Tea and biscuits and pieces of the past
Video segment from A Lonely Place Facing The Sun. Thistle Hall, 2025.
Every week or so, when opportunity and motivation hasn’t been squeezed out by frantic busy-ness, I visit an elderly friend of our family. She was in our life on a weekly rotation as the boys’ piano teacher for about a decade, but even before that, when we were expecting Nino, who is now 15, (and Vinnie was yet to be a twinkle in his father’s eye) we lived next door to her. When Nino was brand new, the living room of our rented cross-leased flat was directly above her teaching room, and while I sat breastfeeding him, we listened to students come and go, and the tinkle of Bach and Mozart and Schubert would seep up through the floor. She is still in the same house where Nino and Vin and I went over and over to learn to play by ear, according to Suzuki method, although now whenever I arrive, armed with a packet of Oreos and a fresh cup of tea for her, she is always in the lounge at the other end of the house, with three heaters blasting, and The Chase blaring on the television.
I’m writing about our connection with her because of the change I’ve witnessed in her over the last few years, and the thoughts that those changes have spurred in me over the last weeks. Her memory is fading. Dementia is a cruel business, for the person afflicted, but also for the people who love and care for them. I can see how much smaller her life has become - from a busy, vital, and above all social weekly rhythm, she is now in a kind of hibernation that is largely punctuated only by the state-supplied caregivers who arrive to bring her food and make sure she takes her medicine, and a weekly outing to join other, mostly delicate older folk, for gentle activity and fellowship. I visit, but not nearly often enough to constitute fun, and when I do spend an hour or two with her, we have a well worn pattern of conversation. Every time, I hear three or four of the same extended stories, the larger recollections of her young life, retold with different words, but the same daggers of memory. She mourns the choices she felt she had to make, and the directions her life could have taken if her sacrifices for family weren’t so necessary. Her memories are about obligation and disappointment, and they resurface every single time we sit together.
We also argue sometimes, when I’m feeling less resilient. She has opinions about education and politics that veer wildly from mine, and while mostly I respond softly and vaguely, (because I know there’s really no point in trying to change her mind about a thing), occasionally I find myself unable to dissemble. I know - that’s an archaic kind of word, and it means something like ‘tricky’ or ‘deceitful’. But it really means pretending, and when I’m feeling robust, I pretend for her. When I’m not, I tell her, gently, what I actually think. It never goes down well. In those moments I shake her worldview, and it’s fair to say that she doesn’t enjoy it. I guess the main thing is, every time I visit, we start fresh, because she generally doesn’t remember what we discussed the last time, and I know she’s always glad to see me.
All of that is a precursor to talking about memory. That’s been my preoccupation for the last few years, studying and making art about how things are remembered and misremembered. I’ve spent quite a lot of time considering how to visually express these ideas about how we embellish and alter the past when we repeat it through memory. The slipperiness of what is real and what is merely perception. Our piano teacher is at the tail end of her story, but she returns to the prologue, each time fixating on the same parts of her joy and her trauma. Those of us who keep her in our company have learned about her most deeply through her revitalised childhood and young adult adventures. Sometimes it seems as though there are only a handful of things she can truly recall. And, it makes me wonder what I’ll return to if I come to the same cognitive decline. Our lives are really the sum of our choices, even those that don’t seem like a choice at all. I doubt I’ll remember any of the vivid detail and hue of my current experience, but likely will return to the things I’m most embarrassed by. It takes nothing at all to recall a particular humiliating incident on a commercial photography job a few years ago, where I really annoyed a man dining in a restaurant without meaning to. I still feel the creep of shame when I think of it. Or the awful sinking feeling I still remember when I was little and an uncle told me off for overreacting to something I had heard that upset me. I don’t even clearly remember what it was, but I still carry the feeling of it, and I bet your bottom dollar I’ll bring it back in technicolour when I’m in my dotage. I remember the girl in my jazz ballet class describing to me how I was just a little bit too fat, and if I ‘just ate one quarter less of the dinner on my plate each night, that’d probably fix me’. I’ll no-doubt have some things to say about that, one day when my filters are all gone.
When I was working in the early stages of my Master’s project, I took a collection of voice recordings from a guided conversation between my mum and her sister, about their remembered childhood at Waitai, on D’Urville Island. Something mum said changed the direction of my enquiry, from being specifically about inherited history, to something much more fluid. She said, in reference to the feud that broke the Moleta family into two, ‘Family folklore can warp and change with the telling’. It shook me, for its absolutely liberating truth. I realised at that point that each of us relates an experience from our own perspective, imbuing our memory with emotional bias. The version we share isn’t necessarily untrue - it’s just one facet of a more complex truth. I now think that that statement doesn’t need to be limited to family narratives, but to a broader idea about our own personal histories. Professor of Culture Liedeke Plate, in her book ‘Technologies of Memory in the Arts’, describes liquid memories - that is, the process of retelling that acknowledges a fluidity of narrative, and the potential for alteration in future retellings. I really like that concept of liquidity - having the properties that allow for movement and transformation, and for the potential to spread like a stain.
Understanding that our stories can change with our attitude seems to be key. I remember my Nanna on Dad’s side, who had a full and long life of high and low-lights. She was never, to my knowledge, very wealthy, but was absolutely creatively frugal and always always full of thanks for her life. Even right at the scary, painful end of it, she was full of gratitude. Her faith was unshakeable, and her memories sweet. I’d like that to be my own witness - faithful and thankful, maybe impactful, definitely creative. I’d really like to fixate on the lovely things that happen with family and friends, and not on the choices I have and will make that are less than edifying. The piano teacher tells me her stories with all of the regret and frustration of hindsight, often omitting the many beautiful consequences of her choices. In all likelihood, I too will remember injustices and the times I was vulnerable, but I’m really hoping I’ll instinctively express more gratitude when I’m coming to my latter years. That I’ll nurture a bias toward the good stuff, the moments of triumph and of good fortune, the relationships that I treasure, the worthy deeds, and the work I create.
What do you want to return to, when recent memory is elusive, and long term memory dominates? It’s possibly not ‘work’ - although for me, part of it actually is. I was talking with a friend the other day about the idea that at the end of a life, nobody ever says they wished they had worked more. She and I both agreed that actually, we love our work, the productivity of it, the creativity of it. That we won’t regret it when the end is nigh. All things can be taken in moderation, of course. But I’m genuinely so happy to do the work that I do, even the boring bits and the bits that involve getting up very very early in the morning.
I’ll visit our erstwhile neighbour again next week, with tea and biscuits under my wing, and we’ll have a new version of that same conversation. I’ll try to hold my tongue when I disagree. And maybe I’ll ask just the right question to unlock a new memory of joy for her.