The loss of artiface

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.