I stumbled across a beautiful poem by HT Wilson on a blog called “Words With No Names.” The poem is called Cancion.

This verse particularly touched me:

Looking straight ahead

she laments

“I don’t know what’s

worth remembering anymore.

I don’t know why I stored

any of these thoughts.”

* * *

It left me thinking -

What was it like when my mother knew she was losing her mind (and also aware that she was powerless to stop it)?

What was it like when it was so difficult to remember to put on the second sock (did it really matter?), but so easy to find herself huddled in a cornfield, singing songs to quiet her little brother, so her drunken father did not find them?

Some might live in the laughter of their youth – but she didn’t play those childhood games.

Could she have done something differently had she known this is where she would be? Would she have?

Could she have taken “possession of her dreams” a “thousand loves away?”

How she regretted decisions that changed our lives!

But did it really matter when the outcome was the same, regardless of the road taken?

Alzheimer’s is the thief of thieves…stealing our minds right from under our noses! (no wonder we couldn’t find them!)

Our minds are our tie to reality …  they are also our tie to unreality. When the mind is gone (and with it, all our memories), what do we have? Who are we then?

And is it not ironic, that if we get dementia or Alzheimer’s or any other form of senility, there is seemingly no escape … and yet the condition itself is an escape?

Is it so bad to live awhile longer in a memory of our choosing?

And if we are still able to reflect, will we say the past was “enough” – or will we say there was “enough” of the past.

Maybe the now is better.

* * *

Thank you, HT Wilson.

Sometimes things we do take us over familiar pathways that allow us to see them in a different light.

I recently found myself taking the exact same road and turnoffs to where my mother used to live. We were headed west to spend a mini-vacation at a beachside get-away, all to ourselves.  Our destination was actually further north; I have not yet brought myself to return to where she lived for so many years. I did not grow up there; I would not know anyone there today; but it was a place I had spent many weekends while my children were young, and just the thought of going there brings back a myriad of conflicting images and feelings.

It was like yesterday, knowing where to turn, knowing the small pit stops along the way, where to stop for lunch, where the bridges crossed the sloughs.

Admittedly, my mother and I did not always get along. I choose now to remember the good things about that time in our lives.

She loved the outdoors and particularly, the ocean. She loved to walk along the beach and feel the wind in her face. We would gather around the beach fires with friends, have picnics, fly kites, and on special occasions, watch fireworks. In my absence, she kept me posted on various changes around the bird feeder.  During the winter storms, she would call me and tell me that the snowy plovers were huddled in her front yard. That’s how we knew it was particularly rough out there.

My mother, a retired nurse, never really quit nursing. Whether feeding the birds or baking for assorted outreach organizations, she was always lending a helping hand.  She gave money to her neighbor dying of cancer to help him buy the drugs he couldn’t afford so he could have one last Father’s day with his family.  She volunteered to help people die.

Someone had to be there to help her die, too, and that person was me.

It’s not an easy thing to help someone die, especially someone you love. It is gut-wrenching. It made me question the inner core of each and every one of my beliefs.

Without a certain chain of events, this would have been logarithmically more difficult. At the age of 70, Husband #3 left her for an old childhood sweetheart; she floundered adrift for awhile, but then gathered her wits and her courage and took a gamble with someone who painted something he could not possibly deliver; in the process, she sold her home of many years by the sea and moved inland, just over an hour from where we live. And that gamble, which proved disastrous, was exactly what was needed for me to be able to help her during her final days.

Whether you believe in divine guidance or whether you believe in happenstance, I have come to recognize that this was just one of many “coincidences” that happened at just the right time in just the right place for things to work out just right.  It is not for me to say what is real or what is not, but aren’t our lives far richer by believing in something that connects us all? That this chain of events should happen just as they did was quite remarkable. I am still incredulous. I am still grateful.

And on our recent weekend “getaway,” I looked across the span of that wide open beach with the tide lapping the shore – so very much like the one where I had stood so many times with my mother – and I thought – Mom, you gave us something really special, just by being who and where you were, and I am still making sense of it all. You gave us fun memories with our children – your children’s children – the chance to run away from an oncoming wave, to fly a kite high in the sky, to build sea monsters in the sand, and to try to dig a hole to the other side of the earth.

But you gave us something more. Something that dawns on us as we watch the tides roll in and ebb away twice each day, as the sun sets on one side while the moon rises on the other, as we turn toward the light in the morning and turn away at dusk, and as the hardened beach grasses hold strong to the dunes even as they bend with the wind and as the sands shift around them.

