My mother was born 104 years ago on August 18, 1918. She spent her last birthday, her 93rd, in the memory care unit of a nursing home. That day is memorable for many reasons. We observed — and tried, and failed, to celebrate — her birthday four months after she left my home, where she had lived happily for years, and where we both hoped and expected she would die. She was where she was because an infection, Clostridium difficile, traveled to her brain and ravaged it as the bacteria had ravaged her gut. Back home, she slept, but rarely at night. She saw strangers in her bedroom and heard them talking and became convinced that thieves were taking her clothes. She was anguished and agitated and awake, and so, therefore, was I. I was also ill, and my surgeon was waiting for me to name a time when I could have a necessary operation. I would have it some 6 weeks after my mother’s death. Which fell nearly 4 months to the day after her last birthday.
Fell. That verb describes much of my mother’s last year.
I baked a cake for her birthday and brought it, along with table decorations, to the home — which was not a home, neither Mother’s home, nor mine — for the residents. I was met by a nicely dressed woman whose accent told me she had been raised in Texas. This lady told me how disappointed she was that I had planned a party and invited all these people, strangers, into her home, without her permission. It was just rude. Though I recognized the woman’s dementia, I also recognized the truth of her words. Strangers had invaded her home and her life. It had all happened without her permission. She was only wrong about the identity of the deed holder. I apologized, and it was an apology to her and to my mother and to all of the men and, mostly, women, sitting, together, and so alone. I told her that next time I would ask her permission and, “Ma’am, would you like a piece of homemade chocolate cake?” She would, indeed. I like to think we parted friends. I do not recall seeing her again.
I visited Mother every day. I hung a photograph of her on the door to her two rooms. It was a picture of my mother, young and strong. I wanted the staff to see that woman. When I walked in Mother would greet me with a glad cry, “Oh, there’s my mother.” She would wail when I left. Me, too.
I wrote the piece below for the August 13, 2010 edition of National Catholic Reporter. Reading it now I realize how much Mother had lost, even before the final illness. But we had a routine and it worked. I helped her with names, helped her place the jigsaw pieces of memory necessary to negotiate the puzzle of her day. “Oh, Mother, you remember Agnes,” I might say, and she would answer, “Of course, I do. Agnes, how are you?” We tag teamed church and the grocery store and the doctor’s office. When we went to a routine appointment and she was asked about her medications, I rattled off the list. One day, though, she decided to answer the also routine “anything else” question with, “Uhhuh, Interferon.” Every professional in the room turned towards me. Hadn’t I thought it important to mention that my mother was being treated for cancer? I turned to her and said, “Mother, is it Ibuprofen that you take?” She nodded and said, “Well, one of those ‘I’ names.” We managed pretty well. Until the Clostridium difficile took over.
At the time I wrote this piece, there was another helpless woman in my life, my infant granddaughter. Her stumbles and misses were cause for rejoicing; Mother’s a cause for weeping and mourning. I think of that now. If I fall, people are concerned. Worried about what it might portend. Nobody smiles and says, as to a child, “Jump up!” The incline and the decline have much in common. Except for delight.
I miss Mother. I want to talk to her. I want her to listen and advise me. I want to make her laugh. Again. Sometimes I go to the cemetery, stand at her grave and tell her the news.
I will see her again, healed and whole. I will see her — looking like the picture of the woman on the door of her last room and not like the woman inside.
Here’s what I wrote, that last summer she lived with me.
My mother claws at her chin. The skin is red and raw. Sometimes it bleeds. If a protective scab forms over the wound, my mother scrapes it off.
The gerontology nurse tells us this behavior is typical of senile dementia. There is nothing to be done, except, perhaps, to “give her something else to do with her hands.” My mother has a tremor. When her mother had this tremor, we called it “the palsy.” My mother’s hands are never still, the constant movements involuntary. These movements cannot be directed towards a useful “something else.” Her hands wander to her chin; they worry the skin there as if it the chin itself were alien and unwanted, as if beneath the loose flesh is something she needs, or seeks, or is.
She has “the palsy.” She will have it until she dies.
