Tag: caregiving

Posted on

Soul Cleanse, Act One

Part One of a Three-Part Series
There’s no iced tea in the fridge. No beach towels on the clothesline, only weatherworn clothespins laden with dew. My mother’s favorite chair sits empty, a soup-stained throne awaiting its queen.

She’s not coming back.

I’m here for a month, at the island farmhouse of my childhood, with its fifty years of scrapbooks and hat collections, colored pencils and muffin tins. Room by room, I flit, pruning the weeds of a once brilliant mind. Armed with plastic totes, a fresh box of contractor trash bags, toilet cleaner and my pink Do it Herself toolbox, I’m cleansing the soul of this house.

I find multitudes of notes scrawled in her once-meticulous handwriting: “Church Sunday and Wednesday.” Her name. My cellphone number taped to every doorway. Baskets. Yankee magazines piled high. Broken pens. Thirteen spiral-bound notebooks, filled with sketches and daily observations.

I’m exhausted. just looking at it.

Posted on

Midnight Caller

My mother wants a phone. “If I only had a communication device,” she laments. It’s become her daily mantra.

She misses grasping the receiver, hearing a familiar voice on the other end. For years, the landline was her lifeline. It kept her company when she stopped driving. It reassured her I was alive. She rehearsed conversations, cleverly scripted to prove she was normal while Alzheimer’s stripped away her identity.

She struggles to come up with the word, but she remembers the comfort a phone represents. Besides church, it’s the only thing I wish she’d forget.

I hate phones. Robocalls aside, I prefer my conversations face-to-face. Even though I visit her every day, she forgets. My efforts to refocus have failed; I finally caved.

And so, the dementia-friendly phone patiently waits, ready to unleash fear-laden midnight calls upon a sleeping daughter.

Posted on

Excited Utterance

We’re in CVS, picking up lipstick and Fig Newtons and suddenly my mother shouts: “HOW MANY DAYS DO I HAVE LEFT?” Her voice is piercing, frightened, all caps.

It wasn’t her first startling outburst. She’s living an unfiltered life lately: half-disrobing in a parking lot; loudly commenting, mid-sermon, on how cold church is. In her pre-dementia days, she was outspoken, airing her conservative politics at the island general store where she’d shopped for decades. When Alzheimer’s took root, she withdrew from the community, aware she was—as she put it—“less than her brilliant self.”

I was alarmed at first, at this recent return to speaking her mind. Yet, last week when she shouted, “WHAT SHOULD WE DO RIGHT NOW?” the pastor never missed a beat of his sermon. I held her hand and, like everything else these days, rolled with it.