That’s how we were. We were those colorful kites flying high amidst scattering clouds; we were the spinners twirling in a blur with ribbons flapping wildly behind us; we were the flock of Sanderlings suddenly flashing silver in the light, the gulls scrapping over a broken crab, the snowy plover hunkering down in the cold.

We were and are the breathing of the ocean. We are in the wind. We are the sand that changes but still anchors the land. We are the tides, coming and going but always here. Steadfast. Forever.

Thank you, Mom.

Hey, Mom – It’s Valentine’s Day. The day after my birthday. You forgot my birthday the last few years, but it’s ok. I didn’t want to make you feel bad by reminding you. And now you’ve been gone for over a year. Not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought of you. Now I understand how love is eternal. Not to complain, but I have the flu, and I really miss you. Did I mention it’s Valentine’s Day?

Hello everyone -

I have had trouble lately writing about my mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s and our journey together in dealing with that gut-wrenching disease. It is hard to believe it has been nearly 5 months since her passing. I still think of her every day and in so many ways. I talk with her all the time. I play her music. I ask her to help me with problems. Is this normal? I don’t know. I do know that the garden is often a place of healing for me. Something about feeling the cold earth, something so very basic and so connecting. Pulling weeds with an absurd sense of order and control, I nurture my favored plants with loving attention, envisioning something of beauty in the coming months. My mother used to love to garden, too, and she left many behind – her small way of making the world a more beautiful place. She also loved birds, whether they were shorebirds, the backyard variety, or majestic raptors – but most particularly, she loved the little hummers. She had hummingbird calendars, blown glass hummingbirds hanging by the window, hummingbird magnets on her fridge, painted pictures of hummers on the walls, and of course, hummingbird feeders.

And so last week when Mother Nature must have been laughing as we dug ourselves out from an unexpected snow here in the Pacific Northwest – something we hardly see throughout the winter – I found myself talking to my mother, and we were worried about the little birds in this unexpected cold snap. I have several bird feeders around the yard, and I made sure everyone had plenty of seed. The quail were especially industrious at scratching around and were there morning and night, on schedule. As soon as the winds died down and the clouds parted, I hung up a hummingbird feeder. I wondered if I was too early, but within minutes, they were coming around. One even came right up and buzzed me as I refilled it. I looked at it closely. I could almost feel my mother’s presence in the vibration of its wings, saying, “Thank you for helping me.”

I posted more pictures of the snow, the garden, and sure signs of spring: the hummingbird, a frog, and cherry blossoms, on my Barbolian Fields blog. Hope you enjoy.

Mom busied herself with unpacking boxes. In truth, she had wanted something much larger; her buffet, table, couch, and chairs barely fit into this thing, even though it was slightly wider than most units of its kind. Although for years she had stood in line for commodities to make ends meet, she had fancied herself living grandly in at least a double wide. The days of not worrying about money had moved out with husband #2, but perhaps she should have gotten the Grecian tub option.  At least the place was clean and had that brand-new smell. Mom had always been an obsessive cleaner. Her mantra had been “There’s a place for everything and everything has its place.” Her new house was as neat as a pin, however neat that is. Everything was exactly where it should be. There was a certain comfort with order and control.

As for me, I thought that getting her out of our home into one of her own would give me some breathing time. Her constant hovering drove me nuts, as well as her compulsively having to put everything away immediately, of never allowing any task to wait, and of incessantly needing to be doing something to be helpful. She would work outside until her back ached so badly she couldn’t straighten up, but would get mad at me if I pleaded with her to stop. Admittedly, my garden and house never looked better, but I felt I couldn’t be comfortable in my own home. I felt like the little girl being told to clean up her room, “or I’ll do it for you.”

But things didn’t settle down just because we each had our own space. There was an assortment of details to deal with: changing addresses, getting a bank account, transferring funds, filling out forms and filing them, putting the old place up for sale. She refused to deal with any of these things.

What happened to my mother, the competent, can-do, independent woman I always looked up to? I was still living in my messy bedroom. She had been, I suddenly realized, perfectly willing, albeit with some resentment, to let men control her life for the past 40 years. In that time, I had grown up and moved away.

