It has been months since I last wrote. In the last post I wrote that I was staying with my Mom during this pandemic for two weeks. The original intention had been 4 days. The circumstances changed in her care and I stayed extra. In the end, I stayed 2.5 months. Two and a half glorious months with my Mom. What a gift. Because of the pandemic. Because of the pandemic, all of my work went online. I literally worked from anywhere: the bedroom, the garage, my car. And then I came back into the room with my Mom.
Month by month, sometimes day by day, she is slipping away. I watched my Mom with her mother, as Grandma shifted into dimentia. Grandma Eulia used to keep a daily diary. She wrote a good paragraph each day. And then, there would be the cryptic entry, like, “Too many children around my legs.” She had no children who visited her. She had no visitors, except her daughters and grandpa. Slowly, those informative paragraphs all turned to sentence fragments, into more cryptic nonesence, into no record at all. When grandpa fell and broke his arm, his daughters quickly assembled to have grandma put into nursing care. Grandpa was grumpy about it because he was taking care of her. He loved her. He didn’t want to be without her. But he knew.
And in that brightly lit place of sensory stimulation and good care, she swiftly slid into full dementia. With a smile on her face, and a chuckle in her throat. She didn’t know any of us, but my Mom would play the piano and grandma would sing the hymns of her life. She wheeled herself to the exits because she had bible school to go to. She never knew us again.
I watched my Mom lose her mother. I saw the pain in not being known. I watched as Mom became not a daughter but a nice woman who visited, and grandma was glad to see. My mother will say that she grieved the loss of her mother long before the death of her mother.
Now it is my turn.
She, too, keeps a smile on her face and chuckle in her throat. We are able to keep her in her home, her wishes, because one of us visits daily, and my niece is her caregiver. We have cameras everywhere, and we check many times a day. Most often, we find her sitting in her recliner, laughing at PBS kids. During an upcoming vote, we talked about how she wanted to vote. Explained both sides. Then she looked at me and said, “You seem to know me well. How do you think I would vote?” I do know my mother well. I’ve paid attention. So I told her exactly how she would vote and why. She was satisfied with that answer and we sent the vote in. My Mom can’t recall many things, but she knows her beloved people. I have not yet lost my Mom, and I am so busy keeping up with her changes that I don’t have time to look back. New Normal is not just the mantra of the pandemic, it is the mantra of Mom’s life.
With tender love,
Amy