Tag: family

Alzheimer's · Faith

Knowing My Name

Sally7 Comments
When Maggie can’t find her fish, she carries a different toy.

“You’re the lady with the dog,” a woman said to me at church the other day.

“The dog with the fish?”  I responded, half-questioning, half completing her sentence.

“That’s right,” she said excitedly.

Our dog is famous around Greene.  She carries a toy, usually a fish, with her on walks.  At Christmas, she carries a Santa.

And now I’m known as the lady with the dog with the fish.  All my life I’ve been identified by others — Dr. Pollock’s daughter, Bud’s wife, Philip’s (or Owen’s or Sam’s or Helen’s or Jacob’s or Karl’s or Mary’s or Laurel’s) mother.  It’s really okay — I kind of like being in the background.

The outdoor high ropes course at the Clark Sports Center in Cooperstown.

Yesterday, Mary did an outdoor high ropes course.  She said, “There were two rules.  The first was that you couldn’t call anyone ‘Hey, you’ so we had to learn everyone’s names.  If we couldn’t remember their name, we were supposed to ask them to tell us again because it’s disrespectful not to try to learn someone’s name.”

“What was the second rule?” I asked.

“I don’t remember,” she said.

When we visited my mother at the Manor, she was still in bed.  It was 11 AM.

“She’s being a stinker,” the nurse told us.

“Hi, Mom,” I said as I entered her room.

She turned and looked at me.  “Oh, hi,” she said.

“Are you going to get up today?” I asked.

“Not yet,” she replied.

“Do you know who I am?” I asked.

“Yes, I know who you are.”  She smiled at me.

“Okay, then,”  I challenged, “who am I?”

“You’re Sally.”

What a sweet little pleasure to realize that she still knows my name!

She knows my name.  I’m not the lady with the dog, or the one with a bunch of kids.  She knows my name.

Alzheimer's

“They were young once. They fell in love…”

Sally7 Comments

A number of years ago, I was able to accompany my father on his trip to his hometown.  He was meeting with his siblings and their spouses to inter my grandparents’ remains.  My mother was planning to go with him, but got sick just before they were supposed to leave.  I filled in for her.

I had no idea what a special trip that would turn out to be.  We went to the cemetery and sat on a little knoll while my father and his brother and sister reminisced about their parents.  They each shared memories of how their parents had made their house a home.  They talked about my grandmother making elaborate Halloween costumes for them, her competitive side coming out, so that they could win the town’s contest.  They talked about their cousins and their pets and their school and their growing up years.  Then my uncle said something which I will never forget.

He said, “They were young once.  They fell in love.  They had dreams and passions just like we do.”

I don’t know why that was so profound, but it hit me squarely in the heart.

My grandparents were old the whole time I knew them.  My grandmother had Alzheimer’s.  She smoked and drank martinis.  I have seen her wedding picture and she was once beautiful.

My grandfather had Guillain-Barre syndrome in the late 70’s or early 80’s, I think. (Perhaps one of my siblings has a better memory for these details.)  It transformed him from the robust, fun Grampa that I loved to go see, to a weak man confined to a wheelchair.  I have wonderful earlier memories of him throwing the Hollywood brick (it was made of foam) at us, and tricking us every time with it.  In fact, I think we all (the grandchildren) wanted that brick when they were emptying out the apartment, but no one seems to know where it went.

Unfortunately, my mind doesn’t always go back to good memories.  Why these memories?  My grandfather weeping in a wheelchair when I came to visit when I was pregnant with Philip.  My grandmother smoking and sniping.

“They were young once.  They fell in love…”  I chose, then and there, to replace my memories with happier ones.

Yesterday, I caught a little glimpse of that with my mother.  We were sitting at the table, with a full plate of marmalade sandwiches.  She had made ten or so before I got there — for the others.  She looked up at a window ledge, and asked my father, “What’s in that vase?”

Now, you need to know that my mother has always a way with plants.  Her home was filled with them.  She had the most beautiful Christmas cactus I have ever seen.  She would take little pieces of the Christmas cactus, stick them in a cup of water, wait for them to send out little roots and then move them to pots.  She started so many plants that way.  And the house is still littered with pieces of Christmas cactus stuck in water.  That’s what was in the vase.

My father looked up at the milk-glass vase with the sad little piece of Christmas cactus drooping over the edge. “Well, that’s a genie in a bottle,” he said.  “If you rub it, he’ll come out and grant your wish.”

My mother giggled like a schoolgirl.  She looked at him and smiled.

When he left the room, she said, “I’m so lucky I found him.”

Oh, Mom, you have no idea.

“They were young once.  They fell in love…”  She was back to that point in her life.  I want to remember her that way.

********************************************

This picture is from Christmas 1981.  I chose it because it’s one of the few pictures I have of my grandparents.  That’s them in the front row.  I love the fact that my grandmother reached over and put her hand on my grandfather.  They were in love still.

Alzheimer's

The Twilight Zone

Sally4 Comments

(This was originally published on Facebook on July 9, 2010)

I think Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone, must have had some experience with a person suffering from Alzheimer’s. Some days, here in Cooperstown, that’s all I can think about – The Twilight Zone.

My mother is trapped in a very strange episode of The Twilight Zone. She is time-travelling from decade to decade, and it’s difficult to figure out where she is. She thinks she is 25 years old, but her face in the mirror tells another story. It must be frightening. She thinks she has a date to go to a dance, but her date never shows up. An old man claiming to be her husband does.

When she wakes the next day, she’s in a new place. Her husband is at work (he’s been retired for 11 years, but is at a meeting). The red barn across the street looks just like the barn that was across the street from their house (it is the red barn that is across the street from their house). “Whose car is that in that in the driveway? I need to borrow it,” she says, but it’s my car and I won’t let her.

Two days ago she was very worried about me. I was 6 years old and lost. I’m here with her; I’m not lost; I’m 50. Something doesn’t make sense, but she can’t figure out what it is. We move on.

The only constant in this Twilight Zone episode is orange marmalade. Orange marmalade is served at every meal – on hot dogs, on sandwiches, you name it. Orange marmalade – I really can’t figure it out. But I think I understand now what they’re talking about on the Food Channel when they refer to comfort foods. They’re talking about orange marmalade.

I think it has always been one of my fears that I will be trapped in The Twilight Zone. It was always such a scary show to me, because there would be that twist at the end – like M. Night Shyamalan had in The Sixth Sense. Reality isn’t what we’ve been led to believe that it is. For my mother, the twist doesn’t come at the end; it comes so often that it is dizzying. Another twist and another twist.

I want to cry.

I’ll have some orange marmalade instead.