I sat there looking at this person I wasn’t so sure I knew all that well. She smoked a lot; drank pot after pot of coffee, even late at night (in fact, I think that’s all she drank), and poured a ton of salt on things, which I highly suspected she did purposefully to get my reaction, knowing I was an anti-sodium, vitamin-popping, wheat-germ-and-granola fanatic. I found myself repeating things to her a lot, not because she was hard of hearing, but because she wasn’t listening – just lost in her own world of thoughts – or maybe she didn’t remember because she wasn’t really paying attention. I was getting a little impatient. We were trying to work through some of this stuff, important stuff, and she couldn’t seem to remember from one day to the next how much money was where and why or where to find information we needed to move forward. Finally, she blew up at me, telling me I was treating her like a child and being overly critical.

It was one of those “ah ha” moments. I was going to have to step up and also step back.

The timing was really bad. I was going through my usual depression after taking my son back to live with his father for the winter, which was an 11-hour drive, one way, if the passes were clear. I would possibly see him at Christmas, if my ex was willing; he controlled visitations. I had already spent my children’s college education funds on attorneys who did not protect my interests; I could not afford to go back down that road.

My partner of nearly 10 years was recovering from a severe Crohn’s attack, true, but our relationship had been on very shaky ground and wasn’t getting any better. It was probably just as well we hadn’t legalized anything. 

Plus, I had been recently diagnosed with a different sort of auto-immune disorder: rheumatoid arthritis; I was also clinically anemic. And did I mention, a pathetic workaholic. I was working an extremely stressful job that required a lot of overtime, once logging in 48 hours in just 3 days in trying to meet some deliverable that must have been critical at the time but which now is not even memorable. It was a demoralizing position; I felt completely unappreciated and underpaid; but at least it allowed me to help my kids get through school and help my mother have a place to live.

When things get hard, I have a tendency to add one more thing to make them nearly impossible. I don’t know what I was thinking when I decided to go back to school to get my Master’s degree before I turned 50. It was a distance-learning program, which had the advantage of allowing me to work at my own pace, but the disadvantage of everything taking longer because you don’t move up until you are ready – and I was never ready. If you don’t do your very best, what is the point? “Good enough” did not exist in my world. And by the same token, like my whole life, nothing was ever good enough. My room was still a mess.

In writing this, I realize I was a lot like my mother. 

I was lonely, depressed, and felt my best friend had abandoned me. Overwhelmed with everything going on, I managed to function day to day with little sleep, consumed with work and obligations.

It is like a spiraling whirlpool. As long as you’re looking down the center, you think you’re looking straight ahead.

I was going to say “someone has to deal with the hard stuff,” but in writing this, I now realize that she was dealing with things I could not have imagined, and I was left to pick up the pieces. In retrospect, there were a lot of things to be thankful for: that I was there to help, for one, and that John the Con came along at just the right time to make the move easier through its difficulty. She had taken all her money and bought this home and, in the spirit of partnership, put his name on it. This could be problematic. We did not have much left to work with.

Mom needed her own space. She has always needed her own space and these recent attempts to share it only emphasized the point. So we went home shopping. It wasn’t quite the retail therapy we were hoping for. It quickly became apparent that our area with prices inflated by California implants was ideal for wealthy retirees, but not for people trying to live on a shoestring. Mom’s income was a measly $850/month social security. She had worked hard all her life, but nurses in those days didn’t have retirement plans, and she was a single mom with two kids and a lot of debt. Husband #2 (the gay Morman alcoholic) had some funds that were donated to the divorce escape, but husband #3 quickly gambled them (and lost) in an “if you love me, you will support this endeavor” argument. So here she was, once again, penniless, homeless, and shafted. 

We decided a modular home was our best option; however, banks would not give a lower-interest home loan if there wasn’t a piece of land that went with it. A home not grounded was, well, just a thing. She only qualified for a high-interest personal property loan. In frustration, I borrowed the full amount from my 401(k) to buy her a new single wide. We had searched for used ones, but everything seemed rather weathered. My mother, a retired nurse, needed something clean and neat. Something to make her own.

“Coffee?” I asked, on our way to the sales center.
“If you’re having some,” she replied.
“Ok – what’ll it be?” as we rolled up to the latte stand window. Buying coffee in the Pacific Northwest is not just buying a cup of coffee. You have options. Espresso, latte, breve, hot, chilled, poured over crushed ice, with foam, without, and 101 different flavors.
“Oh, whatever you’re having.”
It drove me nuts. She always went along with whatever I did. She was simply incapable of making a decision these days. I ordered us two doubleshot hazelnuts. We were going to need them. Personally, I needed a quad, but I didn’t think I could handle my mother bouncing off walls.

