Fragments

Mothers can be at once entirely familiar and complete mysteries to their children. The women who name us and hold an almost unbearable power in shaping our identities are elusive. Certain facets of their selves and chapters of their histories are closed off.

As she opens her memoir, the poet Damian Rogers recalls the time her mother escaped from her nursing home in Buffalo, New York. Joanna has frontal-temporal-lobe dementia, and when the police brought her back, she was unable to say where she’d been. Rogers was asleep in her Toronto home; she didn’t find out about the episode until the next morning. Where did her mother go? What did she do with those hours? Rogers can only speculate: “I am able to imagine my mother, and in my imagination I fill the holes in the stories of what happened to her. There are so many holes in the stories, and I am always filling those holes.”