Happy birthday, little Mom.

We Put Our Noses Together

   Maybe it will help just to whine. Just to complain. 

   This is tiring. I am tired of this.

   I have energy, and there were plans I was trying to pursue, to be more businesslike with my ceramics, to learn more software and maybe Spanish and be more employable. To shore up the wall.

But instead, three years into my mother’s dementia I spend each week in denial (about the coming duty that I will drive to Sherwood again and bring Mom new flowers again and check in on her again and be seen checking in on her yet again so the aides will not consider her last in their duties) ... 

• and then in dread, which makes me short tempered and potentially gloomy and unable not to download gloom on the incautious co-worker who doesn’t realize what’s happening to my family and asks ... 

• and then in resignation ...
• and then in her room, in charm and humor and puzzlement, trying to memorize and to deduce ... 

• and then escaping, feeling briefly relief ... 

• and then dogged by the recognition of my ingratitude (skating away and leaving her stuck in her predicament and missing everything). 

• And then I am wrecked for the rest of the day.

   The cycle restarts. 

   I have each week two new loads of her mail to sort through and think about. Shouldn’t the accountant have her taxes ready to file by now? Why hasn't the traveling dentist called me yet?

   What else is there to think about that I have forgotten to think about because I do not want to?

   Does everyone expect that because I am willing to do this, or must do this, it is being done well? 

   Today she said, a few times, while looking right at me, “You look like you are related to our family.” And she said, a few times while looking right at me, “Do I look like you?” And she said, while showing me her teeth, “Are they all there?” 
   And she said many, many times while looking at something on the wall, “That is the time we all put our noses together and made a beautiful picture.” 

   She sang a snippet from Frère Jacques, “Sonnez les matines.” And I sang, “Sonnez les matines.” 
   But they were not ringing for me. 

Condemned

   The Department of Correction in my state is executing or trying to execute killers this month, and current and former co-workers are journalists-on-the-spot, covering the struggle, experiencing the experience, furthering their careers. Two strong minds sit right beside me, Eric and John, and I hear them on the phone, digging, polite but pressing, and in consultation, energized. Strong. 
   Apart from the awful importance of what's going on, separately and persistently, I brood about ambition and wonder whatever happened to mine. Did I never have any? Was all that yakking about duty to one’s talent back in high school just transient, flimsy self-importance? 
   I think that, yes, it must have been.
   And now here I am in the final third of what will be my lifetime, watching my mother decay in a bed. Her life — big, really, and full of giving and doing — has narrowed down to a rigid but alive carcass incompletely monitored by a mind deprived of facts. Sunday she told me, as though I wasn’t there, “I guess Julia Loyall isn’t ever going to die.” 
   It sounded like regret.
   The Mom I dismissed when I was in high school today hardly exists in my memory. Instead I’m consumed by the image of young mom, Julie Lynch, child of immigrants. Pretty, thwarted, funny and fun-loving.
   My chest twists as I think about that child while looking at today’s puzzled, childlike person who presses her index finger into her mouth and says, “Some of them are gone” — her teeth.

   Last night I dreamed I was surrounded by angry young women. All of them looked like a former co-worker who was a genuine little crusader, always shaking her fist at injustice. All these small women were shaking their fists, at me: “It’s too easy to go on going back and forth in your middle-class comfort, limp as a ragdoll, while we are fighting for a better world. You waste your time.”
   I remember arguing with them/her eloquently. I said something like (and yes, I do have a prissy vocabulary), “We live in a world of pain and surcease of suffering is impossible here. There is darkness everywhere, touching every life. But don't you understand that it’s arrogant to see nothing but the bad and no good life other than marching and arguing all day? It’s naive to dismiss the good world, the light and hope, healing and helping: children, learning, beautiful flowers, dear faces, sweet memories, friends, silliness, jokes, music and joy. If we insist on showing that light to the darkness, we also are fighting the fight. We are. I am.”
   Michael tells me I was snoring lustily when he left for work.

   But I woke up feeling dim and sad anyway.
   I wish poor Mom had not lost her lower teeth. I wish her body was not dissolving.

