Time

It's hard to know exactly where Mom is in time in her mind these days. I assume she is with us, knows us, is aware who she is with, then she shockingly insists that I am her sister. "I'm your daughter!" I say.

"You are NOT my daughter! You're my SISter." I shake my head from side to side. "How old are you?" she demands to know.

"I'm 60 years old, Mom."

"There. See. You're my younger sister."

I am dumbfounded and cannot speak until I manage to say, "Are you playing with me, Mom?" She doesn't answer right away, just stares off into the distance as we drive home from her doctor's appointment.

"I'm trying to think...I did have a stillborn daughter, and a son. I don't think I had a daughter...Wait a minute, maybe I did have a daughter named Donna."

So now I'm not sure whether she thinks of me as her daughter or as a really devoted younger sister taking good care of her.

She spent last Saturday night with her granddaughter Heidi and her family who had taken her to her sister Ruth's 90th birthday party. I met Heidi's husband Jason half way on Sunday to get her back to Wellstone House. When she got in the car, she asked, "Who is that man anyway?"

She told me she had a wonderful time at the birthday party. "Can you imagine, there were so many people there from when I was young and living in Claremont. One had a beard and I'm pretty sure he used to date Midge [her twin sister]. It was really fun to see them again." I was pretty certain 80 and 90-year old friends from my mother's teen years were not in attendance but I let it go.

When we unpacked her things and I looked at her camera pictures, I saw some familiar faces of my own cousins. Mom pointed to my 68-year old cousin Duffy, "He's the one. Midge's old boyfriend. He said I should know who he was. I told him I recognized his face but didn't know his name."

I couldn't let it go. "Mom, that's Duffy, Ruth's son."

"THAT is NOT Duffy!" she said with scorn in her voice. I decided not to argue.

While I visited in her room the other day, she sorted through a bunch of birthday and Christmas cards she had received since last October. There were several from Penny Wood who I knew from my old church and has been devoted to her card-writing ministry. Mom spent 20 minutes looking through the pile and reading each, individual return address, "Penny Wood. ... Penny Wood!" She chuckled as she looked up and smiled at me. "She's the one who used to clean my house, remember?" I just shook my head in the affirmative. It was no use telling her that was Nancy from Easter Seals. "She told me once that I was her friend, you know." Yes, I know, Mom.




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Location:Derry, NH

Moments

Much to my surprise as we headed out for the 90-minute drive, Mom said, in a lucid moment, "Naomi lives just across the border from Massachusetts. I remember visiting there a long time ago. Seems like we went with someone else." I reminded her Caroline and the girls were with us and that Niah was just a couple of months old. It was uncanny that she remembered Caroline went with us and the little detail about Naomi's house being on the border.

As we drove through Peterborough, she exclaimed how she had never been on that road before. I said nothing. Then she asked me "Now who is it again I'm going to see?" I told her Naomi. "Do you know who she is, Mom?"

"Well, I'm not sure, but I'll soon find out."

I reminded her, "Dana's oldest daughter...when he was married to Vicki."

Mom took a moment to think who Vicki was but said she remembered.

"I've never been to Naomi's house," she said. I didn't say anything but thought how unbelievable this Alzheimer's thing is. There are times when the circuits of the brain seem to momentarily connect and allow access to memories that moments later are no long accessible.



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Location:Gile Rd,Nottingham,United States

Curlers II

So I did it! I rolled Mom's hair today. After washing it at the beautician sink in the Wellstone House laundry room, I combed her dripping wet locks and wrapped small sections around one roller after another, just as I had done in my very realistic dream last night. It is impossible for me to figure out when I last put rollers in my or anyone else's hair! But it was fun. It was satisfying. It was gratifying. For Mom and for me.


As I left, Mom took her word search book and pencil and settled into a comfy living room chair where a couple ladies were watching Ellen on TV. "How long should I leave these in my hair, I wonder?" I suggested she take them out when her hair felt dry.



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Location:Gile Rd,Nottingham,United States

Curlers

For some reason, Mom has a hankering to put her hair up in curlers. I'm suspicious that seeing her housemate Harriet waltzing around Wellstone House all day with her hair in curlers has sparked memories of her younger days when she used them.



Since she mentioned it to me several times, I stopped at Walmart yesterday and bought her this Goody package of 36 rollers in various sizes. I remember my own days in the late 1960s of wearing rollers to bed! Big plastic rollers in my shoulder-length hair that forced me to toss and turn to find a comfortable enough position to fall asleep. Mom didn't wear them to bed though. She usually plugged the portable hair dryer into a long extension cord, slipped the cap over her head full of rollers and retreated for half an hour at the kitchen table with her pack of cigarettes, cup of coffee and Women's Day magazine.

She would eventually emerge from the bathroom decked out in blue eye shadow, red lipstick and her short chestnut brown hair bobbed around her beautiful face. During those days, Mom worked as a home health aid and loved spending her day with her client.

I'm not terribly optimistic she will remember how to roll her hair. If she can't find someone to help her, I will put those curlers in her hair when I visit tomorrow.


