Fact

Fact: the American psychiatric association defines Alzheimer's as a "multifaceted loss of intellectual abilities, such as memory, judgment, abstract thought and other higher cortical functions, and changes in personality and behavior" (Sherwin Nuland's How We Die 1993).

Fact: Alzheimer's as a named disease has only existed for the last hundred years or so; prior to this, aspects of the diseases had been observed and labeled under the general term of senility (Nuland).

Fact: someone is diagnosed with Alzheimer's/dementia every 70 seconds (King 5 News 9/21).

Fact: more than 35 million people around the world are living with Alzheimer's/dementia (Seattle Times 9/21)

Fact: Mom has been suffering from Alzheimer's since 2005....and probably even earlier, we just didn't have the courage to look.

Fact: "the only rescue [for survivors] comes with the death of a person they loved. And even then, the memories and the dreadful toll drag on, and from these the release can only be partial. A life that has been well lived and a shared sense of happiness and accomplishment are ever after seen through the smudged glass of the last few years" (Nuland)

Fact: Mom's arms are progressing (albeit slowly) with her stroke rehabilitation--she can now move her hands and arms in a limited range of motion during OT. Mom's legs are lifeless, however; no amount of electrical stimulation or electric bicycle exercise seems to make a dent in her incapacities. Mom has no control over her core muscles--when sat on the edge of the therapy bench, Mom flops forward or backwards like a rag doll. For these reasons, Mom remains a full assist when it comes to transfers, to toileting, to eating, to jsut about everything. According to Mom's PT, Mom's current status is "typical" as most stroke patients have significantly more damage to either their legs or their arms; while one of these areas makes gains, the other typically does not. Mom's arms seem to be the lucky arena for improvement.

Fact: Mom's Alzheimer's brain is unpredictable--some days she sounds almost lucid and other days she is a collection of random ideas, none of them easy to understand. Mom's confusion due to her mid-stage Alzheimer's makes "recovery" from her stoke ambiguous. It takes cognition to follow directions, to purpose one's self to recover. Mom's brain is already Swiss cheese--the gaping holes make physical reclamation less than likely.

Fact: Mom knows she's "going crazy" as she puts it. There's nothing that can be said to soften this fact as we, her family, know this too.

Fact: I love my mother and she loves me, more than anything...we've just wasted so many years not believing this about each other. I say to her as I leave today--"I love you so much Mom." She says back to me--"I love you too, so much. In fact, I love you so so so so so much." I hold her hand and am sure I never want to let go. But there won't be a choice.

in our twenties

"Why did you stop dating Tommy?" I ask Mom.

We are both laying on Mom's bed. Mom's head is raised and crooked on her pillows--her dark brown hair matted flat to the pillow, despite the fact that she had her hair "done" this week. Where all the curls have gone I'm not sure. I suspect Mulu and Lorna inadvertently brush them out in an effort to keep Mom's hair tidy. In contrast, I am sitting with my head propped up on pillows on the other end of Mom's bed--my curly locks are not flattened and instead roll across my eyes as I try to keep Mom's face in sight. Laying this way--head to foot and foot to head--is what I prefer as I can be at eye level and close to Mom. It's not yet dinner time, so we have a few minutes to ourselves. Brian from King 5 is not on--it's the weekend--so I also have Mom's undivided attention. Mom's bed feels comfy, compared to all the hours I sometimes sit right here on the edge of her bed, no support for my back and neck but close to Mom....within arm reach of her cheeks, actually, in case she weeps, an event which happens often these days.

The topic of Tommy comes up because I show Mom a photo taken when she is twenty. She's leaning into the camera and has the most delightful look of intrigue and sex--her lips are closed and lipsticked and almost in a smile and her body, with it's limbs jettisoning out of the borders of the picture frame, lends intimacy and allure. My mom, the straitlaced, play-by-the-rules kind of gal, is all sex appeal. I expect Mom to tell me it's Dad taking the picture, but actually, as I find out, it's Mom's other "friend," the one she dated in high school and also while my dad was in the early years of the war. Tommy, from West Seattle like Mom and my dad, was a constant companion of Mom's. At the senior prom, Mom couldn't decide which boy's invitation to accept--Tommy's or Dad's--and so she accepts both. On the night of the prom she lets Tommy deliver her corsage, pick her up and take her to the dance. She stays a while with him--dances several dances--and then, at some pre-appointed time, she tells Tommy she isn't well and she asks to be taken home. Dad then picks her up and she spends the rest of the prom night with him. My sister-in-law and I are fascinated with this story--it brings us to tears with laughter--sometimes Mom laughs too. How this worked logistically is still a mystery to us--I mean, how did Mom keep these operations secret from each other....wouldn't people have noticed that she went with two dates....wouldn't have someone reported this to the other, currently-absent date? West Seattle is a small place. But I can see that I will never know--Mom is reluctant to talk about it.

