Filtered Perception

It is a little over 10 years to the hour that I received the call. My sister was on the other end and I could hear her sobbing. I don’t recall exactly what she said, something to the effect of, “She’s gone”. At that moment, it was a weird sense of simultaneous relief and immense pain.

Losing my dad was hard, but for some reason I can talk about him without quite the amount of pain. With my mother, I can only discuss her superficially in order prevent myself from reopening the wounds. It may be that I was extremely close with my mother, or the fact that she suffered so much.

My mother and I went through so much together when I was growing up as I was quite a bit younger than my sisters and they were gone most of my childhood. It was mainly just the two of us.

I vividly remember the day that my dad left when I was two years old. I remember almost every detail like one would when the Challenger exploded or 911. I am humbled to think of the grace and fortitude that my mother managed it all now knowing as an adult what it’s like to go through that. I remember things like our house burning, my cousin dying from cancer, the birthday and Halloween parties, the loss of all of her siblings, our trips together, the stress on her face when she had to work the evening shift at the library and I was left at home. I remember her taking me to dance, Camp Fire Girls, and other activities that single moms thanklessly do. I remember her sense of humor, the silly costumes she made, helping her shelve books at the library, her baking pies and the wacky lunches she packed for me. As a teenager, I remember challenging her authority, saying hurtful things, and moving out to go to college without a second thought of how she must feel. I remember her ideas to make money including crafts, propagating African Violets, playing the stock market and, to my dismay, selling my stuffed animals at the Flea Market. I remember how much she loved her family, all of us, especially through difficult times. She took in more than her fair share of family members who needed help including the no-questions asked, revolving door given to her children with spouses and grandkids in tow. I remember how extremely proud she was of the accomplishments of her kids and grandkids and most of all how her how her face would light up when we entered the room.

Eventually that all faded. Dementia robbed her everything: her independence, her home, her finances, her hobbies, her memory, her smile, her family. My sisters and I did the hard things. We took away her car when she hit a family of four, we took away her home when she left pots on the burning stove and fell on several occasions. We took away her possessions each time we moved her to smaller places. I tried to take her into my home as she did with so many in the past. I was a newly single mom working full-time and going to school. I couldn’t hack it for long. My sister then took her in. That arrangement lasted a bit longer but it too ended as my mother lost more and more cognitive and physical function. We put her in assisted living. She was angry at us. We moved her approximately 8 times for various reasons—increased level of care, her accusing people of stealing, escaping out the front door and falling out of her wheelchair in the parking lot, poor staffing including one aide filming my mom on her phone. It was bad. The worst part was her no longer knowing our faces and the retraumatization of events over and over. Like the time she asked for my dad. I mistakenly told her they were divorced and he had passed away. She wept for the rest of the night. She didn’t know who most of us were. She thought I was still a baby and called me a liar for saying I was me. No one tells the family how to handle these situations. You just have to figure it out by learning through doing or saying the wrong things. The sorrow and guilt the family experiences is insurmountable. I don’t know that any of us are as we were prior to her Dementia.

I was given a small blessing the last time I saw her alive. I stopped by to have dinner with her. She was oddly coherent. She knew exactly who I was. She told me she loved me. I was later told by a Hospice Nurse that this is common in the final stage. A strange little gift from God.

My sister, Marsha, visited her on the afternoon before her death. She told Marsha that she would be having dinner with her mother. My sister left after dinner. The nurse recounted her last moments following. My mother was wheelchair bound. She ask him to put her to bed. She told him “I’m going to die tonight” which I’m sure he heard often on the Alzheimer’s unit. He told her he would be right there. He went to her room and that’s where he found her. Peacefully in her bed, gone.