Eloquent Silence (25 page)

When the newspaper was delivered each day she would sit for hours reading it from front to back, over and over. Yet later in the day she would have no idea of the content. Nor would she be able to perform the simplest of tasks such as push the record button for the video player. I had to switch the television on for her before I left for work each day so that she could watch her ‘soapies’ in the afternoon.

Quite early in the piece she lost the idea of numbers. She could no longer tell the time or if she was giving me money to buy some things for her, she had not the faintest idea of the value of the notes and coins. I knew this latter was a very bad sign and was very annoyed when a cousin laughed at her and told her she would have the money if Aunty didn’t know what it was worth.

‘If you don’t want it, I’ll have it, Aunty,’ laughed this cousin who was always very conscious of the sounds of coins clashing. I was annoyed with her for being so crass, as I  knew it was an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible problem that would have to be addressed in all its seriousness before too long—the hopeless disintegration of my mother’s mind. It was not merely a simple matter of not knowing the value of money, but a significant sign that all numbers were losing their meaning for my mother.

Various people would drop in and she was excellent at covering her condition up. She may not remember their names, so she called them, ‘Love’ or ‘Dear.’ No one objected to that. She knew their faces if not their names.

What hurt me more than anything was that as time went by, people stopped visiting her, especially when she had gone into care, saying, ‘She does not know me.’

I was inclined to want to answer, ’But you know her.’ However, I felt this would be wasting precious breath that could be better spent doing other things. That my precious mother had committed the unpardonable sin of losing her thought processes was to me the saddest of all conditions and I would have done anything humanly possible to bring her back from the brink of the ever-encroaching disease. She still had the beautiful smile that would transform her face from blankness into awareness of loving the person at whom she was gazing.

She developed little obsessions. Mum was always a superstitious person, (throwing salt over her shoulder if she’d spilt any while cooking, having to say ‘Rabbits’ last thing on the last night of the month e.g.).

Gradually she grew obsessive about two people never walking on the opposite side of a pole, as that would split a friendship.

And the Numero Uno, kissing someone twice was Bad Luck. Very Bad Luck indeed would follow this action unless a third kiss was given.

At that time, around 1992 I was still living in a Fool’s Paradise, believing that all these symptoms were just a normal part of the aging process and that I could ‘cure’ her when I was at home with her all the time.

I began to go to work part time, finishing at 3pm so that she would not think she had to cook dinner, switching on the stove and burning herself at around 4:30.

When I left work to take care of her in 1993, we went for a holiday to the Gold Coast. Out of her home environment, she began hallucinating in earnest. She was certain our GP, a man of a similar age to myself, and I were conducting an affair. Each morning she would tell me she heard him come and go through the night. No amount of persuasion could convince her she was wrong.

Our doctor, despite her conviction to the contrary, did not conduct his surgery all day then do a round trip of four hundred miles in order to fall into my arms every night. Finally, convinced no amount of arguing or laughter would dissuade her from this belief, I simply gave up and let her tell me over breakfast every morning how she had heard our GP come and go through the night.

As well, she began to forget some birthdays, as dates were a problem to her. I can recall being very sad when she forgot my birthday one year but remembered that of my son-in-law a few days later. Sad, but accepting of the fact that she could not help the symptoms of this insidious disease.

She was beyond the stage where she had desperately wanted to belong at family gatherings, gazing from one face to another to try to following the conversations but unable to contribute at all. The occasional visitors that we had began to speak too loudly for the small space we lived in, no doubt thinking, as some do with deaf people, that volume will make things clearer.

The time came when I found it very difficult to get her to leave her bed and get dressed. For a time I elicited the aid of the Blue Nurses. She would get out of bed for them every second day for her shower. But eventually we had to resume the battle on our own as the nurses decided we would be able to cope and no doubt had enough on their plates already without having to shower my mother who seemed mobile. But could be very stubborn for me, refusing to budge from the bed in her gentle voice, telling me in her fragmentary phrases that she would get up later. That promise would not eventuate into going for a shower. Even if I caught her going to or from the toilet she would find a way to convince me that she was not ready to shower.

At these times I would suffer very badly from depression, taking her meals to her on a tray and sitting on the floor in her room with my own meal on a tray. The only talking was done by me and, being cooped up in the house both day and night, I did not have much news to report.

She did not want me to read the newspaper or a book to her, preferring to lie quietly with her eyes closed. Later investigations into this horrid disease lead me to believe that unusual noises often go on the heads of these sufferers and perhaps she could not reconcile what I was reading with the pandemonium that was going on in her mind.

This was when the Day Care Center came in very handy as she seemed to enjoy going there a couple of days a week on the minibus. I has given me a much needed break and a chance to run errands and catch up on chores I needed to do.

So we worked our way through loss of memory, then loss of intellectual skills. She had been a very competent knitter but the time came when I would have to pull out all she had knitted during the day while I was at work so that she could begin again the next day. Only to return home the next evening and find a similar knitting fiasco that had to be pulled out.

She developed difficulty with social and personal interaction, becoming insulted when no insult had been intended. Table manners began to slip away, talking with her mouth full for instance, something she would never have done previously.

Later she would withdraw even further, unable to make an entry into a circle of conversation, yet most of the time wearing her own brand of loving smile.

I surrendered her to a nursing home in September, 1998, just before she turned 80. This was by far the hardest thing I have ever done in my whole life and caused me the most grief and guilt.

There were huge renovations going on at the home and the accompanying noise was horrendous. I found that was a perfect excuse to bring her home on Mondays and take her back on Fridays for some months. Eventually the nursing home informed me that I would still have to pay the 85% of her pension in order for them to keep her bed.