So, when I find out it's Tommy and not my father who is rowing with Mom, I find myself in need of asking more questions. The photo is so intimate, I want to know what was between Tommy and Mom.

"Why did you stop dating Tommy?" I ask her.

Mom doesn't say anything at first....in fact the silence goes on so long I am wondering if she has slipped back into her Alzheimer's stupor of non-comprehension.

"Mom," I repeat, "Why did you and Tommy break up?"

I'm assuming there was a breakup because Mom eventually married my father, after the war. I also know that Mom didn't think Tommy had the "pzazz" that she thought she needed, which in Mom's world translated into one of two things--she was worried he might be boring and/or that maybe he didn't have the gumption to "provide" for her and a future family. But what I have never heard about is how their relationship ended. Now my father, he was a different story--a real looker (note the navy picture and the rakish grin on his lips) and full of "vim, vip and vigor." He was going places and Mom, eventually, decided to be swept along with him for the ride. In the photo of them as a very young married couple just after the war, Mom looks eternally proper (gloves and bowed head and all)--my father something less than this. My father was never proper, pulling as he did to the edges of things, always testing where one thing ends and another begins. And Mom? How did she fair with her renegade husband--might Tommy have been a more comfortable "fit"?

"Well," Mom finally begins. "Well, we were in a car, his car."

"What kind of car Mom and when was this?"

"Well...well...I really don't know."

More silence.

"What did he say to you?"

"Well...something about...you know...that he didn't think I was ever going to..."

I say nothing and wait for her to say something more. When she doesn't, I add--

"Never going to what...be serious about him?"

"Yes," she nods, a little sheepishly it seems.

"Did you ever see him again?" I ask her?

More silence and then--"No...no, I didn't"

"What do you mean 'no'?" I ask her with surprise. I'm thinking this must have been a catastrophic discussion for them to have never talked again....but Mom assures me that they never had a fight, not then and not on any other occasion. So, the hurt must have run so deep on Tommy's part, I assume, that he didn't want to see her again. And my Mom, what did she feel?

When Mom doesn't say anything more about Tommy, I switch to the other man she dated during this time--Bob. Mom has already told me something about Bob--the guy from Minnesota. He came west to the University of Washington on the US Army's ticket during 1943 and 1944. Mom dated Bob....but, according to Mom, she never considered marrying him--not really. He was just "fun to be with." When Bob proposed marriage and Mom rejected him, he left Washington and she never heard from him again. Mom refers to this as her "second" proposal, which suggests that Tommy's little talk "in his car" must have been a proposal of marriage, one that Mom similarly rejected. Three marriage proposals--astounding! But she says none of this.

All the while, Mom tells me, she is writing letters to my dad--generic letters because, as they both knew, Uncle Sam was reading every word. Sometime after the war ended and my father was discharged, Mom and my father get reacquainted. When I ask her--"How did Dad propose to you?"--she says--"I don't know...Not sure."

I can see the glint of tears forming in the lower rim of her eyes--a small crease of fluid that follows the curve of her lashes. There's something here that's bothering Mom, something more than just stories about her "beaus," as she calls them. I know its time to stop--no more questions. But really, how can anyone "not know" the events of one's own marriage proposal? But then again, this is my mom--her personal life has always been her personal life. Facts are few and far between. When Mom dies, these stories die with her. I will have to live with this. Mom has a right to her privacy.

But just when I change the topic and think to ask her about dinner--what she's ordered (pasta of some kind)--Mom starts to cry in earnest.

"My life...my life...doesn't look..."

"My life doesn't look...any...good," she sobs. 'Not good at all" Her crying is so loud that I have a hard time understanding what she's saying. Her statement is tender, vulnerable, full of grief...and I don't know what to say to her. Not sure what will calm her.

"Course your life looks good, I finally offer as reassurance. "You loved many many people...and many people have loved you." Mulu chimes in here from the other side of the room and says--"That's right, Gamoo. Think of all the people who love you." But the more that we try to talk her out of her doldrums, the louder she cries.

"You promised, Gamoo" Mulu says finally--"you promised not to cry anymore."

"I know," Mom says--I don't want to cry....this is my last cry. Really it is." And as she says this, we can see her try to turn off the faucet and halt the flood of weeping with a smile. And it's in her effort to do so that my mom says something unexpected--

"Where is Paul," my mom asks, "your father's suppose to be...helping...me."

This is the first time Mom has talked about my dad since the stroke, so his name takes me by surprise.

"What do you mean, Mom?" I ask her.

"You know...he was never here...couldn't sit still."

"What do you mean?"

Silence and then this--"We never...you know...talked..." And with this pronouncement Mom breaks into a fresh round of tears. Her eyes now are shiny red and puffed-up like a sea urchin that's been poked. She looks nothing like my mom. To myself I am thinking--how do people "not talk" after more than thirty years of marriage?

