MY MOTHER AND ME

Current Project:Agent Daddy
Status:page 200
I’ve mentioned my mother and her situation enough over the last two months that I imagine most of you are aware she is having extreme memory issues. It seems that every time I see her, there is less of her, both physically and emotionally. At 92, her past is gone, her future doesn’t exist, she is a woman inhabiting the here and now.

My mother and I are different in many ways. She is more private for instance. She keeps her emotions in check, suffers in silence, withdraws when wounded. She also is not a writer, dreads writing as a matter of fact, and though she expresses herself well she does it in a straight forward manner. I can’t think of a single instance when I have heard her use a metaphor.

Listen to me, talking in the present tense. None of the attributes I just mentioned are valid any more. And yet to use the past tense would shine a light on the very nature of Alzheimer’s or dementia and that is that a person disappears while still drawing breath.

My point is this. Now my mother must search for words when she speaks. I visualize the inside of her head as a refrigerator door where the contents of one of those magnetic word kits are stuck to its surface. She tries to link together the right ones but since the words are usually very specific, it’s hard to build a decent sentence. It’s a painful process and hence a thought that used to take ten words might now take fifty as she tries and discards combinations, hoping they’ll fit together, sensing they don’t. The idea, of course, gets lost in the telling.

But it also results in some interesting sentences that are beautiful in their way, lyrical and metaphorical in a manner she would never have spoken before. For instance, when she first fell and was moved into a nursing home to mend, she was desperate to leave. She would ask me every time I came if she was going home now. One day this is how she asked: Looking right into my eyes, her voice hopeful, she said in a halting, unsure way, “Am I going home with you … or don’t you want my shadow touching your shadow?

I told her shadow was welcome to touch mine anytime she wanted which didn’t elicit the expected smile, just anxiety. Damn disease.

Another time she asked if I would share her lunch. She always asks this and since she can’t recall asking, you must refuse her every minute or so in the tremendously long time it takes her to eat anything. It gets tedious and I worked on finding a way to refuse the food without causing her alarm. One time I said, “This is a hospital, Mom. The food here is for the people who are staying here, not their family members.” Graciously, she responded, “It’s s shame they can’t open their arms to include you.”

There are other instances, but what strikes me is this. Each life is a journey specific to the person making the trek. As my mother loses her way and searches for words to express the ever bizarre thoughts that occupy her head, she is becoming downright poetic. Now as I listen to her telling me about places she’s never seen and walks she’s never taken, I listen to the words she chooses to link together to make her story accessible to an audience.

It’s the grass roots of communication touching the wings of imagination. And in a way, it makes us more alike than ever.