Dementia–The Cradle of Twilight

Posted on January 19, 2025 Updated on January 19, 2025

My mom, Connie Meyers was a beauty queen who was never comfortable in her own skin.

She constantly changed hair color, her waistline (yoyo dieting), fashion, lipstick, and persistently adored or hated herself in the mirror. She never fully wanted to be in this world. The story goes that she died once or twice when she was a child. She saw heaven and did not want to return to this earthly realm. She said so all my life. And once her beloved mother, my grandma Ollie May, died, she only wanted to be with her in that celestial kingdom she saw as a child. Then a couple of her sisters died, then a couple good friends, and all she wanted was to peel off her skin and go with them.  Mom was my real-life Selkie.

This poem, Cradle of Twilight was published today Sundays Poet’s Corner of My Edmond’s News. I wrote it during the months of my mom’s descent into dementia. She finally slipped into the deep blue three years ago.

Applying the Celtic myths of our Scottish Irish ancestry was this daughter’s way of making sense of, and peace with her mother’s journey in a life she hated, and her longing to return ….

Cradle of Twilight

Mindy Meyers-Halleck

At the edge of midnight

she rises from bed,

steps outside her coastal cottage

wearing her nightdress

barefooted––

shaved head.

As her soul lays ruined against the rocks,

she breathes in the briny algae drifting on the breeze,

and hears the eternal song of the seas––

the crash of cresting waves, clicking of dolphins, flurry of bubbles,

as seaweed sways, shuffling side-to-side in the ever-shifting tide.

As the webbing between her fingertips

twitches

itches

grows,

she knows––

her seal skin is forming …

eternity knocks.

Soon she’ll return to the briny deep,

swim, frolic with the Selkies,

––drift upon the waves in deep, deep sleep,

with her sisters of the sea.

As her aching body prepares for transition––

exchange of human skin for glossy black Selkie seal––

beneath the silver light of the moon,

she cries seven tears

into the sea,

the price of re-admission to her natural milieu––

She’s been gone too many years,

she misses the sweet taste of salt

and the sky reflected on water,

the soothing blue, blue, blue.

From the shore she sings a melodic tune that echoes across the waves.

Those enchanted echoes

whispers on the wind

a bridge that

crosses one mystical realm to the other––

calling to them

calling her home.

This earthbound world has been painful at times––

abandonment, loneliness, loss, grief––

things the human body can’t release …

instead,

it aches, opines and enshrines

pronounces itself dead.

But love has been a treasure healing earthly wounds.

Love, divine as the silken skin of her sisters of the sea,

has made her short journey a spree

of wonder.

Worth leaving the embrace of blue waters

… Temporarily.

But now she cries seven tears,

and calls to her family of the deep––

Will you come for me soon?

She is ready for the waves,

the gently rocking,

a cradle of twilight sleep.

Come for me soon …

She awaits divine transcendence beneath the silvery moon.

*************

Below are photos of Mom in her heyday and then in the early 2000s in Edmonds, WA.