"Where are you?" she suddenly asks.

"Right here, Mom....open your eyes."

"Oh," she says, "oh...oh...there you are" as if I had magically rematerialized out of nowhere when really she'd just closed her eyes and in the "dark" had forgotten where she is and who she's with. We sit with this for a minute or two. Both of our eyes are open. None of us is saying anything. We sit this way for several minutes more until Mom's eyes close back down again, like window coverings--what we can't see can't bother us. I wonder if Mom's asleep. As I wait to find out, I notice that the sun has shifted, no longer bleeding heat through the Levelor blinds.

Just when I think she's out and I might have to leave without saying goodbye, I hear--

"Wa...wa....wa..." and then again "wa...wa....wa..."--hyperbolic wails meant to imitate herself crying just now. Mom's funny bone has returned--or as Lorna (Mom's during-the-week caregiver) refers to this--"the old laughing lady has returned."

"Just like a baby,b-a-b-y" Mom adds. "Crying just like a baby" And then she giggles and giggles some more. I am so relieved that her crying stint is over, for now, that I start to laugh too. Soon Mulu contributes her voice to our hilarity. One of the nurse's aids pokes his head into the room to check on us. All we can hear is the loud guffaw of our laughter and it's enough. I don't care what she says or doesn't, what secret she tells or what she keeps to herself. I just don't want to see her this sad any more.

Soon dinner comes--the nurse's aid brings in "Penne with Chicken and Caramelized Onions." I taste it, as always, to encourage Mom to eat. There's corn on the cob too, removed from the cob, and wild rice. Delicious! Mom's likes it to. With Mulu's help, Mom eats two-thirds of what's on the plate--this is a victory. I ask her if she's done and she says--"my baby tummy is all full full full."She says this in her small baby voice, something I've noticed her using more and more when she's in good humor. Full or not, she still has room for ice cream--always vanilla in the evening. Mulu slides spoon after spoon of it into Mom's mouth. I'm grateful for this--no matter the sugar, it's something Mom will never turn down. In Mom's precarious condition, any calories are an estimable good.

But when I get up to gather my carpet bag, empty Evian bottles and today's Seattle Times in order to leave, Mom gets tearful again. Her eyes have remained puffy from her earlier cry and, while I thought her tears had run their course, I can see new tears rivering her sheets, leaving translucent streaks in her otherwise pristine bedding; tomorrow she will be too tired for therapy, I think.

With her "good" hand she reaches towards me and whispers between sobs--

"You make me feel...you do..."

'What Mom?" I'm listening very carefully now because I don't want to miss any syllable of what she's saying. So I lean closer and closer still. Place my face so close to hers that I can see the smudges of her Revlon lipstick, how it bleeds into the accordion folds wrinkling the skin around her lips. And I can feel her breath gather on my cheeks and forehead--soft and slightly sour. It brushes there a minute before joining with the rest of the antiseptic air in her room at the Mirabella.

"Make you feel what?" I ask her again.

"Feel...like I have a family."

Her statement catches me, makes me stop thinking about other inconsequential things. The drive ahead of me, the dinner I am almost too hungry to eat, the darkness that has started descending way to early for my taste.

"Yes...I am your family," I say back to her quickly and firmly, because this is something I believe, like a religion. "And you're my family too, Mom."

She smiles at this and I reach to turn her face in my direction with the tips of my left hand, to make eye contact. I take the edge of one of her off-white sheets and wipe the inner corner of her right eye where tears have dammed up.

"It's good...good...good to have each other," she adds. And I say back to her--"Yes, lucky to have each other."

We stare at each other then, my eighty-five year old mother and her forty-nine year old daughter. And I think to myself--how long it has taken to come to this point, how long I have waited for words such as these.

"I'll never leave you," I say to her, and Mom nods "Yes" in acknowledgment.

But I know something else, as does Mom--Mom will be leaving me...and there's nothing I can do about it.

Later, driving home in my Miata, I have the driver's window rolled down all the way. The air's not cool, nor is it warm--it's just neutral as it floats free the ends of my hair, despite the barrette I have used to keep my hair in place. Strands occasionally snake around and catch on my lips, stick to my lipcolor like flypaper. I find myself still thinking about Mom's grief. What could she be so sad about? What could be so bad that it requires the pronouncement--"it doesn't look good"?

Mom is full of regret--about the decisions she made concerning my father, Tommy, Bob even...about many other things too, I suspect. And yet, is it really regret she feels? Doesn't regret require wishing things had turned out otherwise? If so, I doubt Mom wishes this--I don't think she wishes she had married Tommy or Bob. Instead, she just wants the consequences to be different, for the costs to have not been the same. She wants it all--the person she married without the people she hurt to get that. But life doesn't work that way. "My life doesn't look so good" keeps rolling through my mind, a statement full of judgment....shame even. Perhaps that's it--my mom feels shame for her life. After eighty-five years, shameful is how she sees herself.

