My mother’s eyes widened. “That’s who answers the hall phone?” she blurted.
The security guard appeared and escorted us through the maze of doors and foyers until we met with the cool air. “Call anytime!” my mother squealed, bending at the waist with her arms crossed over herself. By the time we walked across the parking lot, we were laughing so hard our faces were slick with tears.
TEN SECONDS
SUSAN KIM CAMPBELL
My mother-in-law startles when she sees her son and me in her kitchen this morning.
She has about a ten-second recall now, I calculate. Ten seconds, then her memory resets.
“Oh!” she says to my father-in-law. “I forgot we have visitors! It’s so nice to have you two here.”
She beams good morning, and we beam back. We all enjoy a pleasant breakfast at her dining table. I haven’t seen her in several months, but she looks as well put together as ever. Neatly coiffed short gray hair, earrings, pastel capris perfect for the South Carolina summer. Nothing in her appearance indicates she has dementia, and has for at least five years.
During this six-day visit to my in-laws, I have become aware of how often I am on my phone or my laptop. There is always so much to do. I need to book a hotel room for an upcoming weekend trip. A neighbor back home in California has a question about the recycling.
My mother-in-law is never on her phone. She stopped being able to use email or text about three years ago. She can still use her phone as a phone, but only if necessary.
After breakfast, the two men leave us to have tea. My husband will spend hours helping his father fix a problem with his computer, sitting in a bedroom painstakingly reinstalling software, program by program. In truth, it’s a way to keep his father company and give him respite from the daily rigors of caregiving.
I do the same. These six days I spend a lot of time with my mother-in-law.
She likes to talk. I am a chatty gal, but now she out-chats me. The distant past is still fairly clear to her. She recalls a few years ago—“Remember that Christmas in Portland when we stayed in that fun rental with the 1970s décor?”—to a very long time ago. “I lived in Georgia when I was five years old. When I moved there, the kids at my school called me a Yankee!”
She heats water for our tea, then casts about in her own kitchen. “Do you know where the spoons are?” she asks.
“Here we are,” I say. I locate the tea and honey.
She was once an excellent cook. That was one of the first things I learned about her, over fifteen years ago.
She was the breadwinner of the family for years, and a mother of three. She was a middle school principal in New England and earned a master’s degree in education. She retired to South Carolina a few years before her memory loss started to become evident.
In order to plan for the future, you have to remember the past. It sounds simple, but it’s something that only strikes me during this visit. If you run out of milk, you have to remember that you did so in order to go to the store. If you don’t remember you’re out of milk, you don’t buy more. The less you remember, the less you have to do.
My mother-in-law does not have much to do. But she is active, she is alert, she is the first to offer to pitch in.
If her spirit is willing but her mind is failing her, she is often all smiles. The illness has brought to the fore a core kindness she has always had, and a sunniness of disposition.
For the rest of us, the world is chock full of to-dos, more of them than we can handle. We are overwhelmed with email and appointments and places to be and plans ad infinitum. We are stressed and short on time.
She and I sit and chat for hours, then I’m ready for a break. I excuse myself to rest in the guest bedroom, which really means I will get on my laptop and research hotels. On the way, I peek into the master bedroom, but my husband and his father are still engrossed in computer repairs.
Not five minutes later, my mother-in-law appears in my bedroom doorway.
I realize that one-on-one contact is what she comprehends best. The night before when the four of us went out to dinner, if one of us left the table and returned later, she was momentarily confused. If the conversation became too animated, she got confused.
I try to think what it must be like for her. A ten-second reset. People appear and re-appear. They are talking but she can’t follow the through line. Kind of like tuning in to bits of radio static, coming in the middle of a show and not knowing why everyone is laughing. One person is much easier to follow.
Or perhaps all of this talking, this need for engagement, is simply a normal symptom or stage of the disease. Either way she seems grateful for the contact.
This woman has always treated me like a daughter. I remember a lively evening with her just five years ago, standing in my kitchen washing dishes and cracking wise. She confessed that when her children were young and at school, she would sometimes sneak off to go skiing on a winter’s day.
“Instead of staying at home, I hit the slopes!” she laughed. She was an excellent skier, and I realized that’s why her son is an excellent skier, too.
“You set a great example,” I told her.
“Look!” she points out the bedroom window now. “The sky is such an unusual color. I think it’s going to rain.” She takes note of the sky often, and of the beautiful flowers in her yard. The Mexican lilies her husband planted drop all of their purple blossoms every night, only to bloom afresh the next morning.
She is the very definition of being present. The present is all she has. In ten-second increments.
I am not so present. I am too busy getting to the future and leaving the past behind.
I put the laptop aside. I can’t stop time, but this I can do. One day I will look back and remember this visit fondly. One day, I fear, my mother-in-law may not be able to talk the way she can now.
“Would you like some tea?” she asks.
“Absolutely,” I say.
I follow her back to the kitchen and she puts on the kettle.
“This is lovely!” she smiles.
“It is,” I reply. I mean it.
Then she begins to talk.