If I say, “Mother, you need to leave your chin alone,” she looks at me, sometimes embarrassed and sometimes angry. She drops her hands into her lap for a moment. I look away. I do not like scolding her as I would scold a child. When I look back, her crabbed fingers are at work, excavating her papery skin.
My granddaughter, Lucy, is nine months old. She has less control of her movements than my mother. She flaps her arms when she sees something she wants: my glasses, a block, a fallen leaf, a morsel of peach. Sometimes she can command her hands to reach out and grab, scrabbling her fingers out and over whatever she desires. Sometimes she can even bring it to her mouth. But sometimes, and more often, Lucy’s hand opens — always a surprise — and the treasure falls back to the floor.
My mother is more reliable with a fork than Lucy is with a spoon.
Lucy’s mother tries to keep her nails short, but sometimes we pick her up from the crib to find that she has scratched and cut her face. All of this is wondrous to us, and sweet: the fallings, the scratchings, the clutchings, the constant reaching and attempting that are Lucy’s waking hours. We applaud her efforts to grab and grasp, even as I laugh and say, kissing her, “You can’t have my glasses.”
We fetch the peach for her when Lucy fails to get it to her mouth.
My mother’s gestures, as involuntary and as pure as Lucy’s, make me sad and anxious. I want to get away. I do not want to look. I want her to stop.
My mother, who loves Estee Lauder perfumes and lotions and powders, now bears the sharper odor of incontinence beneath her floral fragrances. I flinch from the smell, even as I swing Lucy into my arms, and hold her close, not caring that her diapers are dirty, not caring that she smells. No one describes a baby as “incontinent.” No baby is ashamed of wetting her pants. No one feels ashamed on her behalf.
We are at the store. My mother has purchased her groceries and it is time to sign the debit card slip. She writes, “Betty,” slowly and legibly only to one who already knows her name. She stops, confused. Says, “What’s the rest of it?”
It has been a long time since my mother knew her phone number. She forgets familiar words. She has lost the names of some grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I have, for a couple of years now, been intercepting her letters to friends and family so that I can add the proper digits to addresses without numbers, correct the spellings of city names and include a zip code. I know what my mother has forgotten, that a letter sent to “Elaine Bennett, Hondo, Texas,” will be returned, even if the same letter would have been safely delivered in 1932.
But this is the first time I have known her to forget her own name.
Lucy is just learning her name. We call out, “Lucy!” and try to get her attention.
We ask, “Where is Lucy’s nose?” charmed when she gets it, charmed when she pokes her finger into her eye or mouth, instead. That Lucy would not reliably know her name is, in the word we use only for the very young, precious. It is great fun to ask her questions again and again, to speak to her, to teach her. We are patient and encouraging.
I try to mask my impatience with my mother, but that is not the same as being patient. Not at all. And I am discouraged by all her losses and lacks.
I sit with my mother and think of Terese of Liseux and her “Little Way of Love,” and I wonder if she was joking. “Jesus has no need of our works, “ Terese writes, “but only of our love.” But “love,” when it is the care of an elderly woman, is “works.” It looks and feels a lot like housework, with all of housework’s attendant perks, pay and privileges.
The “little way” is long and hard, like digging a foundation with a teaspoon. It is not little. It is steep, and I know I have not touched the bottom. Indeed, I have no idea how far down I will have to dig before I can begin to climb up, and out.
My mother is losing her words, a name, a phrase at a time. “Oh, you know what I’m talkin’ about,” she’ll say. Or, “What’s the word for that?” Or, “What am I tryin’ to say?”
My mother is losing her words. She is losing her name. She, who named the world for me, is increasingly a stranger there.
Lucy is learning words: mama, papa, dog, hat, baby, cat. (If we agree to use “dog” or “baby” as verbs, rather than nouns, she has a whole sentence, perhaps a complete paragraph, at her command.)
We are naming the world for her and she is exploring it with confidence and joy.
I cannot be with Terese just now. The adjective “little” mocks me. I turn, instead, to a poem I recited to my own children when they were babies. It is a poem I recite to my grandchildren. It is a prayer, and now it is a prayer for my mother, as well.
Dear Father, hear and bless,
Thy beasts and singing birds.
And guard with tenderness,
Small things that have no words.
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