So I wonder about my family, what other things we have allowed to shame us. We are a family of secrets. The addictions my second eldest brother faced/faces? The family-less state my oldest brother occasioned when he disappeared twenty-nine years ago? The marital dysfunction my mother worked to hide from my brothers and I (and the world at large)? The eldest son my mother knowingly pushed away? The father I did not love enough when I had the chance? "Sins," my mother would say, sins committed in our "youth." For my brothers and I, "sins" perpetrated in our twenties. All hidden in the name of shame and things we might not do again. O maybe we would? Where is the dignity in this? Where there is shame can there even be dignity? Aren't these the antithesis of each other?

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

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--

collecting laughter

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--

three little pigs go to market

"Which flavor do we want Mom?" I ask this as we are huddled under an awning staked out on Pontius Street, just two or three blocks from Mom's residence at the Mirabella. It's one of those early autumn days where you can feel the beat of summer on your skin but find yourself, at the same time, noticing the cool, fall-ish air that drum-rolls in the shade.

Mom looks at me intently but says nothing. Miraculously, she's sitting up straight in her wheelchair, so this means we have eye contact and often. There's a sign board posted with fifteen different flavors from the "Whidby Island Ice Cream Company"--each one of them is written in a different color ink. I start reading off the names to Mom--"Almond Vanilla," "Blackberry," "Triple Berry," "Coffee Chocolate Carmel," "Chardonnay Spice," "Orange Swirl"--but when we get to "Cardamon" Mom stops me or maybe I just know to stop naming. Cardamon is one of our favorite flavors. Reminds me of Maxime's in Paris or Il Gourmet in Firenze. Takes me back to our more peaceful days--when Mom and I traveled and ate our way across parts unknown relishing the risk of epicurean discovery.

"Does Cardamon sound good, Mom?" I ask her, just to make sure, and she nods, something she's been able to do now for about a day and a half

The pint of cardamon ice cream comes out of the freezer iced-over with frost granules--the cardboard container is brick hard. It's 75 degrees out this afternoon, so I figure we have about thirty minutes to get this ice cream stowed safely into the freezer at the Mirabella, just enough time to finish our browsing and find ourselves a $5.00 bouquet of flowers.

So far, from the "Phnom Penh Market" we've bought corn and fresh green beans for Lorna and me as well as sweet grape tomatoes in yellow, orange and deep-green-striped red. We've tasted three different honeys, deciding on "Wild Knotweed Raw Honey" as our favorite--rich in unexpected flavors, bitter sweet twists; I buy four jars for future Christmas gifts. And we've eye-balled the pastries in the "Little Prague" glass case, deciding on three almond croissants to go--we are thinking big. So by the time we get to the flowers, I've shelled out $12.00 cash plus multiple checks for amounts less than $20.00 each; shopping in the great out-of-doors can be an expensive proposition.

"Which do you want Mom?" I ask her. "How about this green and white bouquet?" Mom turns her head in my direction--something else that's new, mobility in her neck--and looks at the white dahlia's and green Mums. The bouquet is lush and what I would pick, if it was my decision to make. And while she looks at what I hold in my hand, her eyes reach beyond my arm to what the florist is currently building--a shocking orange and red and yellow assortment of dahlia's.

"That one," she says, and I nod yes, thinking her choice spectacular. Here are all her favorite blooms--dahlias, marigolds, sunflowers. I watch as the attendant pours a cup full of water into a small plastic bag and submerges the exposed stems in the fluid; a rubber band holds this in place. A nestle the bouquet sideways on Mom's lap, liking the synergy between Mom's red wool poncho and the vibrant dahlia plumes. As her head leans into the lace-like edges of her blooms, I see her face crinkle in a smile--not a big happy grin but rather a smile that says --"Here we are, you and I, and I'm glad of it."

When we get back to the Mirabella, I immediately set about arranging our booty--it's an obsession I have, needing to make an aesthetic still life out of the food I procure from a market and will soon eat. Meanwhile, Lorna and one of the nursing staff are changing Mom, as the water from her bouquet escaped its plastic borders and seeped out to wet her pants. Mom's at risk for broken skin and diaper rash, so wetness must be addressed vigilantly. Mom accepts these ministrations, with her gaze fixed out the window towards what is still a blue-hot day. I wonder, then, what she is dreaming, what visualization she is practicing to forget that there are two people handling her flesh, two people viewing the intimacies of her body, intimacies that not even she can bring herself to talk about.