The salesman greeted us like we were old-time friends, and Mom responded immediately. Dave was our man. He would change our lives. We sat down at an octagon table beneath a splendid chandelier. The furniture and pictures were all coordinated and arranged exquisitely. We became a part of the display.

We poured over catalogs of more and more options. We picked out carpet, linoleum, cupboards, and countertops; the latter we chose in a deep wine to go with the floral pattern in her couch. Actually, I was the one who chose the bold maroon, something that was later pointed out to me. Mom could not decide on even the simplest of options. We were going to set up house right here in the salesroom if we didn’t get through this stuff; Mom was certainly comfortable enough. The seller was patient, and although we were admittedly not his biggest sale, he was genuinely warming up to this mother-daughter comedy act. Maybe business was slow.

With a bit of haggling on my part, we were able to get the complete energy-efficient package for less than what it would have cost her for a used doublewide. It was going to be beautiful inside and out and just for her. We found a nice little park to plant it in, located 5 minutes of my work. On a corner lot by a wooded area, it had a nice yard, and the neighbors seemed friendly. Each for our own reasons, we couldn’t wait.

The place was delivered in early October. We got it hooked up to plumbing and electricity. We had some steps built up to the front and back doors. The boxes on our list got checkmarks one by one. Mom was content to let me handle it.

But we still needed to get her stuff. Mom didn’t have a lot of things, as she had left much behind in her moves, but what remained was either very large, very meaningful, or both – plus, everything was stored in the house she just left – the one with John still in it.

John, however, was quite cordial and seemed to hold no animosity. He agreed to help us move. We set a date for when the trailer would be ready. We planned a gourmet dinner as a thank you.

As moving day approached, my husband came down with a serious Crohn’s disease attack. In a matter of days, he had lost over 50 pounds. This 6’4” man, always of slender build, was down to a mere 125 pounds. He told us to go ahead and go; he would be alright until we got back. Severely dehydrated, dizzy, throwing up one end and bleeding out the other, privately, he wasn’t sure he was going to pull through.

We had a van reserved, we had the help of a strong teenager, and John was expecting us. “Let’s get it over with,” I said.

Mom was like a nervous schoolgirl on the trip down. We kept the conversation light.

It turned out to be the moving day from hell, literally. The moving van we had reserved had not yet been returned; the rental had no others available. We scrambled around town to find another. When we got to the house, John was all dressed up. He had a “hot date,” he informed us with a sly look in his eye, purposefully mysterious, watching the effect it had on my mother. I am sure it was planned all along.

So Andrew, our strong teenage helper, to whom I will be forever grateful, and Mom and I, two 100-pound weaklings, somehow managed to move tables, chairs, beds, sofas, the works. Numerous boxes were still in storage. John couldn’t find the key. Not his problem. It was pouring down rain and very late by the time we got back. The van had to be returned early in the morning, so we worked until nearly midnight getting everything unloaded. I put sheets and blankets on the bed.

Her first night in her very own home! I am sure Mom plopped on the bed, exhausted, and passed out, her little dog Lambchop at her side. When she awoke, I imagine she looked around and asked two questions she was to ask frequently in the times to come: “Where am I?” and “How did I get here?”

She didn’t realize it, but it was her 75th birthday.

We really had few options, but having Mom live in our house was obviously not going to work. She was driving us nuts. She would wring her hands, pace the floor, and hover around us in our too-small, cluttered house. Someone was always on the verge of tripping. She would startle at the slightest disturbance, if we entered a room, if we spoke her name. “Oooh!” she would exclaim and throw her hands up in surprise. And we would apologize for yanking her so abruptly from her thoughts.

It wasn’t just having moved twice in two months, of completely changing her life – again – or of feeling suddenly tossed from hope to despair. Having no sense of place at this time in her life was only part of it.  No, what was most disturbing was this sudden awareness of falling. The images of recent events reeling skyward in a blur.  It made her stomach lurch upward in her throat at the thought of it.

My strategy was to keep her busy. Grounded. I put her to work helping me in the garden. She always loved gardening. Losing my medicinal herbs, which admittedly looked like weeds, was a small price to pay. The blueberry bush was also sacrificed. Things happen. At least she wasn’t being pummeled by asphalt roofing.