The renovations which had taken months and had enabled me to use the excuse of too much noise so that I could take her home for the week, were complete. I had to surrender her full time. I was heartsick and spent the next few months curled in a fetal position on the couch in front of the television, unable to forgive myself for the traitorous bitch I believed myself to be.

Incontinence plays a huge part in the final decision as a rule. There is no need to enlarge upon this.

My mother was a beautiful-natured person full of love and patience. The only person she ever lost her temper with was me, and this was always short-lived. We forgave and forgot as rapidly as whatever our difference of opinion had been. I could never say she was emotionally out of reach until the final couple of days while she was unconscious and in the process of dying, and perhaps not even then. A nephew she had loved and adored when he was a child and who had been estranged from our family for some eighteen years came to visit her within the last 48 hours. He stood beside her and gently held her hand, communed with her silently for a long while.

The next night she slipped quietly away while I had gone home for dinner and a shower after our whole family had spent the day beside her reminiscing over the old times. We had been talking about the childhoods my children had spent in the loving atmosphere of the family home when we had perforce to leave our own.

Although she did not open her eyes during this day or reminiscing, she stayed with us for the day, not leaving until she was alone, the very thing I had always wanted to avoid for her. So perhaps it would be false to say that the time came when she was out of reach in every way until the final moments when she breathed her last. I believe she knew what she was doing; that having myself or any of her dear grandchildren present when she died would have been almost more than we could bear so she avoided this anguish by waiting until she was alone.

Alzheimers does not always run a predictable course as other diseases are inclined to do but in the end the outcome is much the same. They forget the names of those they have loved, but perhaps not the faces until the last stages. Further on they become estranged from those who have been in integral part of their lives, looking at them with blank, expressionless eyes.

Her fate was sealed from the time the doctor pronounced that she had this horrible disease. In time I knew and accepted with great difficulty that there would be no reversal of this decision and that the only way she would leave the nursing home for any length of time would be in the back of the undertakers’ hearse. She would spend what was left of her life in custodial care, imprisoned for her own safety behind a locked security door.

They forget their past and the events that have filled their lives with joy and sorrow. Estranged from their own lives, they do not know their history or their loved ones.

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s life so simple when all is said and done? In those final five and a half years of caring for her at home and  six years while she was in the nursing home, during that time of torment I had been gradually letting go. First I said goodbye to her wit and intelligence, then to her vitality and her company until finally I had to part with her body. I had lost everything about her and my mother was leaving me but one essential thing remained: Love.

Loving is really all there is in life when you look back and count up your experiences and relationships. We should all treasure it for what it’s worth. Not everyone is fortunate to find any type of love at all, nor can everyone take it when it’s offered or hold on to it when one has it already in their hands.

In the end all I have left of her is the love I gave her and still give to her beyond the grave. My mother was my cornerstone, my touchstone. Always my concept of ‘Home.’ Grief at her passing has never gone away. While she lived it was imperative for me to be in touch with her every day if at all possible. No matter where I went, my internal compass always pointed towards my mother.

She always told me that after she had passed away she would still be by my side every inch of the way. She sends signs of white feathers to my daughter and I, feathers in places where they could not possibly have made their way under normal circumstances—on my bedside table, inside logs of wood where no bird has ever been, in all different unexpected places. A decade later, I can still feel the touch of her hand in mine.

There is no one left who loves me enough to care about how I think or feel or what my needs and desires are. I know I can grieve my heart out but in the end I am still where I have been all along and my dearly loved mother is gone. It is as if a part of the richness of the world went with her on the June night in 2005 when she left quietly and without any fuss at all.  She slipped away during the time I had gone home to have dinner and a shower before returning to spend the night beside her.

Precious beyond words. Loved beyond measure. Until we meet again may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

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n the past people realized that the older generation needed a little more help, protection and support as they aged. Not so now. Families hand over care of their elderly or disabled to paid carers while they pursue the a sizable salary in the process of caring for others, giving back to society in a way that will earn them a healthy income. They are relieved of the burden of caring for their own aged, disabled or frail family members while they are well paid for tending to others who are strangers.

A Homecare worker whom I know says she visits the home of elderly people whose families never come near them. Then they have a fall or break a bone and the family swoops in saying, ‘You have to go into a home.’

So they do and the family still never comes near them or contacts them by telephone.

Such is the age we live in.

I saw a television program recently about people who live on the Greek island of Ikarea. It is not uncommon for the inhabitants to live to be a hundred years old or more. They have a typical Mediterranean diet of fruit and vegetables, olive oil and little meat. Only fish, chicken and goat are available to them on a regular basis. There is no segregation into different age groups. All live, work and play together. Old people are not marginalized, nor do they suffer from depression.

Such is the isolation of the aged in our society in some cases that, purely as an example, an old man fell over in his own home recently in our city and he lay on the cold floor for two days and two nights. The weather was freezing. Had he fallen outside he would no doubt not have survived the experience. Aged 70, he may have been quite fit and thought of himself as being independent, not needing an alarm around his neck. But where are family, neighbors and friends of the aged, isolated people like this?

Studies are being done in America, mixing day-care toddlers with aged care residents in nursing homes. Results would appear to be beneficial for both sides. Elderly people whose speech has been incoherent for some time speak plainly in a sentient manner to these little people, while the toddlers thrive on the love and attention given to them by people who would still appear to be carrying memories of how to deal with tiny children while giving abundant love.