The Next to Last Goodbye

Like all thieves, dementia does not discriminate.  Akin to a plague, it steals from anyone unlucky enough to come in contact with it.  That it is stealing my mother's mental faculties is just one aspect of the disease.  It also has robbed her of a future, an ability to live independently, the opportunity to enjoy a quality of life in her retirement.

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In a cruel joke of the universe dementia has robbed my mother of one of her true loves:  language.  My mother taught English in junior and senior high school for 35 years.  She loved the written word.  These days she can no longer write the language she finds so beautiful, and I suspect that soon she will no longer be able to read it.  Sometimes I wince when I see her determination to articulate a word that has escaped her.

Cooking was another highlight of my mother's early retirement, as she adored recipes and had stacks of cookbooks and clippings everywhere.  When visiting, she always had at least one recipe for us to make together, and my mother and I would dance our little kitchen dance, she directing me as I chopped the vegetables while she whisked a sauce; I took for granted her command of her kitchen and its utensils.

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So dementia has stolen from me, too.  I will never get to see my elderly mother enjoy an afternoon puttering in her garden.  I can no longer smirk at the silly messages about aging she wrote in our birthday cards; she can't even address an envelope anymore.   She finds the telephone too confusing to use.

More than anything, dementia has robbed me of finding a common ground with my mom.   I can sympathize with her situation but I can't really empathize.  I feel as though she is in prison and I'm visiting her:  we can see each other through the glass, hear each other's voices, but when we're done talking she goes back into her cell (dementia) and I go back outside to the "real" world; I can't follow her nor can she accompany me.  It's like living in a really bad dream.

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My mom moved to an assisted living facility this weekend.  It was completely her decision.  She found this place near her sister's house and decided to make the move before she experienced any further loss of her faculties.  In a way, she made this next stage of her life easy on us, freeing us from having to decide to "put her in a home."   Of course we completely support her choice as her new apartment still gives her a measure of independence albeit within a supervised community.

She lives five hours away from me now.  She is gone from my daily life, probably for forever.  And my grief has been kick-started.  She will not get better, she will get worse.  Such is the nature of this disease; dementia can be managed but not cured.  We are all powerless in it's wake.

Mother's Day 2011