“I don’t know why they won’t let me go home,” Mom said. “I wish I could go home, but it’s not likely that’s ever going to happen. I think I probably am going to die here.”
“If it wasn’t for the Alzheimer’s, Mom, you wouldn’t have any reason to be here,” I answer each time we have this conversation because it is the truth. It breaks my heart that Mom has to live at a nursing home, but the other truth is that she said I should go home and live with my husband because that is my place and the only way that could be was to place Mom where she would be safe.
“Is anyone staying at my house?”
“No. Your house is just the way you left it. Richard and the neighbors keep an eye on it.” I don’t tell her that I keep thinking I should see if I can buy her house, to keep it in the family, and to make sure it is still there if a cure for Alzheimer’s would come and she could return home.
“OK. Good.” She is satisfied with the answer. “I don’t think my Alzheimer’s is as bad as other peoples’. It’s not as bad as the doctor thought it would be by now.”
“It’s pretty bad, Mom, because your short term memory is gone. You’re still pretty good with the long term memory, though.”
“What is short term memory?” she asked.
“A minute ago, five minutes ago, half an hour ago.”
“I remember five minutes ago.”
The leading question: “Do you remember we were in the dining room?”
“Yeah.”
Now the trick question: “What did we do there?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Do you remember we played Yahtzee with Catherine, Effie, Helen, Mary and the activity director?”
“Oh, yeah? I don’t remember.”
“I know, Mom. That’s why it’s called Alzheimer’s and why you can’t live alone at home.”
“What did you say that was—what I don’t remember?”
“Short-term memory.”
“Yes. I’ll work on short term memory.”
“I don’t know if you can change it, but it won’t hurt to try, Mom. It won’t hurt to try.”
The visit was a good one. I enjoyed Yahtzee in the dining room. I enjoyed crocheting with Mom in the sitting room. So, why did I cry half of the way home?
My brothers and I moved Mom from her home to a safe shelter from the Alzheimer’s storm the day before my 56th birthday. One of my brothers said, “It’s kind of a birthday present for you.” I didn’t answer that because it pierced my heart so deeply. A better woman would have stayed to take care of Mom, because this woman was torn between taking care of her mother and eliminating the stress on her marriage; torn between two of the most important people in her life: her mother and her husband. What kind of birthday present was that?
In the six weeks since Mom moved to the nursing home I see I can be more objective…I see the Alzheimer’s progressing. I see my mother 25 minutes away from us. I see her slipping into the Alzheimer’s cocoon where we won’t be able to reach her.
“I’m sorry I don’t get here more often, Mom,” I say. Two or three times a week is the most I've been able to manage. Is it because August is such a busy month? And what about when winter comes and the roads are icy and the snow storms come? I'm afraid to walk on ice because of a fall a few years ago. I don't want to break a hip or something.
“Don’t you worry about that,” she says. And I recall how she said when she doesn’t know us any more we should stop coming to see her because she will be gone. I choke at the thought.
“I’m surprised I can still crochet,” she says.
“You learned it a long time ago when you were a child, Mom. That’s why you remember,” I said. I said nothing about the simple double crocheting she does now, and I fear she’s forgotten how to crochet the octagon-shaped blocks for the bedspread she was making before the move. The bag with that work is put away, out of sight, out of mind.
Please, God, I weep, please be kind to my mother.
I pray that prayer like a mantra, over and over again. And rush on to the next item on my to-do list. Keeping busy within my family distracts me from the grief of slowly losing my best friend, my mother.
© 2009 Cathy Thomas Brownfield
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