Dreaming
Today I had my weekly video chat with my mother, who is in a nursing home in another state. Because of the distance, I could not see her as often as I’d have liked. But since the pandemic sank its teeth into the planet, I see her once a week. Even if it isn’t in person, it still helps me, though she surely does not remember any of these visits.
Dementia’s a funny thing. It has turned my mother from a brilliant, proud, whimsical, well-read woman into a silent, biddable lamb. I do miss the way she was, and I sometimes catch myself thinking that when she’s better again, we’ll laugh about all the adventures she had when she was sick. It is with a lightning bolt to the heart that I remember: she is not going to get better again. This is a one-way slow train to oblivion and eventual death by the most ignominious of means.
She doesn’t carry her end of the conversation anymore. I pretty much do a monologue, and I try to give her the social cues she needs for her reactions. Most of the time I don’t get anything back from her but the occasional smile and that rare and musical giggle. So I have begun to read to her. She has loved non-fiction all of her life, with a focus on biographies. There are few of these on my shelves, but from such of hers as I kept, I read excerpts to her until either I go hoarse or we both get bored. I never know how much of it she really understands but I have to trust that perhaps she finds my voice soothing and a little familiar.
Today she fell asleep soon after I began to read a biography of illustrator Edward Gorey. I didn’t mind at all. I just kept reading, because Edward Gorey was an intelligent and creative man and one of my earliest influences on my own illustration work.
When I tired of the sound of my own voice, I stopped and zoomed in on the phone screen to see if she really was asleep. She lay, eyes closed, hands twitching just a little, and clearly already in the REM stage. As I watched her I let the pain of the loss of her beautiful mind flow over me, and I wondered idly what she was dreaming about. I hoped it was something lovely, perhaps a happy memory from her own childhood.
Alzheimer’s disease is cruel, but it saves the most pain for those around the patient, for they are the ones who remember how it used to be. The patient herself may have a temporary sense that something just isn’t right; maybe she becomes angry or sad about it. But by the end, she will be so lost and unaware that nothing will hurt her anymore, no matter the circumstances.
There is no avoidance of the chronic, devastating wound this terrible disease leaves behind.