But the nervous fidgeting and fretting was the least of it. Mom could neither live in the present nor look to the future. She was stuck in the past. And deep scars from the past just wouldn’t go away.  She was like an old dog with a sore on his leg who can’t stop licking it, over and over, not letting it heal, just gnawing on it like an old bone, and it keeps getting worse, until he gnaws it right off. She was mentally crippling herself.

She couldn’t help it. The bad movie of her life just kept playing over and over. John the con man: how could she have let herself be so swept away? Her ex husband: it was so goddamned easy to leave her stranded on a beach. Her son: he had hated her since his teens and called her every once in awhile to tell her so; boy, had she screwed up his life, and he knew just how to make her pay. And then there was her rebellious headstrong opinionated daughter whom she was now forced to live with.  She thought of losing her freedom, of being dependent, of not being able to take care of herself – however you described it, it still meant the same thing: losing control – and worse – being controlled by others.

How she hated controlling people. Her father had been a raging controlling alcoholic. She had worked for arrogant controlling demanding physicians. Her husbands – 1, 2, 3, and almost 4 – each of them controlling, although the first, her true first love, maybe not so much – the failure of that marriage was her own fault – so many misunderstandings – so many things unresolved. And then there was the last – one last stab at happiness – an absolute manic controlling maniac. How could she have trusted so blindly? She had picked some real doozies in men. She thought of people who had hurt her deeply – people she loved – people who betrayed her – people who took advantage of her – people who didn’t appreciate how hard she had tried to make things right. 

She sat on our porch steps, her knees pulled up, her back and hands aching from the incessant gardening, and she hugged her little maltese, Lambchop, whom she had loved for nearly 20 years, and cried. He was her only friend – the only one who really understood. She clung to this little frail old man of a dog like he was the only thing that was constant and true. And he probably was.

How do you define the beginning of a fog? It’s not something you can really grasp.
It is different for everyone. You know one person with dementia and you know one person with dementia. There are no easily defined beginnings.  Sure, there are “symptoms.” Symptoms are signs. Signs that say you are headed in a wrong direction. But there is no turning around.  And no one gets out alive.

There are escape routes, however; but they all lead to the same place.
And between here and there, a series of tiny deaths along the way.

We have acronyms now for conditions and levels of self destruction, or is that, the destruction of self.

The sense of self – or how we make sense of our selves – slowly deteriorates.
Somehow, giving it a name makes it more real.  Levels provide a means of charting the decline.

People who live with it need no names or arrows. It is very real when the borders between real and unreal become less clear.

MCI – mild cognitive impairment. My mother called it CRS – can’t remember shit.
But it’s more than CRS when you can’t trust your own mind – or when you think you are thinking clearly but others are scratching their heads.  Looking back, perhaps I should have recognized that the logic center of the brain – the part that makes rational decisions – was starting to shrivel. 

But my mother made many mistakes in her life. We don’t always know they are mistakes until we look back; the rest of us should not be so quick to judge; her intentions were always good. But they caused her to dwell in the land of regret a lot, particularly every holiday, and most particularly Christmas.  My brother and I grew up in what I am realizing is more norm than unusual in terms of disfunctionalness, a word which I am now creating, over which my mother thrashed herself frequently.  I assured her that she did not destroy our lives on purpose, a comment that was not taken humorously. After all, no one runs off and marries a gay Mormon alcoholic on *purpose* for Pete’s sake! Or maybe they do. But lest I digress…

According to recent research, chronic stress increases the expression of the amyloid precursor protein (APP), the abnormal processing of which contributes to the development of Alzheimer’s disease (read the recent post at ouroboros). 

We were headed to Hades in a handbasket on the Stress Express.

Mom had left the gay Mormon alcoholic behind and had settled into a comfortable marriage with someone who seemed relatively normal and true blue, if not a bit boring. Twenty years went by as 20 years will quickly do – and they were looking at retirement in a town by the sea, about a 5-hour drive away.  I usually saw her a couple of times a year and we talked once a week or so on the phone. We weren’t all that close for reasons that don’t need to take up this space, but we kept in touch.

And then one day her husband declared he was leaving her for his childhood sweetheart, with whom he had been having an affair for the past 10 years or so. Mother was blindsided. She seriously had no idea.

So there she was on her own, and this person who had always prided herself in her intelligence, who was a voracious reader, volunteered for Hospice, was a gourmet cook, and kept an immaculate house – was suddenly at a complete loss. What happened to this person I knew as a kid, the single mom working two jobs and multi-tasking everything from hospital emergencies to camping trips? Well, for the past 40 years, as typical for her generation, she had let the men in her life do all the manly things – like fix the faucets, make decisions, and control the money.  Women get good at dusting.  Now she had to figure out how to balance a bank statement.

