Day 14 at Mirabella.
3:35 pm
"This little baby is crying," Mom says soon after I walk into the room. I've kissed her hands and then her cheeks and now settle back down into her bed for a visit--we are laying head to toe, toe to head, my bare feet laying close to her shoulders and chin. When she makes this pronouncement, she waves her right hand, a slight but recognizable gesture she just started doing today during OT.
"She woke up this morning without her mommy," Mom continues, looking at me like I completely comprehend when really I have no idea what she's talking about.
"She hurts" Mom says, "and no one to love her."
Just when I'm about to say--"what do you mean"--it comes to me what Mom is referring to. "Your right hand hurts?" I ask Mom.
"Yes, she says, her lips parting first to a pout and then to a grin as she cradles her right hand with her left, an inadvertent gesture she can only perform when she isn't thinking too hard about it.
"Ah," I say back to her, "too much t-h-e-r-a-p-y perhaps?"
She nods yes and then I say--"Well...let me see what I can do for that little baby."
4:50 pm
"How many children do you have Dorin?" Beverly, Mom's PT, asks her.
"Three," Mom says.
"Can you tell me their names?" Beverly adds.
"Well, there's Peter. There's cuckoo Eric. And cuckoo Christine."
When Mom relates this story to me, she's laughing wildly, sure that she's told a joke, but at who's expense I'm not sure. I'm so stunned by her recall of proper nouns (her children's names)--the most difficult kind of words for Alzheimer's patients to memory--that I almost miss the irony of Mom's words. Mom is sure she's going crazy--she told me so several days ago. Her calling the kettle black, so to speak, makes me roar too, roar and weep all at one time.
7:32 pm
"I want my mommy," Mom says to me tearfully, as I'm leaving.
"How about a daughter," I say back to her as I wipe her cheek with the side of my sleeve.
"You have a Mommy," she says, alluding to the fact that her own mom died when Mom was nineteen, leaving my mother with an unresolvable grief. In the photo which stands in a plain gray frame to the right of Mom's Mirabella headboard, it's 1936 and Mom is twelve. Mom is on the far right; her mother, Berentina, is in the middle followed by Mom's sister, Marguerite, on the far left. Marguerite is twenty and Berentina will die just a few short years later at age fifty-nine. Mom will be just twenty-one years old.
"Yes, I do have a Mommy," I say to her with a smile, "but you have a baby," a concession which acknowledges my own childless state.
"Yes, I do," she says. We laugh then, enough giggles between us to wipe clean her tears, even if there's an unspeakable grief beneath.
"Goodbye Mom," I whisper to her as I press my lips to her pasty cheeks. I can feel the grit of her hair under my fingertips as I collect her bangs to the sides of her face, away from her tearing eye lids. Her hair feels insubstantial, brittle--in need of a wash and curl--despite her eternally youthful shade of brown.
"Goodbye baby," she calls after me, just as I close shut the door behind me. And it takes everything I can muster to move away from Room 201, to leave my mommy behind.
Deeply, a mother's daughter
--this is alifewithmom--
4 comments:
Christine,
The response and repartee demonstrated by your Mom is remarkable!
You must feel this to be warm and nurishing after all your struggles, setbacks and patient perserverence.
This remarkable improvement in your Mom's connectedness and ability to communicate is a direct result of your efforts.
Congratulations!
Dan
Dan: Thanks for your kind words....but one caveat. When I arrived today, I wasn't sure what to expect--often Mom's "improvements" from her earlier stroke were patterned by one step ahead and two backwards. Mom's speech was still strong (little expressive aphasia...few word finding issues), but her cognition was quite poor. Every cogent thought she spoke was followed by a thought displaying utter confusion. C
Christine,
I understand that your Mom isn't good-as-new and suspected your recorded highlights might indeed be the sum total of the day's cognative communications. This level of improvement however, provides an intimate reconnection that was missing four days ago.
This, I believe, is something for wich we can feel thankful.
Dan: Yes, this is in fact what struck me this morning--that I have been given the gift of reconnection with my mom...in small little bits, but there. Tonight when I write the blog, perhaps I will feel the need to give the other side of the story for the last day or so, the other little bits that scare the hell out of me because they reveal how disconnected from reality Mom is. C.
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