MY FIRST MENTOR
LENORE GAY
My father, a jovial, patient man, made paintings, mostly watercolors as well as pen and ink drawings. He also wrestled big logs into his studio and carved them into abstract pieces. The smell of wax drifted from his studio when he polished the wood to “bring out the grain.” He told me that by high school he’d figured writing, and painting, along with sculpture, were harsh mistresses; if he wanted a family, he had to choose. He chose painting and sculpture and earned an MFA in painting.
When I turned five, Daddy and I began visiting museums and art galleries. To my questions about why an artist painted a strange body or a sky with three suns, he’d answer, “What do you think?” Later when I asked what to write about, he’d say, “Use your imagination.”
Fascinated by Japanese painting, my father wrote haiku, a seventeen-syllable Japanese form of poetry. He gave me books on haiku. I wrote haiku through high school, along with poems. He and I critiqued each other’s attempts.
As soon as Daddy turned sixty, he enrolled in his first poetry class at Virginia Commonwealth University. He took poetry classes for the next twelve years. His legacy was a thousand poems. His process had been to edit a poem and keep five or six versions. I watched his mind at work by following the trail of edits.
I began to noticing changes in him at eighty. He told me his memory was “goofy,” and he put yellow stickers with information around his condo. I’d been helping him type his poems, but the poems were changing: the words weren’t surprising or lyrical, and the themes were less complex.
The same trend occurred with his watercolors. The last time the family went to the beach he had no interest in swimming. My brother set up a table on the front porch so Daddy could watch the ocean and paint. His final seascape hangs next to my desk. Soon after visiting the beach, my bro
ther curated a show of Daddy’s paintings, going back to the 1930s. The shift was obvious. From the vibrant, detailed watercolors of buildings and nudes to simple seascapes, it was unmistakable.
Over time, other changes became noticeable as well. His movements slowed, his gait changed to a shuffle. He did odd things. One afternoon when I visited, I found him lining up cans of black bean soup on the windowsill of my deceased mother’s bedroom. I asked him why in a bedroom, when he had a large pantry. With a startled expression he said, “Your mother loved black bean soup, so I thought the cans belonged here.”
He no longer drove to art exhibits or poetry readings. I would drive him to events. People would talk with him. Always polite, he’d say a few words. But as we walked away, he’d ask me who the person was.
He could no longer manage money, calling me with confusing questions. The first time Sasha, my daughter, and I cleaned out his refrigerator we found rotten deli meat and expired jars of mustard and pickles. He admitted he didn’t cook because he didn’t feel safe.
Daddy couldn’t live alone any more. I called my brother Allen, who returned from Hawaii and moved into Daddy’s condo to became his caretaker.
A visit to a doctor confirmed what we knew. The diagnosis was multi-infarct dementia.
Sasha, Allen, and I would take Daddy on outings to coffee shops, shopping, and out to eat, but he soon lost interest in going out. He sat in his bedroom watching television most of the day, or just lay on his bed, dozing or staring at the ceiling.
We tried adult daycare for a while. Allen would drop Daddy off and pick him up a few hours later, but Daddy didn’t enjoy the program and didn’t want to go for long. We then hired certified nursing assistants for ten hours a day a few days a week so Allen could have some free time.
I talked with Allen about assisted living, but he didn’t like the idea. To him it felt like we were abandoning Daddy, even though I explained that we could visit anytime. When we had decisions to make, he and I usually agreed, but we argued about this one.
When Allen wanted to visit friends in New York, though, he located an assisted living facility that admitted guests for five-day respite care. While Allen was gone, I visited Daddy daily. For the first few days he kept asking when my brother would return. At the end of the week I said Allen would be coming the next day to take him home. Daddy looked at me with a surprised expression. “No, I live here.” Daddy wanted to live at the facility; he’d made some friends and liked the activities.
At the assisted living facility, he was active for a few months, but gradually lost interest in activities and people. One day when I was visiting him in the day room, he parked his wheelchair close to my chair. He looked directly at me and said, “I want to talk with you, but I just can’t.”
He lived in assisted living for four years. In the fourth year, he attempted to leave in the middle of the night. He couldn’t walk, but managed to get to a side door and go outside. The alarms went off. The staff found him barefooted, lying on the ground in pouring rain. With a bit of sparkle, he told the staff he wanted to go out and have some fun. The staff moved him directly to the locked unit.
Every time I left the facility after that I cried, full of despair and helplessness. Once he asked me, “Who was I before I came to live here?” Startled, I gave him some facts about his life. He nodded, looking puzzled and dissatisfied, as if I’d described a stranger he couldn’t remember meeting.
And inch by inch, he’d changed into a person I no longer recognized.
BE HERE NOW
MARITA GOLDEN
I always bring flowers. They are colorful, and they make me think of life and of all that is new. When I bring flowers, it means I care.
I bring flowers each time I visit May, an eighty-year-old former neighbor who lives in an assisted living facility. That is the place where she lives; a place where she is safe and cared for by skilled and nurturing professionals. In that place, her life is shaped by dementia and by grief. For a decade, she has had dementia. For a year and a half, she has been a widow. In her dementia-mind her beloved husband of fifty-five years, Jimmy, is both here and gone, the willful chaos of her thoughts and memories deforming, but never halting, the process of grieving.
