Losing My Mother: A Daughter's Experience with Alzheimer's
Losing My Mother: A Daughter's Experience with Alzheimer's
I can’t say that I’ve ever really “had” my mother. Our relationship, at a minimum, was tumultuous, and the rift that developed in my early years never fully went away. Although, in her later years, my mother came around and attempted her very best at playing a fully supportive mother. It worked. It was nice and although I was not able to fully forgive her for her past transgressions, this period of connectedness did bring us together in a way that I’d never imagined.
Over the past two and half years, I’ve watched my mother vanish in front of me. The doctors believe it’s an aggressive case of Alzheimer’s Disease that has caused to her deteriorate so quickly.
I remember in the beginning, she was aware of it happening to her, she was scared, anxious, and frustrated. She would verbalize these feelings to me as she slid in between a state of normalcy to a forgetful, scattered method of thinking. I felt helpless, I knew that her symptoms weren’t good, but still, I couldn’t imagine how bad it would truly get, so I downplayed her feelings and told her that “everything would be fine”, “we all get forgetful from time to time”, or something along the lines of “not to worry”.
As time progressed, it went from her forgetting where her keys were and mixing up her children’s names (before quickly catching herself) to the point where she would repeat herself so often that you couldn’t carry on a five-minute conversation with her without frustration. At this point, I was still oblivious to what was truly going on, so I would get annoyed and claim she wasn’t listening to me or I’d ignorantly say things like “Mom, I just told you that” or “You just told me that Mom”.
Over the past several months, I discovered through family members that were caring for her, that her state had worsened to the point where she’d completely stopped doing everything that was normal for her, and instead, being unable to drive or leave her home unattended, she shut herself in her bedroom, coloring in adult coloring books for hours on end. She couldn’t even prepare her own meals, much less remember to eat them, she’d stopped cleaning her home, and was even found by the authorities wandering down the local highway in the city she lives in, lost and confused.
While I knew my aunts were caring for her, I still made a point to call her daily to check in...when she answered, she acted as if we hadn’t spoken in months and would begin to sob about how happy she was that I’d called, how much she loved me, how much she missed me. She couldn’t articulate much else, nothing about her daily activities, no questions about my life, just sobbing either tears of joy or sorrow while she repeated to me just how much she loved me. This same conversation and emotional response from her would sometimes happen twice in one day whenever I’d call again, without any recollection that she’d just said the same things a few hours prior.
It broke my heart for her and selfishly, it broke mine as well, as there were so many things left unsaid between us that I’d always wanted to say and now it seemed quite obvious that I’d never have “that conversation” with my mother. I’d lost my chance, I’d put it off too long, and now, it was evident that it would never happen.
I kept putting off making the trip to see her, it’s only a few hours but it was so hard for me to be around her and I wanted my mother back! I didn’t want to face this sad, vacant version of her. I finally decided I needed to just make the trip and began planning which weekend I’d go when I received the news that they’d decided to put her into an assisted living facility.
At first, I was shocked, then for a bit I felt enraged, as she didn’t belong there, she had her home, which she loved, her garden, her photos, her everything was there, in her home! She was always so proud of her home and so comfortable there. I couldn’t imagine any facility would do her any good and not only that, although at the time I didn’t fully realize it, the action of placing her into that home marked the ending of a chapter for her and me both.
Never again would I sit on her porch for hours with her, talking about memories, family members, love interests, or about our dreams in life. Never again would I show up with my overnight bag at her door with the kids in hand for a mini-weekend getaway. Never again would the two of us make her amazing homemade noodle soup in her kitchen, while she bragged about hers being perfect. That little home of hers holds so many memories inside its walls for the two of us. Laughter, music, arguments, tears, joy...you name it. From my teenage years through my college years, to having my first child and sharing my amazement of him with her, to being in my thirties and sporadically stopping through, usually in a rush with the kids in tow.
Now that home is just a house and my mother is living under lockdown in a facility that I’m sure is the better place for her medically, but I wonder, Is she still there at all? Does she know what’s going on? Is she OK with being in a home that’s not her home? Is part of her locked inside herself, silenced, masked by her rambling? What happened to my mother? Does anything remain inside?
All I do know at this point is that I’m really learning that every moment counts and to be fully present in each moment. When my mother tearfully asked me the other day if she’d done a good job as a mother, I set aside any grievances that I might have and told her, “You were perfect, you loved me so much, and you never made a wrong decision.”. I told her that not because it was true, but out of my awareness that the only thing she’d remember is what I said then, in that very moment, and I wanted that very moment, along with all of her remaining moments, to be happy ones.
I have also come to realize that although she may not be able to verbalize to the extent of being capable to have any “important” conversations, my mother’s basic instincts and behaviors while interacting with me really do tell me all that I need to know, She loves me, my mother loves me, and really, that’s the only answer I need from her.
Each moment that we have on this Earth is truly precious, it’s an opportunity to create positivity, love, hope, and so on. We all get so caught up in so many mundane things that time ends up passing us by so quickly and if we aren’t careful about it, we end up looking back, asking what we’ve accomplished or experienced of any value over that lost time. Time is the one thing that we can’t get back. So live and live fully.
-Christy Chilton, April 2021