Alzheimer's

I am an evil child. All of our family has birthdays in either April or May, and Mother's 76th birthday was May 26. The date fell on Memorial Day this year, so I had the day off. But I didn't go to see her. I didn't get a card in the mail. I felt wretched.

May 11 was Mother's Day this year. May 11 is also my birthday. On Mother's Day in 1959 my father took a picture of my mother sitting on the stone wall in front of our Rhode Island home. She was perched as gracefully as someone about to give birth could be, with a lovely backdrop of yellow forsythia. Later that day the labor pains began and she went to Kent County Memorial Hospital for the birth of her first child. At 2 am on Monday morning, her labored breathing gave way to my first breath.

I don't know why I thought it might get easier. It seemed like maybe I would get used to some of the routine or accept her condition or something. But it only seems harder.

I wasn't planning to visit. The weekend was very busy with every day already including four or five hours of driving. It would have been my only day at home. But in my bedroom is a picture of Mother from her college days. Her bright, beautiful face smiles down on me from atop my dresser. Here she is in 1954.

Ecclesiastes 3:1 “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.’”

I am again behind in my postings. It's been busy, but as I think I've said before, it becomes harder and harder to write. Emotionally it pulls everything out of me to go back into the experience, even if it hasn't been a particularly interesting visit. But I guess that's what therapy is about, and that's what this blog is for me.

Mother has always loved animals--she gave that to me--and I'm guessing that, for her, this day somewhere in the late 1930's was a good day. When I arrived for my second visit, one of the aides greeted me, as she was just getting Mother up from the lunch table. "She's having a good day," the aide said, "she fed herself." I swallowed hard.
 

It has been way too long since I last visited my mother. I did visit once since my last post, but I find it harder and harder to re-live the visits in my posting. I read to her from the Bible on my last visit. No sign of recognition. I did the 23rd Psalm, which she recited from memory at her father's funeral in 2004. Nothing.

I haven't been as delinquent a daughter as my lack of recent postings would indicate. I've been up to The Birches 5-6 times since my last post, but with changing jobs, lifestyles, and moving, I just haven't written about it.

In that time, the visits started very bad and then got better. The earliest visit was a couple of weeks before Easter. I found Mother in the activity room, which was crowded with both residents and relatives as a guest performer led the residents in some singing and handed out rhythm instruments.

Finally, in keeping with the title of this blog, I visited on a Monday!

I arrived mid-afternoon and Mother was seated at a table in the dining room. I came in and said hello. She made no response. I gave her a kiss and she looked at me with a blank look. I sat down at the table, glad no one was there to ask who this was that was visiting. One woman was across from her, but soon she had a visitor and they moved to another table.