Thumper

   If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.
   Whatever Bambi’s mother thought she was saying, that sentence doesn’t say, “Say nothing.”
   I’ve worried about that since ... I’m not sure when they first took me to see Bambi. I do know it wasn’t on my fifth birthday, because after that little family gathering — at which Mom gave me a maroon leather and tan straw purse with a domed lid and a dime tucked neatly inside, and a little mirror — we piled into the Hudson and were driven across the late afternoon to a movie theater where the adults discovered to my (I’m sure it was vocal) disappointment that Bambi wasn’t showing. After some discussion (“We should have called ahead”), it was decided we’d see Big Red instead, even though who knew anything about it? 
   All I remember is a dog jumping through a window.
   But later we owned a record album of the original Bambi soundtrack, which etched deep crevices in my brain as surely as brother Joe and I etched through the tracks by playing that disc over and over and over for years.
   “Your mother has gone away. She can’t be with you anymore. You must be strong and learn to live by yourself.”
   Bambi’s father hasn’t delivered the bad news to horrified audiences quite that way for decades. But that is what he said back when I was listening. 

   Mom’s usual spring allergies have filled her lungs with congestion. This is the third spring in the nursing home, the third spring she hasn’t been able to sit up or move around to make the stuff move out of her lungs. And so it makes her cough so hard she might break a rib. Seriously.
   And two of her lower teeth broke off. 
   I knew about the congestion and was feeling OK about how we’d decided to help her — cough syrup and Claritin — but I didn’t know about the teeth. The last few weeks she’d been asleep every time I visited. She was asleep and I sat beside her a while looking at the flowers before going away. So when the hospice nurse called to tell me she’d ordered ground foods for her, I thought it was just because her teeth have been so loose. I didn’t know they were gone. 

   What if Bambi’s father had told the young prince of the forest something like that?
   “Your mother’s teeth have gone away. She will not have them anymore. She misses them. There is nothing you can do.”
   

Upswing

   Mom HAD lost weight but now she has gained weight. She's up 4 pounds since Christmas.
   She did have a UTI but now she doesn't have one.
   The skin tear she gets from sliding in her gerichair is healing. The aides place her back in bed after meals so she's not slipping on that chair so much anymore, and she has an air mattress again.

   Is this improvement ... good? 
   While I understand why part of me asks that question, the answer is yes, it's good. She's not sick, she's  healing her body still. Even when she wasn't, she still was enjoying things and everybody at the home seems to like her very much. She gets a banana with her breakfast every day (loves a banana) and ice cream every day, too (adores that). 
   She's utterly cute and sweet and friendly.
   She's just demented, immobile and helpless.

   I have been imagining how Mom affects her local economy. Her helplessness provides employment for a facility owner, director, business manager, office manager, social worker, contract supervising doctor and his staff and a hospice doctor, a hospice nurse and aide, three shifts of CNAs, a treatment nurse, an LPN, an RN, a kitchen manager, kitchen assistants, a plant manager, a janitor, a laundry worker, a counselor, an activities director, physical therapist, the vendors who supply the food and equipment and ordinary services like phone and cable TV, a pharmacist, Medicare and health insurance clerks, people who own and work at gas stations along my route to see her, floral departments in two Krogers and their vendors who supply the roses and the orchids I buy once or twice a week.
   A lot of people have jobs because my Mom has dementia.

You are me

   The hospice nurse called to report Mom has lost two pounds since last week.
   When I saw her this afternoon, she was quiet, lying flat in the bed with her pink elephant. I had a coffee table book of flower photos to share, and she did study the pictures earnestly, saying sometimes, "All the beautiful roses."
   Sunny was squawking in the restroom, complaining because she wanted an aide to help her and also just yakking. I hung close to Mom's face so it was easier to hear.
    She said, "I love you and you're my mother."
    Cognitive misfiring?
    My hair was hanging down and it brushed her face. I don't imagine Granny as ever wearing her hair loose, but she must have. I remember sneaking into her bedroom and seeing a big thick-bristle hairbrush on her dresser and (I think) a matching comb, with beautiful brown handles. I've never seen another hairbrush like that, so possibly it was a clothing brush. The bristles were thickly packed, like horsehair but soft.
    I was 4 or 5, but it's a clear memory.
   What was Mom's relationship with her? Did Granny lean in, smile to make Mom crinkle her eyes, place a cold hand on her forehead? I think of Granny as a reserved character, not big on the PDA; but of course she would have cuddled little Mom, who would have been adorable, a pretty, funny little girl.
    Mom's room is becoming less like a place and more like a time zone, if that makes sense. A time zone where old time and new time exist side by side and both times refuse to stand still.

Rainy Monday

   "The ice cream is all gone and now everything is terrible."
   And she meant that, too. Over and over, she meant it. Everything was terrible.
   It must have been strawberry ice cream because there was a pink stain on her shirt.
   I leaned in close, searched her eyes and said, "The ice cream is all gone and now everything is terrible?"
   She laughed and laughed.