Beautiful Mind

 The mail I got last Wednesday was not the cheery kind. Instead I received a copy of my mother's death certificate. Just a form with some of the blanks filled out. My mother's life was reduced to just a few pointed comments, dates and times. When she was born. Where she lived. Marital status? Divorced. But I confess, the reason for me to continue down the page was to find the box marked "Cause of Death." 

According to this documentation, my mother died of "senile degeneration of the brain." 

And this terrified me. One of the most alert, metacognitive minds in all my experience "degenerated?" Not the mind that read all those books, played all that music, taught me all those things. I believe my mother's brain was tired from all that use. It needed some rest. 

The brain that ran her own accounting business, and kept track of our family's birthdays. The brain that read the New Yorker from front to back once a week, and kept her subscription to Time Magazine long after newsstands ceased to be. 

This was the mind that brought me literature and music. This was the mind that held the rules to more card games than I ever managed to learn myself. This was the mind that, until oh-so-very-recently beat me regularly at Gin Rummy. 

She was the family historian. She kept track of all the begats and could explain cousins and their relative distance from one another. Degeneration? She was the one who kept track of all the generations. When I was trying to describe our family tree, I relied on her Cliffs Notes to keep me on track. 

The day that mail came, I was sitting on the couch with my wife watching Turner Classic movies, as we will. Sun Valley Serenade was on, and I was relatively pleased to be able to identify Sonja Henie, Glenn Miller and Milton Berle. My wife wanted to guess that the second female lead was Claudette Colbert, but couldn't commit. This was when a quick phone call to my mother would come in handy. She could tell us about the career of Lynn Bari, who was not in the Rolodex my wife and I keep on stars of the thirties and forties. 

Instead, we relied on Wikipedia, a poor excuse for a replacement for my mother's beautiful mind. And Wikipedia never let me win at Gin Rummy.