My Mother And I Have Adventures 1
I have to surrender to the fact that I will never stop talking and thinking about those few years when my mother was fading out. Everything about the experiences I had during those three years with her had a dream-like quality; or maybe it just seemed like a dream because it was something so rare and unexpected and something to be held onto.
My mother was always indoors once she was moved out of her own apartment. When she went to live at Concordia House in Mt. Lebanon she was functioning not so great, but she hadn’t touched bottom yet as far as the Alzheimers would bring her. So she stood at the windows and gazed outside, trying to catch even a sighting of a bird; there was a small family of deer that lived in the woods behind the building and when she saw them at dusk she was overjoyed.
This was heart-breaking. It hurt so bad. Privately I called her a bird in a cage.
Being outdoors was so important to her; gardening, going on cookouts and picnics, taking walks, all of these things were so meaningful to her and now, at the end, she was shut in. She tried “escaping” and ran outside at dusk; this is a phenomenon that goes along with Alzheimers. It has a funny name but I can’t remember it. It is a restlessness that comes when the sun begins to set. It may be called “sun-downing.”
I kept trying to think of things to make her happier. I bought her a pair of binoculars so she could see the birds.
But there is something to be said that is difficult to put into words. However I must be honest. I had a job I loved, working for the Devereux Foundation when we lived in Philadelphia. I worked with mentally challenged adults in their group homes. This involved caring for helpless men and women, down to the nastiest tasks that the work entailed. Helping with dressing, grooming, tying shoes, and yes, some were incontinent and wore Depends. After that, we had to round up our “individuals” and get them into the super-sized vans to transport them to their “day programs.” Some of these day programs were so awful, I can’t even try to describe them. The higher functioning people were fortunate to get into sheltered workshops. Those men and women were always bursting with pride on paydays! And most important–I loved all of them. I had patience with them, I laughed when goofy stuff happened with them, I loved taking them to see a movie or go to a flea market. I had no experience with this so I didn’t know but I had a natural talent to manage what was happening with them. I loved the work. I put in long hours without complaint. I wrote a short story about my experiences called Suffer The Little Children To Come Unto Me.
What does this have to do with my mother? The truth is that my mother was not her normal self anymore. The same questions and statements, over and over again…there was something wrong with her that made it difficult for most people to spend any real time with her. Now I have to figure out a way to say this. I’ll put it this way; I have a God-given ability to cope with this kind of situation. I was able to spend full days with my mother while others could only spend several hours and then have to leave. I think my relatives were surprised at this; in fact I know they were.
So, that being said, I made it a mission to think of unusual things to do when I went to Pittsburgh.
lgmwriting 