Our Alternate World

A few days after Thanksgiving my mother, who was already deep into the throes of dementia, fell and cracked her pelvic bone and broke a bone in her elbow. She is now in a nursing home. The day after Christmas we sat in the day room with an episode of Bonanza playing on the television with Mom’s withered self slumped in her wheelchair at a table, with me beside her and a plate of food between us. Her glasses were missing. A bib was tied around her neck. She ignored what was once her favorite TV program and stared blankly at something outside the window. I scooped up a spoonful of the pureed spaghetti and put in front my mother’s lips. “Mom, open up.”

She opened her lips slightly and I put the tip of the spoon in her mouth. She got a tiny portion of spaghetti on her tongue. “Open wider,” I said. She opened wider and I slid the spoon into her mouth and she swallowed. “You like it?” I asked.

She looked at me, then at the plate. Eventually, she ate all the spaghetti and drank a half glass of tea through a straw. After a few spoonfuls of pudding she refused to eat anything else. She dozed off for while, then lifted her head and looked at me with empty eyes, then looked around the room. “Let’s go,” she said.

“Where do you want to go?”

“My Daddy.”

“He’s not here.” Grandpa Messer died in 1958 when I was eight years old. “You want to go down and see the Christmas tree?” No response. “Want to go back to your room?” No response.

I stood up and turned her wheelchair away from the table and pointed her toward the door to the hallway. “Let’s go,” I said.  “Lead the way.” Using her feet, she maneuvered the wheelchair into the hallway and stopped. “Mom, which way do you want to go?” No response.

I pointed the wheelchair down the hall toward her room.  At the intersection where she needed to make a right turn to her room, she wheeled the chair straight through the threshold of another client’s room. I grabbed the chair, pulled her back and parked her beside the nurse’s station.  I didn’t want to leave her alone in her room. I sat beside her in the hall for a few minutes and we had a one-way conversation – me telling her about Max and Sarah. Then I kissed her, said good-bye and walked away. About halfway down the hall, I turned to see what she was doing.  She was standing up, looking at me. “Mom,” I called and started toward her, but a nurse got to her and sat her back in the wheelchair. I stepped back to her and kneeled down. “Mom, I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Okay,” she said.

I left.

Life has its own curriculum to teach us things we rarely learn intentionally: how to feed an adult who cannot or will not feed herself; the reality of dementia; the reality of becoming old and staring at this life’s exit. But what do we take away from these difficult lessons? If learning means altering our understanding of the world, what is the altered understanding?

Learning is not always a pleasant thing. Sometimes we don’t know what we know until knowing is churned by chaos. I thought I knew the meaning of dementia.  But I didn’t until I encountered my mother’s unknowing eyes, until I had to decipher her garbled language that revealed that her present was the past. This unpleasantness, this chaos drove me with her into the past, browsing her high school yearbooks and our family photo albums, remembering her has the flirtatious young woman standing on her toes to kiss the young man who would become my father, remembering her as a grade mother who brought cupcakes to school for a Valentines party, remembering her as the dogged monitor of the weather who insisted we could not play whiffle ball until the rain had stopped, until the last piddling drop of water had been squeezed from that summer afternoon cloud, remembering her as too meek to administer a paddling, but conniving enough to threaten me with “wait ‘til your father gets home”,  remembering her as a woman afraid of snakes and water, remembering her as a woman brave enough to step between my father and my jerk-of-a-teenage-self when Dad had me by my collar ready to smack my back-talking mouth.  Life is here and now until it is the past.

For now, we exist briefly together as Mother contrarily sits at the exit, only the shadow of herself. Chaos reigns, testing our capacity for learning and loving. Learning can be painful. Loving can be challenging for the mind and the emotions.

Here is a glimpse of wisdom that seems relevant:

From 1 Corinthians 13

Where there is knowledge, it will pass away. ⁹ For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰ but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears . . . ¹² For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.¹³ And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.