When finally the changing is done, our feast is ready for consumption. With intention, I slip spoonfuls of cardamon ice cream down Mom's throat...and pull off chunks of the almond croissant and encourage her lips to accept this nourishment. Mom's not doing much eating of late--three of four bites per meal, not enough for sustenance, so I am thrilled to see her attacking our booty with vigor. She even accepts the three strawberries I press into her mouth whole, mashing her teeth around their edges like a pro. There's none of the ground beef dribbling down her bib and none of the mashed potatoes left to compact into her gums rather than be swallowed. She's bitten, chewed and swallowed it all.

Just when we've finished our sugar mania, Tess, the nurse-in-charge tonight, walks into our room and wants to do a "progress" assessment, to determine Mom's continued eligibility for Medicare. I am immediately concerned--much depends on Mom's continued viability as a Medicare patient at Mirabella. My brother and I are worried, knowing how political these "progress" reports can be. We want Mom here as long as possible under Medicare coverage--we want to maximize her recovery before she returns home.

"Where are you?" Tess begins. "In a hospital in Sun Valley," Mom answers quickly, like this is something she's been thinking about all along. (God, I'm thinking, this is going to be disastrous.)

"What year were you born?" Tess continues. "1924" (the correct answer) Mom fires back like this is something she says every day when in fact it's something she hasn't been able to remember for weeks. What month were you born?" "July," Mom answers with ease (another correct response). "What day?" And with this one, Mom stumbles, beginning with "fif..." but then finally coming out with "fifth" (correct answer).

As Mom is answering Tess, I feel frantic, worried that she will wander off into the sort of unreality she's been spinning as recent as this afternoon. As soon as I came through the door, Mom said--"who was that man who gave me the money?" While I wasn't there, Lorna informs me it was my brother, Eric, who supplied the $20.00 to be used as spending money at the market if Mom wanted. Or, Mom's statement to my sister-in-law earlier today that she hadn't heard from me, her daughter, in a "long time" when, in fact, I've been here 24/7 ever since her residency at Mirabella. Really, where do these ideas come from?

"How old are you Dorin?" And with this, Tess has finally stumped Mom; Mom can't think of her age no matter how many hints she is given. Mom gets that she's in her 80s (better than two days ago when she told the speech therapist, Lisa, that she's 98) but that's about as far as she gets.

"Do you know where you are Dorin?" Tess repeats? Again Mom gets this wrong, stating that she's in a "hospital" somewhere.

"But I'm really very lucky," she tells Tess spontaneously. "I'm very fortunate." And as she's saying this last comment, I can't help remembering what she'd said just a few days ago--about how hard this was here--too hard--and that really she didn't think she had the strength to carry on. Between now and two days ago, though, Mom seems to have had a change of heart. Lorna pipes in then and says she's been praying for Mom, claiming this as the reason for her "transformation." Who am I to say--if believing makes Mom happy, then I'm all for it.

When we get around to the part of the test where Tess examines mom's eating and swallowing, Mom opens her mouth wide and reports to Tess, with a certain amount of glee in her voice, that it was "us girls....feeding our faces...three little pigs" just before Tess came. Lorna and I look at each other and burst into laughter, not just at the image of us aging women as "girls" but also at the idea of Mom seeing our food consumption as a delightful gluttonous affair (though to be honest, it wasn't that bad caloric-wise--just an awful lot of sugar).

Inside her skin, there's still a little piece of Mom that survives, someone I recognize if I close my eyes to a slant, like Mom, and conjure without my sight.

"I'm very lucky," Mom says to Tess again, and I try to remember what that felt like to be grateful for what's been given, particularly when it's a long ways from anything good. Maybe peace is coming for Mom. Maybe there's time after all.

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

this is my mother

"Look at this one," I say to Mom. "Who do you think these people are?"

I'm holding a photo out to Mom, a black and white studio shot that looks like it was taken at the turn of the century.There are two rows of somber, over-dressed people, all of them from the "Nilsen family" (as the back of the photo reads) and all of them from Kumle, Norway. On the back is printed in neat penmanship the birth dates (from 1867-1884) for each of them as well as their names and when they immigrated to Seattle. So they must all be related, I think--three brothers and two sisters. The men look alike--small mustaches and effeminate heart-shaped faces. The women look grim; both have white pleated blouses cinched tight at the waist with their hair swept up into buns on the tops of their heads, as was the custom in 1900. The women, Nikoline and Rakel, pose in identical, uncomfortable stances--their hands looped behind their backs and their noses slightly raised to the photographer's lens. The men, Johannes, Engel and Magnus, look like near-carbon copies in their dark suits and white collars and hands placed in the same fashion on the tops of their thighs. Only their varied tie patternings suggest that these are three different men rather than one reproduced three times.

I can tell Mom recognizes the family name--Nilsen--but this is the extent of what she can say. I too can remember Nilsens at family reunions in the past, but I can't place the names in this photo or think of what their link is to my mother's families--the Leirens and the Andersons who immigrated from a small town on a fiord just outside Bergen.

