When you look into the eyes of an Alzheimer sufferer, what do you see?
When that victim is your mother, what do you read into her expression? Do you occasionally see the "Mom" from your childhood? Do you see the lost old lady looking for help? Or, do you see the sweet young thing your father married 55 years ago and wonder "did I really every know my mother?"
I see them all every time I visit Mom. Yes, a lot of it is painful, but there is also a whole side of her that, as a parent, her child never saw; and now it's out there. And even as someone who cares deeply about her, a part of me is thankful for these unwitting insights.
The visiting time is long…competing with that amazing flap on her walker or the way the circular floor drains in the nursing home spiral down the hall, or a mis-placed slipper on the desk at the nursing station are all challenges that life does not well prepare you to deal with…so a half an hour seems like half a day.
I want to scream "I'm here, Mom, deal with me!": Yet, I know she won't; I know she can't.
My mother is now eight years into a diagnosis that has an average survival rate of seven. Never a large woman, she has shrunk to a size I never could have imagined. It is a terrible thing to look into the faces of a room full of elderly women hoping you might recognize the one who gave birth to you, and fearing you might not. But that's the fear that grips me with every visit.
On some levels, we have become much closer over the past few years. There is no longer any artifice on my part, she made it quite clear several years ago that artifice is one of the first things that is lost to this disease.
Instead, there is an honesty and warmth to our relationship that hasn't existed for close to fifty years. And that, if anything might be just the compensation I seek.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
Shutting down the old girl
Perhaps the most melancholy ritual of November is shutting down the old girl on Pretty Mary Lake.
The old girl is a late 19th century, five bedroom farmhouse in which our family has spent much of three generations of summers. Lest you get the wrong idea, this was not built as the county seat of some member of the landed gentry of centuries past. It was built by a farmer and forester as the best he could afford; the house is narrow, and the rooms are small. There is no insulation and the plaster in places is being supported largely by layers of wallpaper and paint. No central heating; though our little Irish wood stove, "Reggie", manages to keep the kitchen warm well into the fall and, given a couple days, will take the chill off the rest of the house.
It does, however sit on an acre-plus of lawn in the midst of a forest, and has a screened verandah that stretches across three of its faces. It features several hundred feet of lake frontage as its longest boundary. It is natural and wild, has stands of pine so large that two men cannot touch hands while hugging them and marshy sink holes so deep that generations of children have been warned off with stories of tractors disappearing into their depths.
However, one shouldn't be taken in by the interpretive signage at nearby Kejimkujik National Park, which talks about local farms being built on the fertile south side of moraines formed by advancing glaciers. Ours was built on the south side of a moraine that passes quickly through shale flour into swamp.
Every November, when evening temperatures begin to dip below zero, the plumbing must be drained, screen doors--and there are four--replaced with plank storm doors, all paint, boxed and canned goods packed into the car, the refrigerator emptied, dahlias dug and any other remnants of a wanton summer cleared away.
If the weather is nice around mid-month, shut-down can become the occasion for one last spell of rural idyll. Twenty acres of forest, marsh and lake shore to be checked, a city dog who revels in the freedom of the country and around every turn of every path the reminder of past wonderful times.
If schedules come together, a friend or family member might join me for part of the visit, especially if the weather forecast is promising--though two out of the last four years we have managed to get caught in unpredicted early fall snowstorms, so most tend to be a bit wary about accompanying me.
While I work away at tidying the yard, neighbours pull in--or merely wave as they speed by on the dirt road out front--and I catch up on all the news since the last time I was around. I read final copies of the Bridgewater Bulletin and Liverpool Advance, have pleasant chats with Suzie at the local corner store and stop by the hardware store and gas station just to demonstrate that we are still around and still part of the local economy.
But as each hour passes, I get closer to that final act of draining the plumbing, locking the door and driving away. I write in the journal we have kept for almost 40 years, read about the joy of opening the place up each past spring and the melancholy of closing it down each fall.
Finally, I walk through the house, checking the windows and lights. As I pull the kitchen door shut and firmly click the padlock, I might catch sight of one last lone bat picking off insects unfortunate enough to have been awakened by the warm afternoon sun or evidence of a bear having visited the apple trees overnight. I smile and sigh, get in my car and drive away.
The old girl is a late 19th century, five bedroom farmhouse in which our family has spent much of three generations of summers. Lest you get the wrong idea, this was not built as the county seat of some member of the landed gentry of centuries past. It was built by a farmer and forester as the best he could afford; the house is narrow, and the rooms are small. There is no insulation and the plaster in places is being supported largely by layers of wallpaper and paint. No central heating; though our little Irish wood stove, "Reggie", manages to keep the kitchen warm well into the fall and, given a couple days, will take the chill off the rest of the house.
It does, however sit on an acre-plus of lawn in the midst of a forest, and has a screened verandah that stretches across three of its faces. It features several hundred feet of lake frontage as its longest boundary. It is natural and wild, has stands of pine so large that two men cannot touch hands while hugging them and marshy sink holes so deep that generations of children have been warned off with stories of tractors disappearing into their depths.
However, one shouldn't be taken in by the interpretive signage at nearby Kejimkujik National Park, which talks about local farms being built on the fertile south side of moraines formed by advancing glaciers. Ours was built on the south side of a moraine that passes quickly through shale flour into swamp.
Every November, when evening temperatures begin to dip below zero, the plumbing must be drained, screen doors--and there are four--replaced with plank storm doors, all paint, boxed and canned goods packed into the car, the refrigerator emptied, dahlias dug and any other remnants of a wanton summer cleared away.
If the weather is nice around mid-month, shut-down can become the occasion for one last spell of rural idyll. Twenty acres of forest, marsh and lake shore to be checked, a city dog who revels in the freedom of the country and around every turn of every path the reminder of past wonderful times.