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Location:Gile Rd,Nottingham,United States

Visit

Sunday afternoon I pick Mom up after church and bring her to the house to hang out for a few hours. It gives her a change of scenery. She sits in the rocking chair, sips hot tea, and has very little to talk about.

She is still talking about George. "I doubt I'll ever see him again, do you think?"

"Probably not, Mom. I'm so sorry."

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Location:Gile Rd,Nottingham,United States

George

Mom called me the other day to tell me she had received a nice handwritten card from someone at my church. She had used the prayer request card at our Christmas Eve service to ask for prayers for her son, George, who she hasn't seen is nearly 10 years. I didn't tell her that it was the ministry that John and I co-lead that was responsible; that I saw her request had been targeted to receive an handwritten card and that I had disclosed it was from my mother and that it would be nice if someone sent her a card. Sharing the details of my life with her has never been part of our dance. She wouldn't get it anyway.

When I stopped by later that day after she called, she showed me the card. It had clearly brightened her day and, once again, brother George became the topic of conversation. "I don't know if he's even still alive. Maybe I'll call Joyce and see if she'll tell me if he is at least all right. Probably she won't. She told me one time that she wasn't allowed to speak of Georgie to me and so I shouldn't even ask questions about him."

All I could do was take a deep breath and let my anger toward my oldest sibling go.

Gazing into my mother's eyes, I sensed her depth of despair over her firstborn's absence from her life for more than 30 years. And now, she had a new worry: what if Georgie has died? She wouldn't know. Neither would I.

My spiritual director, Sarah, has broached the subject of reconciliation with brother George. It's odd because he and I never had words, nor any kind of misunderstanding. He was mad at Mom & Dad and turned his back on all of his siblings. But, he did stay in touch with Aunt Joyce, my dad's sister.

"He'll always, always be MY son," Mom said as she vigorously rocked back and forth in her platform rocker. "I told Joyce that once, you know. I said, 'he's still my son, no matter what.'"

Brother George deeply challenges my core values because I continue to harbor angry unforgiveness toward him on behalf of my mother. She never deserved his desertion from our family. She is not an evil person. She may have had poor judgment and said unkind things in the heat of a moment, but nothing deserves this total rejection of his parents and his whole family. He robbed his children of family who would have loved them; robbed my children of knowing their aunt and uncle and cousins. The saddest piece of all is I can't even imagine how I could forgive him for abandoning us; for not being here now to help me with our mother. He lives 20 minutes away. I just shake my head in hopeless disbelief.




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Location:Gile Rd,Nottingham,United States

Moving

The inevitable happened. The Wellstone House kindly gave me a couple week's notice, but Mom was moved to a double room on December 31st. I arrived at 2:30, moments before a scheduled fire drill. Those old people clearly were used to the incessant blaring as they made their way to the exits within the required 3 minutes. After that was over, Mom plunked herself into her rocking chair. "I don't like the idea of this at all."

"I know, Mom. Me either. But it is what it is."

Amy, the director, started with the contents of Mom's closet. Then we asked Mom to get up so we could move her rocking chair. She parked herself in the folding chair in front of the computer-less computer table that was soon being removed from the premises since there would be no room for it now. She muttered something to Amy about feeling abandoned and how much she'd rather be in her own apartment again.

"Mom, I wonder if you'd like to go sit in your new room. We have your rocking chair ready for you and you can tell me where you want things." She was agreeable. I ignored her obvious unhappiness, stuffed down my sorrow as I got hot and sweaty carting all of her stuff from her old room, down the hall to her new room; the contents of her bureau, including a drawer full of half-used balls of yarn, her book case full of crochet and quilling books, poetry, Nicholas Sparks' novels, and word search magazines. I filled up a laundry basket with all her various baskets, bags and boxes of yarn; some brand new skeins, as well as half-used skeins rolled into balls, down to little balls of scraps in all different shades and colors that she refuses to part with.

I moved on to her large rubbermaid container and the contents on top and inside; all of her artwork. Sheet after sheet of watercolor paintings, photographs she had glued onto roughly cut pieces of watercolor paper stock and bordered with little curly cues of quilling strips. Pictures from magazines she saved to "put on canvas."

As I emptied the contents of her medicine cabinet, it struck me she would no longer have her own private half bath so I had to prepare a small container of the essential items to keep in the shared bathroom across the hall from her room.

The whole process took two hours. I drove home with a heavy heart and the computer table, rubbermaid container, and a basket full of various things she no longer used that just took up space she no longer had. I thought of how little one really needs when reduced to the bare essentials of life in assisted living. My mind's eye scanned the book shelves in Mom's apartment over our garage still stuffed with her collection of Christian devotionals by Max Lucado, Charles Stanley and Joyce Meyer. Her complete set of the Left Behind series. Her country music CDs; her santa collection; her Artist magazines and Bob Ross painting books. Her kitchen cupboards full of 60-year old gadgets and knives and spatulas.

One day, I will have to deal with it all. I wonder who will have to deal with all my stuff some day?

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