Mom gestures and murmurs--her voice is still breathy, the air sucked right out of it. I have to lean in to hear what she might have to say about the Nilsens--I don't want to miss a word. We sit there for quite some time, me leaning in to her left side in my straight-backed institutional chair and Mom careening to the right, slumped in her wheelchair; I'm trying to follow the OT's suggestion that Mom can begin to learn to sit straight by having her company sit on her weaker side (so she can learn to straighten-up).

"Who are the Nilsen's?" I ask Mom again, not wanting to give up on this quite yet.

"Well...well...you know...from the old," and then her words peter out.

"What was that again Mom?" I ask, trying to practice patient listening--what Mom needs now to coax the words out of her mouth.

When she doesn't say anything more just then and instead moves her gaze to the floor rather than looking at the photo, I realize that I may have to give up on this.

The simple fact of Mom's lowered gaze fills me with fear, the kind that breaks a sweat and causes the heart to pump with unexpected abandon. I've waited too long, I say to myself. I've waited too long to ask these questions. Too long.

These past few years there's always been something else that needed doing--papers I needed to grade or meetings I needed to attend or food that needed to be shopped for--that prevented me from systematically talking Mom through her family photos. It's not that I haven't visited Mom--on the contrary, I'm a constant presence in her house. It's just that it takes time and patience to hunt through Mom's photos, as none of them are organized and, even before this stroke, Mom's speech has been circuitous and difficult to follow.

Now that Mom's so ill, I feel a strange compulsion to know all of her family background, even the trivia, because when Mom dies it will all die with her. She's the last of her generation from the old country. Who will know these stories then, who will keep my ancestors safe?

Here at the Mirabella, we've been looking at photos for over an hour...old ones of people I mostly don't recognize. Mom has boxes and boxes of pictures stacked in her bedroom closet; one of these boxes is at the Mirabella. When I opened the lid a bit ago I found two folders marked "genealogy"; I grabbed these at once, thinking answers might be found here. But when I opened their glossy bindings I found pieces of random paper--some of them interesting, some of them not. There are brochures after brochures from various genealogy organizations: The Minnesota History Center in Sandpoint, Idaho, The Dakota Territorial Museum in Yankton South Dakota, The American Family Immigration Center in New York City, The National Archives, Pacific Alaska Region, The Eastside Heritage Center. I'm surprised by how much time Mom has put into her genealogy project--something else I haven't known about my mother. And then the loose yellow legal pad pages filled with Mom's black penmanship--scrawling and difficult to read, even this long ago. Phone numbers, birth dates and death dates, and then name after name, some of them with lines drawn between them to indicate some kind of relationship. Some of these markings make sense to me but most of them are a puzzle, secrets that only Mom can decipher.The way her notes are scattered across the pages, with some "words" simply unintelligible suggests that Mom was having a difficult time gathering her thoughts--that the Alzheimer's was already present. "Anderson H536 Enter Roll 8 long" means nothing to me. Neither does--"M J 2 1 K5 40. Roll 346 him." Microfiche, I ask myself? And then what appears to be a web address--www.Jewisten.org/databases/E1018/Ellis.html. Mom doesn't even know how to turn on a computer, I think to myself with surprise, much less use a keyboard and find a website. And all of these numbers and symbols are wobbly, incontinent really, as they dribble across the page with different slants to the letters and many cross out lines and places where it looks like her pen might have sat too long on the face of the paper before moving on.

And then, finally something I do recognize--my grandfather Dida's arrival to the US in 1908 from Bergen and Berentina's arrival to North Dakota in 1912 where she stayed with her sister Sina for a bit before coming to meet and marry my grandfather in Seattle. Berentina stayed just long enough outside of Fargo on the farm to learn about her sister's rotting teeth, Sina's twelve children, the cruel and incessant toil of the farm, the harshness of the seasons, the absence of books and music and "culture," the incessant meals for the family and the farm crew six times a day. In short, Berentina learned how brutal this life was for women and knew immediately it wasn't for her. As an acclaimed chef and a woman of great beauty, she had more possibilities than this. (See the queenly photo of Berentina at the time of her mariage; the second photo is Dida in his sixties with Mom and her sister Marguerite...Mom's the beauty on the right).

Mom's sigh then comes to me, loudly, interrupts my soliloquy about my grandfather and grandmother. Her sigh reads--"I have lost patience with this." Or perhaps, worse yet, "I am bored or tired." But really, as it turns out, Mom is just anxious to move on, put these pictures back to safety in their box. Apparently, she doesn't believe I can protect them, keep them safe from harm. They're just too precious.