There is much that May has forgotten, no longer knows. But what she cannot not know is that now she is a widow. She is alone in the way that you are alone after fifty-five years of soldering a life together with one person, breathing, exhaling the same air in the same rooms and same house, building and fusing plans and promises together until death do you . . .
In her brokenness and because of what still remains, I consider May a friend. Before, she was a neighbor. Now she is much more.
* * *
I had witnessed the decline of them both. Seen Jimmy harried and over time growing thinner, grayer. Always it seemed we met in the line for prescriptions at the drugstore at the nearby mall. I knew he was diabetic and was more worried than reassured by the brave half smile that did not succeed in lighting up his long, chiseled, dark face when he saw me, explaining that he was in line for pills for both himself and for May.
Jimmy never said the word dementia, but we knew something was wrong. When my husband, Joe, and I drove past their house on summer evenings and stopped upon seeing them sitting in lawn chairs in the driveway, we knew from his wrapping his arms around May to encase and protect her. May would babble nonsensically, laugh for no reason, ask me my name, or peer suspiciously at Joe and ask him if he lived in our community, Paradise Acres.
Jimmy never said the word, but his gaze, apologetic and consumed with the quiet ache of loss, informed us of everything. He, a diabetic, was caring for someone with dementia. The grown children came by occasionally.
When I had visited Jimmy in rehab in the aftermath of an accident that injured him but left May unscathed, he told me, “We were driving to National Harbor to see the new casino. May likes casinos. It was a rainy night. I don’t even know why I was driving that night. We just got it in our minds to see the new place we’d heard so much about. Coming back home through all that rain, the car slid off the road and hit a tree.” Jimmy told me this lying in the small bed in a rehabilitation facility whose halls smelled of disinfectant and burned food and whose lobby was filled with residents in wheelchairs, who looked forlorn and desperate enough to make a getaway through the front doors if they could. His shoulder and arm were injured so badly that he would no longer be able to drive. After five weeks in rehab, he returned home. The day after he slept for the first time in a hospital bed set up in his living room, Jimmy died in his sleep.
One day after Jimmy died and May had moved into assisted living, one of the sons told me what he had known, what he had not known, what he had done, and what he could not do. “One day I went to the house and saw all that my father did for my mother to take care of her. I don’t know how he did it. I thought to myself, I simply could never do what he did. I didn’t go back for a while. I couldn’t.”
* * *
When I bring the flowers, they work their magic. They do what flowers do, impose the silent promise of happiness. In their eloquence, they say what I cannot or dare not. May and I spend the first few minutes placing them in the vase I bought her just for this purpose, just for the flowers I bring.
May’s apartment is well-appointed and spacious, shared with another resident who lives in a separate, smaller living space behind her own door, where it seems she is mostly bedridden.
Although she was always tiny, the harrowing burden of dementia and grief have reduced May to a frailness that worries me. She accepts my visits even as I am certain that she does not and cannot fully remember me. Remember who I am. But she is gracious and welcoming. For I have brought flowers. I have brought myself. A self that she may not recall, but a self that she knows instinctively honors who she was and who she is just by knocking on her door.
I have learned that May does not have to remember me for the visits to lift me, to bind us one to another. The flowers l
ean toward us on the glass coffee table as though to hear our conversation. There is so much I do not know.
And so I begin at the beginning. Because for May every day is a beginning.
We are starting new. Starting fresh. When I ask May where she was born, that question rivets her. She sits up, no longer slumping forward, twisting her hands. She looks straight at me, composing herself. Composing the story of her life.
* * *
This day I have come with a photograph of me as a six-year-old standing in front of a 1956 Oldsmobile with my parents and a family friend in front of my grandmother’s house in North Carolina. It was at the end of my annual August visit to Greensboro to spend a month with my maternal grandmother, “Granny Reid.” I offer May the three-by-five black and white, now dry and cracked with age but for me a talisman and treasure, placing it in her small hands. She peers at the photo and asks, “Is that you?” pointing to the child in the photo who stands squinting at the camera because of the sun and hugging her mother’s dress.
“That’s me.”
I tell May about my summer visits to Greensboro, and the sumptuous home-cooked meals my parents and I had to eat at half a dozen relatives’ homes before we could hit the road and head back to Washington. Tables groaned with the staples picked and pulled and plucked from backyard gardens and henhouses. It was food that said, “We love you.”
“So much food; I remember,” May assures me. “So much food. Country people love to eat, and the food was good. Home-grown.
“I was Daddy’s favorite. The favorite, he told me that,” she says proudly. Telling me where she is from, she is telling me who she is. Coherence and memory and confidence return as May tells me about her family’s farm in Wilson, North Carolina. Hating the farm but loving her family. Reading the books brought at Christmastime by her mother’s sister, Aunt Sue from Newark, New Jersey. “I knew I didn’t want to keep working on the farm. None of us did. Daddy and Mama didn’t even want that for us. And I got it in my head that I was gonna be a secretary.”
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