Myrt 90, Me 60

  

Driving to visit my mother today, I had the usual tortuous conversation with myself. 

I wish she still lived with me. 

She wanted to be with others; she was unhappy. 

She ate more when she lived with me and I made sure she stood a few times a day. 

It was one step forward and two steps back, not the other way around.

She seems weaker.  She has lost weight.

She is 90 and in the end-stages of Alzheimer’s, of course she will become more frail.

I miss her and I wish I could care for her.

You forget how your spirit was ravaged by bearing close witness to the pernicious workings of dementia.

It’s a long drive so I force myself out of this pathetically sad self-talk and turn to an audio book for thought-rescue.   The diversion does not last long though.

I start trying to make sense of my mom’s journey from being the person who was as stoic as a rock to her new diminished form, helpless and vulnerable.  Imprinted on my heart is this woman who seemed to be able to handle any dang thing that life threw at her.  As a child and as a teen, I never saw the woman cry and I never saw her out of control, and believe me when I say that life had given her plenty reason to break down.  She never did.   Now the tears of a lifetime flow freely.  So many tears.  Is it an old, unnamed sadness which has breached her wit’s weakened walls or is it newborn sadness, swelling and spilling from some tiny comprehension of her own suspended consciousness.  In other words, is it a clear and present suffering?  I will never know. 

Just a year ago, I would have described her mind as tangled wires – like those eternally knotted up earbuds in every kid’s backpack - which a patient hand can lay straight and smooth again.  But, no amount of love, kindness and patience can unscramble what is left now.  I did not know that those tangled days were the good days.  Now … now her mind is an open window where people drift in and out like scents and she never seems to fully grasp a presence; it all wisps away.  These days, I always, always hold her hand when I visit ….

because I do not want to be that disappearing scent,

because I do not want to vanish into thin air,

because of this I do not let go of her hand.

I turned 60 yesterday and it was a wonderful day.  I felt grateful all day.  So, today I told Myrtle that I had just turned 60.  She smiled weakly, looked around the memory care unit and said with a serious certainty, “Oh, you’re older than me.” Glancing once more at the folks sitting nearby, she mumbled, “I’m still in the waiting room, I see.”  Then she closed her eyes to sleep again.

I am not sure who she thought I was or where she thinks she is today.  It didn’t really matter.  I clung tightly to her hand, wondering.  

I wondered - when I am gone from her memory, where I have lived for 60 years, what does that mean.  Is it a part of her that has vanished or is it a part of me that has vanished? 

I wondered -   if I were to leave this good earth tomorrow, how can I “live on in her heart”, if I am already no longer there?   And, if she has small memories of me cocooned in one of dementia’s locked chambers, memories which I have forgotten, aren’t they now forever gone? 

If something of me has vanished, and if in the end we are only all the little things we have left behind, maybe this is why I feel such a fathomless sense of loss. 

Without her memories of me, I am simply less.  And broken-hearted.   

She can’t seem to stay awake, so I leave.  Climbing into the car with a hot lump in my throat, and while contemplating all of these profound questions, I start routing through my backpack.  I’m starving.  I find a protein bar.  The preposterous juxtaposition of the sobering need to eat with a struggle to puzzle-out divine philosophical inquiries is not lost on me.   

I roll down the window and eat. 

The sweet scent of freshly mown grass drifts in, bearing dozens of childhood memories.  I close my eyes and drink deeply of that perfume and I swear I can hear the far away happy chatter of kids at the public pool and I can smell the cherry Kool-Aide my mother is mixing and I can feel the hot sun on my face.