July 10 - "Ma, a Memoir"

“Ma, a Memoir”
by Lynn Freed
New Sudden Fiction (2007)

* * * (Good) Realistic

A daughter deals with her mother’s faltering mind while her father is in the hospital with cancer.

It’s a sad story. It’s made all the more sadder by the fact that there is probably very little fiction involved in a story such as this. People die and people struggle to remember. Getting to the point in life where 60 years of happiness can become so confused…

I did enjoy the imagery at the beginning of the story:

“He’d got away. Only as far as the hospital, but still she’d been left behind. Once, she would have got into her Fiat and revved and revved and gone off in a puff of blue smoke to find him, to catch him out in the arms of another woman, perhaps. Sixty years of marriage had only heated the furious war between them.”

Even at war you get the feeling there was love there.