First off, though, she needed a new car. “I found the perfect vehicle, Mom,” I chatted away one day.  “Meet me half way.” We connected at a little coffee shop on the corner of a not-too-busy street; I gave her a little Geo Metro that would get her great gas mileage and be perfect for going to the store and the post office; I took her beautiful retro Camaro, which I had coveted as a teenager, but which now, I saw, needed an overhaul.  There was only one hitch. She had never driven a stick shift. How can this be – someone who was in their twenties in the 50s never have driven a stick shift? Maybe she just forgot. I gave her a crash course, a kiss goodbye, and a “Good Luck Charlie!” wave farewell, and away she went, jerking a bit at first, but then roaring off.  One thing for sure, my mom had guts.

“The world is passing me by,” she said one day, realizing the health care field was rapidly changing and the world had been transformed by technology. So I bought her an inexpensive computer and patiently explained how to use it.  I labeled everything and wrote out detailed instructions.  Moving the mouse across the screen was a source of great anxiety. It would zip across there with a mind of its own, and then the next thing you know, everything would disappear.  All she wanted to do for now was inventory her household things and recipes. She decided to take a class, which was lousy because the teacher was focused on those who already knew everything and didn’t make time for people like her who were mere beginners. Or so she said. In the end, the box of mystery was an expensive solitaire game, which she was glad to give to the kids for their schoolwork. “Computers are overrated,” I told her. “Paper and pencil work just as well.” But I couldn’t help but notice she wasn’t writing much these days, nor reading for that matter.

My mother was the master of hiding. Hiding her feelings, her fears, what was really going on. When I was little and was upset, she used to send me to my room and told me to come out only when I could put on a happy face. I, too, learned to hide things.  I learned to recognize her “happy face” look.  I noticed it a lot these days.  It’s the “I’m fine” look.

I also started noticing a change in speech.  This was something she could not hide. Forgetting the right word, she would try to substitute a description instead. I found myself filling in the blanks. She actually sounded relieved when I did this.

And then she got involved with someone I’ll call “John.” John was smart, had traveled all over the world, had made (and lost) a small fortune, was a gourmet cook, a connoisseur of great wines, was well-read, artistic, a writer, and a master at the computer. He was everything her ex-husband was not. He also had a bit of a gambling habit, and he wasn’t averse to using someone else’s money to get what he wanted. Mom explained to me that they had decided to live together because neither of them had a whole lot, so together they could live on a lot less. They each sold their houses in the seaside town; John helped Mom close down her bank accounts and stock options; together they bought some land and a modular home only about an hour away from mine.  The place needed some work, but did I fail to mention he was also an expert carpenter, craftsman, and had sailed through the Isthmus of Panama on a yacht – in fact, he designed yachts – and built them, too.  It was a good thing Mom had the money to finance this little endeavor, because apparently he was waiting for his next breakthrough, and in the meantime, could avoid taxes by earning little or nothing. 

Only Mom was not a gambler. In fact, she was rather conservative. She enjoyed a good meal and a glass of wine now and then, but was extremely frugal.  She had lived in the dusty plains of Colorado during the Great Depression, when all they had to eat were potatoes, which grew underground where the grasshoppers couldn’t get them, and wormy rabbits, which had nothing left to hide behind.  The only thing she blew money on was her nicotine habit, and she was trying to quit that one. She did not buy new clothes, gourmet food, fancy tools, or invest everything she had in a dwelling and leave nothing for emergencies. Normally, this would not have made sense. But it was the man’s place to make decisions, even if he was impotent, a detail I preferred not to know. Gambler she was not, but – and this is a big but – she was willing to take a risk on this person. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” I can still hear her gaily saying that.

John, on his part, probably loved my mother at some level. He loved her intelligence, her sense of humor, her caring ways, and of course, her generosity.  She was getting a little scatter-brained, but it was kind of cute, and he liked having someone who looked up to him and whom he could care for.  He did not, however, sign up for complete debilitation.  But as I was to understand, John served a purpose. 