After this road block, I decide to shift Mom's attention to something else, something less precious, less complicated. So I haul out a stack of more recent photos--taken in the early 1990s. They are glossy and colorful, in contrast to the Nilsen drab. I turn the 4x6 snapshots over and try to discern the date...but all I can read is "Aug 3"--no year. Judging from the kind of hair I sport--long and wavy as opposed to shorter and curly--I can guess the date of our camping excursion. We've hiked up to the lakes above Goat Lake in North Central Idaho. It's a blue blue Idaho day and the sun looks hot, as Mom and I are in shirt sleeves despite the elevation, approximately 8700 feet. Mom's leaning uncomfortably against a large white boulder, one of those incongruous mammoth stones that are left behind as glaciers melt and moraine crumbles. There's no lake in sight because we are perched on the rise between Goat Lake and the higher, wilder lakes.

When I show Mom the photo, it takes ten second are so for her to see the glossy 4x6 because her lids remain shut.

"I can't see anything," she says with what sounds like a bit of fear.

And I remind her then with a smidgen of impatience, "If you open your eyes, Mom, you'll be able to see, even with the cataracts." Once her eyes open up to something more than a slit and focus on the picture of herself in the white boulder field, the most unexpected thing happens--Mom leans back her head and begins to howl. Just like a coyote. And I mean literally howl--"aroo....aroo....aroo....aroo," she screams with her chin jutting straight up in the air, despite the debility of her stroke. And for a moment I am so taken aback that all I can do is stare at her, at the strangeness of this. Instantly I remember the origins of this howl--a ritual of sorts: what she and I would let loose in our exuberance when we'd reach the summit of a day's climb. Something so sweet, knowing we'd earned it by the sweat of our skin.

"Aroo...aroo....aroo...aroo," she repeats again, even more loudly into the antiseptic institutional air.

And as I listen this time to her roar, I hear an echo, another howling song that's coming from this very room, from my own lips in fact.

"Aroo....aroo....aroo...aroo," I sing back to her, without even intending to do so. My lips just move by themselves and my head leans back in symbiosis with Mom's

When she hears me, Mom lowers her chin and opens her eyes to look directly at me. Our pupils connect just then, lock tight, and for the first time in a very long time I feel like this is my mother. My mother.

Together we explode into another plaintive yawl, another duet of a song, just like we did when she and I lived in an easier time, a time before there were reasons for she and I to disagree, to not understand each other.

So here we sit, two women in our separate chairs, letting our tongues sing together, our voices bend as one to an uncommon joy.

More than the meaning of happy.

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

laughing as memory

My mother hardly eats, I eat a lot. Well, maybe not that much, as I haven't noticed my pants getter tighter or my belly exploding over my belt...but "a lot" in comparison to Mom. While Mom's meals come to her every 4-5 hours because I've helped place an order the day before, mine have no such self-propulsion. Instead, I work with an empty refrigerator and no energy to go to the store and shop and then the reality that, even if I made it to the store, I'm not sure I could decide what to eat, what to buy. So, my meals consist of "snacks"--potent little bites of protein and carbohydrates.

There's something about entering Mom's building, the Mirabella, that bleeds my energy level--like when I give my keys to the valet and head for the elevator, chances are that when I reach the second floor, the Medical Center, there's going to be a migraine headache brooding in the base of my skull and a low glucose level that threatens to be debilitating. I've tried to stave this off by bringing little mini-meals with me--things I can easily eat while sitting on the edge of Mom's bed and carrying on a conversation with whoever--Mom's therapists, Mom's caregiver or Mom herself. So miniature egg salad sandwiches come sealed in cellophane and Ziploc bags and wedges of cheddar and Emmentaler cheese are safely stowed for emergency snacking. Reading what I've just written, you'd think I have a fetish about food, but really I'm just trying to find ways to make it through the day with Mom. The hours are long and all this sitting and observing and worrying takes stamina. This I know for sure.

Today was a mixed day--hysteria in the morning and calm good humor in the afternoon. It has been seven days since Mom has had a bowel movement...so the morning is spent trying to encourage this most natural operation to occur. Despite a mixture of prune juice and Milkamagnesia on Saturday (quite a potent cocktail) and Senna tablets on Sunday and Monday, nothing had emerged from Mom's large and small intestines. Scott, Mom's nurse practitioner, reasons that Mom may have what is called a "neurogenic bladder" where the nerves in the small intestine have been damaged by the stroke and hence do not function to encourage the body to dispose of waste. Or, it could just be the pain pills Mom is on--these can cause constipation, I am told. Really, I had no idea how many ways a "wet stroke" (brain bleed due to amyloid angiopathy) could impact the body's functioning. Walking and use of one's hands are just a part of the entire damage.

While Mom is writhing in pain over the plugged intestine, she's entered a world of her own, one where closed eye lids and tears are standard operating procedure. There's nothing reaching Mom--she's not in "good humor" as Lorna relates. By the time lunch comes, however--tuna sandwich on whole wheat--she's calmed down a bit but takes only a few bites. Fortunately, two massive bowel movements over the lunch hour do the trick.