If schedules come together, a friend or family member might join me for part of the visit, especially if the weather forecast is promising--though two out of the last four years we have managed to get caught in unpredicted early fall snowstorms, so most tend to be a bit wary about accompanying me.
While I work away at tidying the yard, neighbours pull in--or merely wave as they speed by on the dirt road out front--and I catch up on all the news since the last time I was around. I read final copies of the Bridgewater Bulletin and Liverpool Advance, have pleasant chats with Suzie at the local corner store and stop by the hardware store and gas station just to demonstrate that we are still around and still part of the local economy.
But as each hour passes, I get closer to that final act of draining the plumbing, locking the door and driving away. I write in the journal we have kept for almost 40 years, read about the joy of opening the place up each past spring and the melancholy of closing it down each fall.
Finally, I walk through the house, checking the windows and lights. As I pull the kitchen door shut and firmly click the padlock, I might catch sight of one last lone bat picking off insects unfortunate enough to have been awakened by the warm afternoon sun or evidence of a bear having visited the apple trees overnight. I smile and sigh, get in my car and drive away.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
When H1N1 crashes your retirement party
I left the office building in which I had spent the best part of 32 years of my life Friday. I reached the parking lot and bent double, wracked in a coughing spasm that re-awakened my bruised ribs from a fall three weeks earlier; straining to breathe, the sweat rushing to my face, the bile rising in my throat, the tears springing unwillingly to my eyes.
Not an emotional response...although I was prepared for one...but a physical admission that I was sick; that despite my willingness to give it one more try, one last day, my body was telling me what my brain already knew. Elvis truly had left the building.
My body, or at least my unconscious, seemed to intuit this a day earlier. Thursday I awoke feeling that my oft-abused lungs had been filled with Jello overnight. Okay, a loose cough but still juicy. By the time I made it out of the shower, it was obvious that the couch was as far as I would journey that day. I just had no energy. And I needed some energy to drag myself in for the final luncheon, the congratulations, the best wishes, the hugs the following day.
So Friday, I went off to my last day in the mines, trying not to cough on any co-workers and quietly blaming the person in the office next to me for sharing her cold. And I largely carried it off..."no, no, it's not H1N1, merely so-and-so's cold..."
Friday evening, family and friends ganged up on me.
"Your eyes are red and puffy. Your skin is hot to the touch. You appear muddled. You're not well, are you?"
No, it didn't take a flu clinic to tell me (what are friends for?) that on this day of all days on which I wanted to be in top form--to be at my best--I ended up feeling as sick as I had in a decade.
The mental health experts say there are a very few things that stress you more than these few life events--the birth of a child, getting married, the death of a child or partner, or retiring from a long career. What my conscious brain had rejected, my unconscious brain had proven with symbolism and physicality that could not be ignored. Damn brain! It had robbed me of my ability to sail smoothly through a final stressful situation; to laugh off, one last time, the pressures in the face of which I had made a career of remaining unflappable.
Gee, I know this to be true...because the boss, even calling me "friend", told my co-workers this in his speech. And yet, all the while, that finely honed social conscience that had so carefully guided my every action through three decades, was screaming "Are you nuts? Are you exposing those who you love and admire, who carry forward your life's work, to the much-hyped and much-dreaded swine flu?"
In retrospect, the answer--to my shame--appears to be "yes". So with my thank you cards will go an apology. Too late, perhaps, but it just proves I was more human than I, or my boss and co-workers were prepared to admit.
Not the send-off we had planned, but I am content to live with this little irony that convoluted my last day at work, and accept it as one more proof that it was time to go.
Not an emotional response...although I was prepared for one...but a physical admission that I was sick; that despite my willingness to give it one more try, one last day, my body was telling me what my brain already knew. Elvis truly had left the building.
My body, or at least my unconscious, seemed to intuit this a day earlier. Thursday I awoke feeling that my oft-abused lungs had been filled with Jello overnight. Okay, a loose cough but still juicy. By the time I made it out of the shower, it was obvious that the couch was as far as I would journey that day. I just had no energy. And I needed some energy to drag myself in for the final luncheon, the congratulations, the best wishes, the hugs the following day.
So Friday, I went off to my last day in the mines, trying not to cough on any co-workers and quietly blaming the person in the office next to me for sharing her cold. And I largely carried it off..."no, no, it's not H1N1, merely so-and-so's cold..."
Friday evening, family and friends ganged up on me.
"Your eyes are red and puffy. Your skin is hot to the touch. You appear muddled. You're not well, are you?"
No, it didn't take a flu clinic to tell me (what are friends for?) that on this day of all days on which I wanted to be in top form--to be at my best--I ended up feeling as sick as I had in a decade.
The mental health experts say there are a very few things that stress you more than these few life events--the birth of a child, getting married, the death of a child or partner, or retiring from a long career. What my conscious brain had rejected, my unconscious brain had proven with symbolism and physicality that could not be ignored. Damn brain! It had robbed me of my ability to sail smoothly through a final stressful situation; to laugh off, one last time, the pressures in the face of which I had made a career of remaining unflappable.
Gee, I know this to be true...because the boss, even calling me "friend", told my co-workers this in his speech. And yet, all the while, that finely honed social conscience that had so carefully guided my every action through three decades, was screaming "Are you nuts? Are you exposing those who you love and admire, who carry forward your life's work, to the much-hyped and much-dreaded swine flu?"
In retrospect, the answer--to my shame--appears to be "yes". So with my thank you cards will go an apology. Too late, perhaps, but it just proves I was more human than I, or my boss and co-workers were prepared to admit.
Not the send-off we had planned, but I am content to live with this little irony that convoluted my last day at work, and accept it as one more proof that it was time to go.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
