She was editor at Groupe Ville-Marie literature, in Montreal, from June 2019 to 2021. Her next book, Baldwin, Styron and I, will be published by Mémoire encrier in February 2022. She is editor-in-chief of the journal Quebec letters.
I am at the CHSLD de Bagotville, in Saguenay, in my mother’s room, helping her eat.
My son, husband and I hopped in the car and drove out of Montreal earlier than expected, a week before Christmas. Seeing the progression of the Omicron variant, we feared that it would become complicated to move from one region to another or that the number of family caregivers authorized to visit CHSLD residents would be reduced.
I live in Montreal and my mother has been back in La Baie, her hometown for several years. My aunt Monique, my uncle Rémi and his wife, Martine, are the first three on the list of family caregivers. I am the fourth, because they are the ones who, also living in La Baie, take care of her from day to day.
I am feeding my mother like you would feed a child. I am not allowed to leave here, to take off my mask to eat or drink myself, to use the toilet in the room. Omicron has already started its mad progression, and these precautions are necessary to protect Mom, her neighbors and all the staff who care for them.
Better times
The last time I came, there was a lull on the pandemic side. I was allowed to be in the common dining room with my mother, the other residents and the attendants. I have incredible memories of those moments spent with them, who took care of four or five of all the residents of the 2e stage. They made jokes, tried to motivate those who pretended to let go, presided with firmness and delicacy at all stages of the meal. And they played clowns, teased the boarders, teased each other. I was there, laughing a big, straight laugh at each of their jokes, and it felt so good to watch them and experience it with them.
I think about all this while feeding mom, alone with her in her room, banned from the common room like all caregivers, Omicron obliges. My mother and I, despite our rocky relationship, shared this: a certain very teasing humor, a visceral urge to laugh, sometimes in the worst moments. It’s one of the last things to leave her: her humor. My jokes no longer have any effect on him, even the simplest and most childish ones. She doesn’t understand them.
I try to convince her to eat his meat. On the wall, just behind, there is a photo of her in her forties, at the counter of the stationery that she had opened at one time in Montreal. She sold pens, quills, cards, paper, trinkets, gifts. After years of teaching French to immigrants for a school board, she decided to give it a go: start another life, have her own shop.
A life, before
The woman I am spoon-feeding and whom the CHSLD attendants know sick, declining, stricken with dementia, this woman they take care of, has had a life filled with daring projects. In the world of music, politics, then with this business.
Before that, she had met a Tunisian in her part of the country and had welcomed him into her life. They got married and had two daughters, my sister and me. They left Saguenay for the big city, Montreal. They divorced and she opened this shop where I had my first job as a college student.
All this life, her life, comes to mind as I look at this photo of her, head held high, determined, beautiful and full of life behind her checkout counter.
I look at the one in front of me today and I tell myself that even though she doesn’t remember it, she carries it all inside her.
And all the other boarders, the elders who live here because their families are unable to accommodate them, what adventures, what accomplishments, what follies and what exploits are hidden in a corner of their brain to which they no longer have access ? What memories and what small revolutions are they no longer able to tell us about or remember?
I think of the attendants who take care of them, laugh with them, provide them with all the necessary care, after almost two years of a pandemic, without giving up, without losing their rigor or their commitment to the task and I say to myself: They may not know in detail all the routes behind each of their residents, that would be impossible. But one thing is obvious: in the way they address their residents and their families, the staff of the Bagotville CHSLD, even after two years of this incredibly difficult situation, continue to act with a respect that today upsets me. I thank them with all my heart.
Because it seems, in each of their gestures, that they and they know that behind these fragile, damaged bodies, behind these beings now without memory, without words, there are people who have lived through serious moments and moments fabulous, people who have done incredible things, who have vibrated, acted, dared.