The River of Forgetting My Mother Watched

**The River of Forgetting My Mother Watched** When my mother turned eighty, she told me she was going to close the bar. Her hearing had deteriorated badly. She could no longer catch the high-pitched alarms. People had begun telling her, “Miki-san, something’s ringing.” Sometimes it was the gas shutoff clicking in automatically. Sometimes the refrigerator door left ajar. Once, it was the smoke detector.
“I can’t risk causing trouble for others,” she said over the phone. “I’m closing.”
“Are you going to sell the place?” I asked.
“No. I want to leave it to you. Find someone to rent it.”
A tenant was found quickly. I flew back to Japan to handle the contract.
Still, I wasn’t sure she could really retire after working for sixty years. She had no hobbies to speak of except pachinko. I figured that once she stopped working, she would end up spending her days there.
That is exactly what happened.
When I returned again to rein in her spending, she said, “I know, I know. But if I stay home all day, I get restless. I’ll try to cut back.” It was only words.
“I’m sorry for the trouble,” she would add.
“There’s nowhere else you can trouble,” I told her. “If it’s me, that’s fine. But even then, keep it within some limits. I’m not telling you to stop what you like.”
She gave a faint, apologetic smile.
Just then, a dark shape crossed the corner of the room. A cockroach.
Instinctively, I grabbed a magazine to strike it.
“Don’t!” she said sharply.
“If the window’s open, they come in from the neighbors. Don’t kill it.”
“Why not?”
“When I ran the place, I hunted them down without mercy. No need to keep doing that now. That one has somewhere it wants to go back to as well.”
I said nothing. I scooped it up with a folded newspaper and let it go out the window.
That day, I had planned to ask her if she would consider moving into a care facility. Her legs were still strong, but it seemed better to move while she could still make friends and adjust. Better than waiting until she was bedridden.
But her words—“it has somewhere it wants to return to”—left me with nothing to say. Of course there is always somewhere one wants to return to. To spend the last years of life thinking only of going back must be hard.
Still, I lived outside Japan. If she was just passing time at pachinko parlors, that was one thing. But if something happened… In the end, I brought it up.
“I have no intention of making you take care of me like that,” she said. “I don’t want that. When the time comes, I’ll go somewhere that can handle it. But until then, I want to stay here alone. I know it’s selfish. I know you worry. But let me have this.”
“…All right. But at least let me arrange a helper.”
“If that helps you feel better, then do it,” she said, smiling.
That arrangement, however, turned out to be more troublesome than the pachinko.
Within a month, she would always tell them not to come anymore. Over the course of a year, I lost count of how many helpers were replaced.
Then she began to say, “When they come, things go missing. Money disappears.”
And yet, I was glad I had insisted on bringing them in.
If I hadn’t, I might never have noticed how quietly dementia had begun to approach her.