Two weeks ago I went to visit my mother at her long-term care facility in Alpharetta, Georgia, as I do about twice a month. It’s a five-hour round trip, and I usually go alone, if you don’t count the guys from Radiohead, Junip, My Morning Jacket, and Pink Floyd. Barring bad weather and heavy traffic, I actually like the drive. It’s good to get away from my regular life, which revolves around my computer, the art studio, the kitchen, and letting the dogs in and out four-hundred times a day. Plus, when I get home in the evening, my husband has always fed the dogs, poured the wine, and is cooking dinner.
My time with my mother is time out of context. She lives on a memory unit, which she does not recognize as such; instead, she believes she is either “on vacation,” or “in between homes.” I never dispute this; to do so would further confuse or upset her. Because I am partner to her alternate reality for those hours, it’s like living inside a very disorganized parallel universe. One minute I am telling her about random happenings in my life—what I’m working on, friends I’ve seen lately, conversations I’ve had with my siblings—and the next minute she’s telling me my brother lives “upstairs” and asking me where Dana is.
“Mom,” I’ll say in my most jovial voice, “I’m right here!” She always laughs uproariously at her own gaffe. Several hours later I fall out of that universe and land feet-first in my kitchen with my husband, where ordinary things like dinner prep and wine-pouring is happening and I am once again indisputably myself.
My brother and I moved our mom to memory care after she broke her hip in assisted living. She could not remember breaking her hip from one moment to the next, and because she has a propensity to be active (she race-walked her way through her entire adulthood and into her eighties), she would not wait for assistance to leave her wheelchair or her bed. We worried she would fall again, to worse consequences.
As falls often do, that one seemed to accelerate her dementia. She frequently asks the same questions over and over, and makes the same comments and observations on constant loop. One of her sticking points is about her age.
“I’m a hundred!” She exclaims, anytime anything feels difficult, like getting dressed or getting in and out of the car.
“No Mom, you’re just ninety-five!” I say.
Ordinarily I do not correct her when she misremembers things, but this reversal of the clock always delights her.
My siblings and I are lucky that we’ve had our mom for so long, especially as we lost our dad to cancer thirty-six years ago, when he was just sixty-one. We are also lucky in that, for the past two years, Alzheimer’s has been kind to her, if there is such a thing. She’s more cheerful, more content. She eats better. And she’s less anxious. Instead of pounding an imaginary brake when she’s riding in the car and we round a corner, she leans into the turn and sings out, “Whee!”
And she’s still witty. Two weeks ago on our way to a Chinese restaurant, I asked what we should order to go along with our shrimp dish.
“Something tall,” she said. “To even things out.”
This past weekend, she pointed at the design on my t-shirt, a bull with just one eye and only three legs.
“I hope you got that for a discount,” she said.
Upon hearing our mom had Alzheimer’s, a friend warned my siblings and me that it was going to be a wild ride. And it has been. Despite her apparent cheerfulness, it’s been hard to watch her decline. When I take her out to lunch, it is often more of a struggle than a pleasure, though I’m happy she still wants to go.
And I’ve noticed that when I take her out for bagels or barbeque, and then into a little boutique to peruse, for an hour, the same twenty items on offer five times over, or to a small art gallery where we discuss, at length, the same ten paintings and sculptures until (thanks be to God) she says she is tired and ready to leave, the people watching treat me like a superhero.
It’s like being at a park with a puppy. No one cares what you look like or the fact that you could be a knife-wielding reprobate. All anyone sees is you in the moment, nurturing and loving a vulnerable being. This puppy-conferred allure makes you irresistible, and moves people to do what they otherwise might not do: Smile. Engage. Fawn, even.
When I take my mother out by myself, strangers beam at us and touch their hands to their heart. Men, to whom I have not been visible ever since my childbearing years screeched to a halt, rush to open doors. People in restaurants scramble to give up their prime table for us, so we don’t have to journey all the way to the back. At the last café where we ate, the owner gifted us a giant chocolate chip cookie, which we ate with delight and gratitude.
These wide smiles and kind gestures are indescribable gifts from those who sense my mother and I are on the ride of our lives. I am always deeply moved, while at the same time a bottomless sorrow blooms in my chest. There’s no mistaking that they see what I know: In both the parallel universe and the real one, our ride is winding down.
Dana Shavin is an award-winning humor columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist and Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular columns spanning twenty years. More at Danashavin.com. Email her at [email protected].