coda to laughter

'Where are you going?" my mother says when I start to gather my things and head home. Her question scares me, as do all her words that indicate she is less than whole.

"Home, Mom" I say.

"But you are home," she says.

"Well, I have some work to do," I tell her, smoothly overlooking the fact that Mom now has no idea where she is and who I am. This is true despite the fact that just minutes ago she seemed perfectly lucid and was chatting about the musical Annie and the fact that she and I saw this in New York when it opened on Broadway in the late 1970s. How Mom can shift so easily between her competing realities is astonishing.

"Don't you have it with you?" Mom asks then. And actually, I do. I bring work with me every day to Mirabella, though I have yet to open the papers and actually begin--Mom's world and her issues seem too compelling. That my bag weighs at least ten pound with all my papers is a testament to Mom's own philosophy--that she's better off bringing her "work" with her, safer really. All those family vacations where Mom dragged her bills and her files all in the name of--"I couldn't get it down before I left so I need to get it done while I am away." She persisted in this habit up until a year and a half ago--the last trip she took to Idaho, the last time she had the where-with-all to even know where her "papers" might be. There she sits in her blue parka and her cream wool hat, despite the fact that we are sitting in Labor Day heat. We are waiting for the holiday parade to come by, Appaloosa horses and gun-slinging cowboys, all in celebration of Ketchum's olden days as a mining town. She'd dragged her pounds of bills and hen-scratched papers with her on that trip (or rather Lorna carried them for her)--insisting that my sister-in-law stuff them into a black zippered bag to take on the plane. Course, none of those bills ever got paid while away--why should they? Vacations are meant to be holidays away from work (unless you are, of course, like my father who never could make this distinction). And by that time, Mom was incapable of paying her won bills, a fact that Mom had been very reluctant to acquiesce to. But this is not vacation for me or for Mom--we are deadly earnest, fighting for our lives.

But whether I have my "papers" with me isn't the point--I need to go home, be home, be safe in my own house, away from the multiple realities that accompany all Alzheimer's sufferers like Mom.

Mom seems to accept my statement of--"I have work to get done" and I am relieved. This is something she can understand. It's really taxing to keep pretending that what Mom is saying is making sense or that her realities are everyone's realities. I am so anxious to tell myself that--"Mom is back, Mom is once more in this world"--that I want to ignore all of the little glitches, the seconds when it is clear that Mom's mind is working in circuitous routes using a logic of her own, one that not even I can decipher, despite all the years Mom and I have spent appurtenant to each other, literally with our bodies, our backs touching in accord, our smiles radiating our uncommon joy in each other. Notice the photo--taken in the early 1980s. This is Mom and me before we lost each other.

But Mom's declaration that I am "home" is incontrovertible evidence--something I can't ignore--that Mom may have regained her language and her sense of humor but not her mind. No manner of wishing can make it otherwise. As I drive through the wet Seattle streets--because. yes, it did finally rain in the rainy city of Seattle--first turning onto Denny Way and then onto Stewart briefly before entering the freeway, I am struck by how ordinary this all is--driving in the rain, stopping at the proper signs, yielding to oncoming cars--ordinary and yet how extraordinary if you are Mom. I wonder if she misses all of this--the quotidian--or if the Alzheimer's has taken away enough of her brain that she doesn't notice the deletions, the vast gaping holes where her life used to be.

I'm remembering Mom's laugh earlier today, as she was explaining to her OT, Becky, how she was talking earlier in the week. "It sounded like this," Mom says with a smile, hunching her shoulders slightly and pulling tight her vocal cords so that her voice comes out thin, raspy, barely audible. "Y...e...s...I...c...a...n," Mom grins, letting her voice waft its feathery vowels and consonants into the room. "Y...e...s...I...c...a...n...m...o...v...e...t...h...e...c...o...n...e." She laughs again, and despite her slanted shoulder--this unevenness started creeping back into her spinal alignment today.

Becky and I both laugh to, loudly and with glee. We are astonished and pleased by Mom's performance, by the physical fact that she can manipulate her shoulders, her throat, her voice, when just days ago she could do nothing but stare into space or at the floor. But my laughter catches, becomes quickly solidly rooted in my throat as I realize something important...that Mom knows--SHE KNOWS. She understands when she is talking "crazy"... when her voice sounds inaudible, like death-warmed-over...when she is nowhere near living the kind of life most of us prefer to see as "normal." The knowledge of this makes me mute and all I can do is flee from the room, as fast as I can, before my sobs speak for me.

All I can see is the grief in this.

Deeply, a mother's daughter
--this is a lifewithmom--