“I don’t want to live with this,” read a note we found afterward. “Just let me die.”
At the time he wrote the note, Dad had recently been diagnosed with cognitive impairment, often a precursor to Alzheimer’s; years earlier, his uncle had suffered from what was then called “senile dementia.”
Sometimes dementia comes barging in the front door; other times, more stealthily, it comes tip-toeing in the back. My mom’s Alzheimer’s came in through the back end of things, because it involved picking her up for a potentially life-saving colonoscopy, and if anything signifies the back end of things, it’s a colonoscopy! I told her I’d leave my house at 8 a.m. to pick her up, but she called me at 8 p.m. the night before, asking why I hadn’t called. This episode was the conduit for her moving in with my husband and me. She stayed here for her remaining five years.
Every morning, my grandparents would make breakfast, go for a walk, and drive to our house for lunch. In the afternoon, Grandfather watched football while Grandmother read magazines or worked in the garden. She planned to grow tomatoes once the spring rolled around.
She never did plant those tomatoes. In an unexpected cascade of events, my grandfather was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And while my grandmother had been struggling with her memory for a while, her dementia took a drastic turn after his diagnosis. She acted out in ways that were unlike her: calling the police, chasing my ill grandfather through their house with a knife, barraging my mother with terrible insults. I saw firsthand how much strain families and caregivers experience.
New York radio station WBAI has Gershwin classics on all day. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong are singing the one that always made her laugh. I hope she’s still able to hear it; I turn up the volume:
You say potato, I say po-tah-to,
You say tomato, I say to-mah-to, . . .
She sits mute, a breathing statue whose life has been slowly erased from within.
Our days are gray, bleak, silent. Her silence can last days, sometimes weeks. I hear only half-words, gentle grunts, mumbles, and sighs. I wonder if she is able to think.
Dad and I visited Ma every day in the nursing home. Sometimes she greeted me with a smile and a welcoming, “Well, look who’s here!” Other times she dismissed me with a menacing look and hurtful words: “You’re a piece of shit.” Dad would remind me that it was her dementia speaking, but that didn’t erase my heartache or dry my tears.
Despite lacking higher education, due to her immigrant parents’ belief that daughters did not deserve a college degree, Ma was a smart woman. She read constantly, both novels and newspapers, and she could mentally add up her grocery bill, always coming within a few pennies of the actual cost. Ma had a sharp mind, one that did not allow for false flattery or foolishness; instead, she would set a goal and achieve it, allowing nothing—and no one—to stand in her way.
Dear readers,
Our first inkling of trouble came when Maman, my Belgian mother, got lost en route to our house. After my father died, Maman had been living alone in a New Jersey apartment, and she would periodically drive across the George Washington Bridge to come visit us.
One day she didn’t arrive on schedule. After an hour had passed and we were growing frantic, the phone rang.
“I’m at a restaurant,” Maman said.
“Which one?”
“The one we always go to,” she said.
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