And then shadows of fear started to creep in.  She could not keep track of the money, which he spent with the fervor of one who was used to living lavishly.  He assured her that everything was documented on his computer, but the computer was locked under a password.  He seemed to spend long hours in front of it and got angry when she interrupted his “work.” The screen would suddenly go blank when she walked in the office door.  He also got angry when she interrupted him creating his gourmet presentations, which the meals had now become; he got angry when she disturbed his concentration during household renovations; in fact, there seemed a lot of things to be angry about.  The manic in him was one thing, but when he revealed that he had lost his fortune when he had gotten violent with his live-in partner of many years – she had committed the ultimate betrayal and ran off with all his money – or maybe it was court-ordered compensation – whatever – that was when Mom started to see his darker side. And at that point, that was all she could see.

Mom’s fear mushroomed from the nucleus of her being.  She could no longer complete a sentence. We talked frequently, our conversations becoming more and more one-sided in our secrecy and in decoding what she was trying to say.  I filled in the blanks continuously.

On the homefront, other sagas were unfurling. It was the end of August, and I had to drive to Montana to take my son back to his father, who had custody during the school year. It was always a traumatic time for the two of us. He was in 7th grade now, but had lived away from me since he was only four.  Our summers and other vacations together were precious, if not unrealistically hectic trying to cram in as much quality time as possible in the course of 2 ½ months.  At the same time, my husband was having an attack of Crohn’s disease. He was vomiting and bleeding and had dropped 50 pounds in a couple of weeks. We weren’t sure we could stop the train. It was barreling out of control.

I called Mom and told her to pack some things. This was not working.

I drove the 11-hour drive to Montana to return my son; the next day I drove back; the following day I drove to visit Mom. “She’s coming up to help me out for a few days,” I explained, and we returned later only to get her things.  John was conspicuously absent. Legal details were worked out later.

My mother lived with us for one long month. I can’t realistically describe how this time was for all of us. She was prone to panic attacks; she would zero in on meaningless small things, like a piece of lint on the carpet, and spend hours and hours cleaning, cleaning, cleaning.  Our house was not that dirty. Ok, I tend to collect a little clutter. But not dirty. And amidst all this, we were somehow trying to replace the roof on the house. She would get in the way, picking up little pieces of broken asphalt on the ground. Trying to be helpful.  Mostly just trying to be busy.  Trying not to think.  Trying to think.  Trying not to think about not being able to think.  We would try to give her something functional to do, but mainly we just wished she could sit and relax. She was uprooted. Homeless. In the way. Out of place. Losing control. Losing her mind…

My mother stares at her feet
“There are rats in my house,” she states matter-of-factly
“They are eating my shoes.”
It is a curious thing – and she stares at them a long time.
The cat meows loudly.  The little dog wiggles for attention. 
She looks up abruptly.  “I meant to tell you about that…that thing…oh, you know –
My mother has taken to stuttering between groping for words.
“Quit your worrying.  I am just fine.”  She says it clearly.
“What thing?”
“It doesn’t matter.”  She pauses.  “It’s just a bad day,” she finally explains. 
Every day is a bad day if she has to talk.  But I do not say this.
Her nights have become days and her days, nights
She wanders through darkened rooms in the fog that has become her mind,
Insisting she is fine in the security of known surroundings
“I wish I could just go back where I came from.”
Back where she used to live, far away, where she would not be a burden to me.
In her momentary child-like logic, this non-solution seems quite possible.
I, too, wish she could go back –
Back to the days when she used to go fishing with her little dog
Back to when she sat by the fire and crocheted Afghans
Back to when she made cookies for the elderly and volunteered for hospice
Back to when she remembered to eat.
She is a retired nurse.  She understands complex medical conditions
But she cannot sign her name, because one must think ahead to the next letter to do so – what was it?
The cat and dog foods are sources of confusion – which is for which? 
It is suddenly critical she remember.
The cat, at 23, is a legend, wobbling as she walks, sometimes bumping into the walls.
The dog, age unknown, is gray, urinates frequently, and has eyes that bulge with constant need for affection
They are three little old ones, survivors, all of them
So very frail – so very strong – hanging on to one another –
Listening to the rats in the night
Destroying the toes of old shoes.

*****

I wrote this a couple of years ago, just before my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.  In the posts that follow, I will try to describe what that journey was like for her, for me, and for the many people around her.  My mother passed away on November 29, 2007.  Helping her through that was one of the most profound experiences of my life and quite possibly the most important thing I will ever do. In many ways, it was also somewhat controversial and brought up all kinds of ethical questions and decisions I had never before contemplated on such a personal level.