Last weekend, my husband and I visited my mother on the memory care unit where she lives. We brought her a bagel with cream cheese and lox, fruit, and hot coffee, her favorite foods, hands down, with the possible exception of chocolate croissants brought by anyone but me. As she munched and sipped, she looked around the big open sitting room, empty except for the three of us. The other residents were lunching in the dining room down the hall.

“People are leaving,” she said. “It’s the end of the season.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said. My mother, who has Alzheimer’s, sometimes believes she is living at a resort, and that she will need to pack up soon and return to one of her three homes. As she isn’t distressed, I don’t correct her, although I do wonder how anyone can believe they have three homes and not be freaked out by the property taxes.

But more so than that, I wonder what she makes of the other “resort goers,” mostly nonverbal folks in wheelchairs who are, at any given mealtime, being fed by staff members they do not recognize from one hour to the next. 

A few seconds later, when my mother referred to her assisted living facility as exactly that, my husband and I traded surprised looks. How could it be that her brain was capable of holding two competing thoughts at once, and trotting them out, side by side without one seeing the other?  

It’s kind of like when I dream I’m chasing my dog down the street but also, my dog is a horse. Do I stop mid-dream and say, “Wait a minute, this dog can’t also be a horse”? No, I just take the visuals at face value, along with the fact that, in the same dream, my elementary school teacher Mrs. Price is also my husband, and she is wearing a wetsuit.

But my mother wasn’t dreaming when she referred to her living facility first as a resort and then as what it actually is. Maybe where she lives sometimes feels like one and then the other, or maybe it feels like both, simultaneously. After all, at resorts, as in assisted living facilities, people do tend to relax and receive food at regular intervals, with the occasional entertainment opportunity thrown in.

Later, in thinking about this, I remembered learning about the concept of “both/and” in my life coach training. “Both/and” refers to how, as human beings, we can, and often do, hold two opposing perspectives or feelings in our mind at one time. For example, I’m terrified of public speaking and also electrified by it; then, when the reading or presentation ends, I feel both tremendous relief and extremely let down. It’s exhausting (but also exhilarating).

The same weekend I saw my mother at her resort/assisted living facility, I visited friends in Greenville, South Carolina. After dinner, a deck of Tarot cards made an appearance. As no one present could call themselves a true Tarot master—or believer, for that matter—we did what any self-respecting group of impatient skeptics would do: we plugged our card spreads into ChatGPT and asked what our futures held. What happened next was its own duality: we inveterate doubters read our results with the kind of slavish respect the faithful reserve for epistles from the Almighty.

As if us disbelievers believing wasn’t duality enough, consider that what we were taking as truth were wordy proclamations handed down by an entity faking its own brains.

Let me just go on record here to say that I both respected and despised my Tarot reading. According to the cards, I have only recently found my way forward on a new book project, after a long, unsettling period of confusion and misdirection.

“This is so true!” I said to my friends, who were gathered around awaiting their turn at the cards. They nodded approvingly.

“Now you are entering a necessary fallow period,” the cards went on to say, via ChatGPT.

This, I now see, is how the Tarot ropes you in: by feeding you a tasty morsel of undeniable truth before shoving the rest of your bitter fortune down your throat.

“I know you’re super energized,” it seemed to be saying, “but try to nap.”

A fallow period, necessary or not, is the last thing I want right now. ChatGPT must have sensed my dismay, because it tried to reassure me.

“According to the cards, you’re not blocked,” it chirped, “you’re integrating!” This sounded to me like the kind of language you use to tell someone bad news while pretending it’s good news.  

“You haven’t lost your house and all its contents in the fire, you’ve downsized!”
“You didn’t forget to pick your child up at daycare, you opened the way for them to enjoy a lifetime of therapy when they’re older!”

Maybe, in the spirit of dualities, the Tarot was right and wrong. Right, in that I have finally found my way forward, and wrong in that it is not at all time for a rest. Or maybe, in the same way my mother lives at both a resort and in an assisted living facility, there is a way to both write and not write, and still move my project forward. If this is the case, then how fascinating to find, in the mix of two questionable models of divination, a little island of good sense.

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Dana Shavin is an award-winning humor columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist and of Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular columns spanning twenty years. She is the Literary Arts Program Coordinator for the Dalton Creative Arts Guild. Publication history and more at Danashavin.com. Email her at [email protected].