It's an 85 degree day so after lunch I take Mom for a spin around the environs outside of Mirabella. Everything is new, because Mom still has no memory for our Sunday outing. I take her to the park adjacent to the Seattle Times building and today the fountain is on--a fascinating contraption made of rough-chiseled boulders and plunging water--the sound is both deafening and inviting. Around us is early rush hour traffic, cars in a hurry to be somewhere fast. The contrast is inevitable--Mom's inability to go anywhere and these cars that escape to the suburbs within minutes of downtown. We sit here for the longest time--no need to be back until Peggy sees Mom at 5:00. And we do just sit--Mom in her wheelchair and me resting my arms and upper body on the side-rails of her chair, wanting to be close in case Mom should decide to speak. I want the proximity, thinking that face distance apart might be close enough for Mom and me--close enough to keep me here, linked to what is left of my mom. So I cock my neck to the right, exposing my left ear to Mom's speaking self, and hope that I can hear well enough to decipher Mom's needs. We sit here in the quasi-silence, quasi because there is little that is truly silent about the city--trucks snagging their brakes, people hollering across the street, sirens waling off of Denny. Lots of urban noise....but it is a different kind of sound than Mirabella presents--louder but at the same time more vibrant, more reassuring of life. After all, isn't this all "normal"--all the noises that make up an ordinary work-a-day life? So, unlike the time Mom has spent for the last ten days, this glimpse into the "out-of-doors" suggests a life after this, a respite from the grim push and pull of death. Mom must be glad of this.

The longer we sit, the more we are required to gaze at what's really here--the Sumac trees shading the park, the cinder-gravel walkways that attract many a mid-day walker as they make there way between the Seattle Times and the parking across the street. We sit and take this in. I believe in stillness, absence of sound. Silence can be a good thing--forces me to re-orientate. Sitting here, it is impossible to not consider my own body as just a minor cog in the mechanism of life. I wonder then if Mom feels this too. I don't know how to ask her, as the ideas seems to amorphous, ephemeral. So I keep still and just think these thoughts, hoping for some kind of telepathy.

When we finally return to Mirabella, Mom seems ready for therapy--a long ways from where she was earlier this morning. Becky seems ready also, and gets right to the task of lessening Mom's shoulder tilt and the pronounced tone that is bending her neck to her right shoulder. She sits on the left side of Mom and reaches around her right side, placing her palm on the side of Mom's neck and head. I can see Becky's biceps working hard, as the pressure it takes to bend Mom's neck to the left is immense. We do this for at least five minutes....and when Becky releases Mom's neck, the transformation is miraculous: Mom is semi-sitting-up straight. It's the first time I've seen her look relatively "normal' since the stroke. Becky repeats this three times before moving on to the cones: the yellow, red and orange plastic cones that Mom is asked to move from her lap to Becky's hand and then back again. Oddly, when she's first asked, Mom actually uses her hands to reach for the cone. But then, after three repetitions, her "thinking self" reasserts itself. For Mom, her best activity occurs when she is not thinking or concentrating on a particular task and instead lets the instinctual self take over. My understanding is that this is the path of recovery from a strike--reminding the brain of new routes connecting the brain to familiar movements of the body. This seems at odds, in part, to the idea that Mom needs time to focus and concentrate on what she is doing, so I am not sure how to rectify these two extremes. In any event, Mom's intuitive, instinctual self is in tact....it's the other more intentional self who is at odds.

Mom is in good spirit, chatting away with Peggy about family vacations. Becky asks where Mom has traveled and Mom can't remember any of the Italian cities--not even Venice and Rome and Florence. I reveal a family secret to Becky, then--the story of Mom and I eating an entire "Torte della Nonna" on a trip to Florence. Nun's Torte, the English translation, is heavenly--a vanilla cream concoction with Italian pastry crust (all butter) and whole bleached almonds smothering the upper crust of the pie. Our favorite bakery off of the Pont Vechhio doesn't make this everyday, so one has to plan ahead; some days they will not sell us a slice and we are faced with the difficult decision to forgo our treat or immerse ourselves in a caloric OD.

All three of us giggle then, at the mention of this "sin"--an explosive, infectious sound that is hesitant to leave our circle of three. The prickled happy edges of our laughter draw looks from the other tenants in our therapy room--therapy is a serious matter, afterall. Mom's laugh, in particular, is sweetly resonant--hovers her lips as if she hasn't a care in the world, not in a hurry to be anywhere else but here. It lifts up the corners of Mom's mouth, blooming a smile I haven't seen in years.

This is what I want to remember about Mom.

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


When finally it's time to go, Lorna wheels Mom back to the center-line of her project, afraid that she may not be able to handle Mom by herself.