I signed up to get paid to be mom's helper through the county. It's only taken two years to finally get it all together, sign up the right places, turn in the paperwork, get the health certificate.
I think the health certificate just did me in. Reading a doctor's scrawling on there that said "END STAGE ALZHEIMER'S. GENERALIZED ANXIETY DISORDER AND DEMENTIA." Signed by the doctor in the middle of a regular Thursday, like he was probably going to stop at Pollo Loco on the way home and watch tv.
I don't know why I can't believe that this is a real thing and actually happening. Even though I've been watching it happen so slowly for two years. The labeling in ink on paper made me see my mom as a patient, as having a real problem with a label, a diagnosis. She's just a piece of meat, an animal that got a disease. That's all she is, a name, some numbers like birth date and social security, oops she has a problem and it's incurable.
There's so much left off of this paper I feel like yelling. What about the PTA. She always brought cookies to my chorus practice in 4th grade. She was always the prettiest of all the moms. She made me want to be a mom. I could see from how her hand would linger on our backs when she talked to other people, that she knew no matter what was happening in the adult world, that we were really the only things that mattered. She told us often.
I put her to bed that night lifting from wheelchair to bed still able to sit up barely on the edge in her semi-crumpled ball that is her body. I shove the chair away a bit and then bend over her, pulling up her shirt to feel her long, smooth back. I scratch her back like she would do for me, and she used to say ahhhhh but now instead of humming like she is always doing, she gets quiet because it quells the need to hum. Contact is better than humming.
Dementia has a lack of language which is its language. It makes your person less than they were and then not them at all. I get mad at dementia.
But my mom is just sitting there in the middle of it, both of us trapped in this real diagnosis with no escape. I sit next to her on the bed and wrap my arms around her and feel her whole self lean into me and we listen to whatever song is on and I cry and tell her I'm so sorry and she laughs because tears and laughs are all mixed up. Whatever closest to the top bubbles up. She has arms around her that love her, no matter if her brain got broken. I'm starting to think this is a whole garden.
My mom planted it and I'm just tending it.
