All Bites Are Off

All Bites are Off

originally published in Lavender Bones Issue 3 2023

Sushi pieces are supposed to be bite-size, but they’re not. Attempting to slice them with wooden chopsticks is rude and ineffective.

“Are you able to prepare our rolls in smaller bites, please?” I ask. The answer is always No.

If you’ve ever fed someone who’s forgotten how to eat, you understand my frustration.

My friend is descending into a rare form of Alzheimer’s symptoms like a falcon diving for its meal. It’s fascinating, violent, and ends with a death.

“You couldn’t pay me to eat sushi,” her mother mumbles every time we do. She’s a retired nurse who proclaims that she “knows better than to eat any animal raw.” I acknowledge her worries and retell the story of one man who got a 5 ½ foot tapeworm from eating raw salmon every day. And then we eat our sushi.

Because the pieces are not bite-size, I deconstruct her favorite rolls for her. If it’s a good day, she can swallow some spicy tuna and a clump of rice. Her face lights up most when a sliver of mango mixes in. (That stuff is slippery.)

On the table is a sectioned rubber plate and a no-spill drinking cup. My grandchild grew out of these as my friend grew into them. To be honest, she has also grown out of them – in the other direction – but I can’t give up. It seems disrespectful to feed her from my plate, even though I know she cannot see the plates anymore.

“Oh, are we eating?” she asks as I put a piece of shrimp in her mouth, “I can do it myself.” She smiles as the bite of shrimp falls to her lap, and she grabs the edge of something that topples loudly.

In movies about end-of-life illnesses, women are always there for each other. They laugh and cry at the same time and face the intimate ugliness without looking away. I want to do all of that, but I find myself secretly dreading the visits now. Many of her friends disappeared within the first years of symptoms, and sometimes I want to disappear too.

But we’ve spent our lifetimes together. We laughed and cried through our marriages, parenting, teaching jobs, divorces, deaths, and political turmoil that sometimes landed us on opposite sides. For over 40 years, we were each other’s navigation tool.

Touch is all that’s really left now. I place her hand on my arm and guide her to the bathroom. I feel limited by my inability to lead us both. Too often I use words when touch or silence helps her most. An incline or a deep shadow topples her, and we start again. How do I guide her on this precipice of life’s edge?

She was a brilliant woman – a trilingual, activist teacher who lived all over the world. “Well, now I think I’ll move to Germany for a while,” she said sometime in the 80’s. I begged her not to live so far away again, but she left anyway, and it was good for both of us. I’m glad she didn’t listen to me because her travels came to a crushing halt before she was 50.

I first tasted sushi without her, while I worked briefly in Japan. She tried it without me while she lived in Spain. Neither of us made good first-sushi choices so we weren’t impressed, but we both fell in love with raw fish after her illness began. I also feed her traditional bites from countries where she lived and hope to spark memories. Instead, every bite is a first-time taste for her, and she is delighted. Is sushi still a favorite for her or am I the one clinging to our tradition?

As my visit ends, I write my name on her mother’s calendar for a day next week. Each time together gets more heart-wrenching and difficult. Sometimes, she’s in terrifying hallucinations, and sometimes she asks me if she’s sick. As I drive the hour home, I think about learning to make sushi rolls myself.

There’s a moment during every visit when I study her face, and I see the little girl who first let me sit at her table when I was new at school. Her eyes still shine with the wisdom of her travels, and her smile still offers a gentle, unwavering kindness. Somehow, I still see her as the lifeline she has always been for me, and I am holding on with all our might.