Not much can prepare you for the day when you greet your mother and she pulls back in alarm. When you place your hand gently on her shoulder, look into her eyes, and she returns your gaze with suspicion and fear. When saying “It’s me,” fails to suggest a hint of familiarity.
Years before it came to this, my six siblings and I had begun to compare notes, sharing the troubling signs that suggested our mother should no longer be living alone in the home where we all grew up. Our eighty-nine-year-old Dad had died recently, felled by an aggressive angiosarcoma that took him down like a chain saw to a healthy oak. It left us all reeling. Mom powered through, always doing, giving, reaching out. Her strength amazed us, though it shouldn’t have: she had always been strong. Then she began to say things that didn’t make sense. She remembered things incorrectly or not at all. A few close-call safety incidents convinced us, and finally her, that it was time to put her beloved home up for sale. She lived with one daughter for several years, then with each of us for a month at a time, but when this eventually proved to be unsafe for her, she agreed to moving into a residential care home. We divvied up the week and made sure that one of us would visit her every day. That there were seven of us who all lived nearby was a testament to both good fortune and our parents’ magnetic pull.
~~~
Mom appears comfortable and cheerful in her new surroundings. I plan to take her to the supermarket today, something she enjoys. When I arrive, she is sitting in her favorite chair in the common living room. As I approach, she looks up and smiles, greets me by name, takes my arm, and pushes herself to standing. In her room, I help her out of her three cardigan sweaters. She extends each arm as I grasp the cuff of the top one and slide it over her wrist, careful not to tug too hard. Unsteady on her feet, she holds on to her table to keep from tipping over. I ask if she’s warm in three sweaters, and she laughs, gives me her hand to feel how cold it is. I chuckle in amazement. “You’re always freezing.” It’s a hot June day.
She asks, “How’s my mom doing?” I remind her that her mother died long ago. She wants to know how long. It’s been 65 years. She looks at me without replying; it’s clear that she is trying to digest this information.
With the sweaters off, I help her into a clean mint green top. Her arms are soft and warm, and she obeys like a toddler, bending her elbow, pushing her head through the neck opening, letting me pull the shirt down around her hips. I add a heavy white cardigan and a pastel flowered scarf. As we ride down the elevator, I tell her that we are going to the grocery store. When we reach my car parked just outside, she asks where we’re going, and I tell her again. On the way, she asks where we are going, and then asks where I had picked her up. I try to describe her suite, to recreate a mental picture of where we had just been. Her face tells me that she hasn’t made the connection. I reassure her that she’ll remember when I take her home, and I change the subject.
In the store, she chooses cookies, some pretzels, a couple of other necessities. A cart approaches ours and my niece’s voice calls out, “Hi there!” Mom is blank until she notices a two-year-old sitting up in the front. There is no confusion here: she knows this sweet boy with blond curls whose eyes light up at the sight of his great-grandmother. The two regale each other with happy chatter, enjoying the thrill of an unexpected encounter. This niece and her husband purchased Mom’s home when it went on the market. The family is delighted that it will remain with our parents’ descendants.
We return to the car with our bags, and Mom’s muscle memory engages as she buckles her seat belt, noting how nice and warm the car feels from sitting in the 80-degree sun. I explain where we’re going when she asks, but she can’t recall where her home is or what it looks like. When we arrive, her awareness of the surroundings is evident. In her kitchenette, I help her put her purchases into her cabinets and open a new box of tissues. The excursion has tired her out.
How does your body remember to keep living when your brain no longer knows to keep thinking?
Mom has been in her care home for a year now. Physically she is strong, but the mental changes that accrue are evident. She used to kiss Dad’s framed picture and sleep with it under her pillow. When one sister visited yesterday and reminded her that it was Dad’s birthday, Mom asked when and how he had died. Dad had been her whole life from when she was a young teen and their Italian immigrant families had become close. Maybe her failing memory is protecting her from grief.
We siblings often report in with each other after our visits, recounting both comforting anecdotes and new ways that we see her fading. The stories she recites now come from further back in her life. She doesn’t remember the church outreach program where she volunteered daily during the past twenty-some years of her life, but she remembers with excruciating detail events from decades ago. She rails against that nasty man who lived across the street from her growing up. He didn’t give his wife a penny. Not a penny even to buy Christmas gifts for their kids. She had to sew housedresses for neighbors and hide the money.
She repeats the saga of how the two-foot-tall statue of the Virgin Mary came to be in her possession. I was three years old when I said the Hail Mary for Sister Magna. After I recited it, she gave me this statue of Mary and I have kept it for all these years. If she hadn’t shared these stories with us a thousand times during our childhood, we’d think she was making them up. But she remembers these as clearly as if they happened yesterday. That statue still stands on her dresser.
~~~
It is sobering to witness how Mom is losing her dignity, to find her no longer in control of her bodily functions. Last week she fell while getting out of bed in the middle of the night, gashed her head, and needed five stitches in her scalp. Her caregivers have installed a wedge-shaped heavy pillow to prevent this from occurring again.
Once back from the emergency room, not remembering what had happened, she set out reciting versions of the story as they entered her mind. She tells me that she fell out of the moving car, even though Dad was driving so carefully. That she had probably forgotten to close the car door.
When Mom is not involved in one of the many activities provided by her care home, she sits inert, unengaged. It pains me to see that her sense of initiative, a force that used to motivate her every waking moment, has disappeared. Even when she was ninety, the thought of having nothing to do was abhorrent to her. She only voluntarily gave up the keys to her car at age ninety-two when her left eye blacked over as she was driving home from her volunteer job. She said that if it happened again, she could end up hurting or killing someone in an accident. Now she seems to have no concept of doing or not doing. I’m sad to think she lives with no apparent purpose, with no drive, with no sense of the passing hours. The only question she asks is, “How’s my mom?”
But hugging her, I’m struck that perhaps she does have a purpose, inadvertent though it is, because she’s still teaching me. In her current state she shows me how to give even when I feel no appreciable return, how to care for someone who in two minutes won’t remember I’ve even been there. When I kiss her good-bye, I tell her I love her and that I’ll be back. She always replies, “I love you, too.”
~~~
Mom now has an orange and white robotic cat that sits on her lap. She is in love with the cat. Its meows are jarringly loud to me but are tailored to someone with severe hearing loss. This cat purrs when you pet it, lifts its paws randomly, turns its head, and even rolls over.
I ask her if it has a name, and she says no. When I ask if she wants to give it a name, she also says no. I refer to it as Kitty Cat and remark how sweet it is. She doesn’t let go of it for a second.
Mom talks to the cat nonstop during my visit. While it is an ingenious device for those with dementia who have love to give, I feel sad watching her. My mother thinks this robotic cat is real.
“I love you. Mom-mom loves you,” she says over and over as she pets its back and rubs its ears.
The text messages fly as I share this new development with my siblings, with reactions ranging from Does she truly think it’s real? to Oh, how sweet! to Poor Mommy.
When I visit the following Monday, Mom still has the cat on her lap.
“Such a sweet kitty,” I say. “How is she doing?”
Mom gives me a puzzled look and immediately replies, “It’s a ‘he’!”
These are the funny moments we siblings share in messages post-visit. “I guess that answers our question as to whether she thinks it’s real,” I text.
Laughing emojis chime on my phone like jingle bells. We know we must find laughter amid the reality that her body has far outlived her brain. But her heart still knows how to love.
~~~
I often do Mom’s hair during my Monday visits. Throughout her life, she was meticulous about her appearance, and this is one way I can honor that. I help her to lean her head over her bathroom sink. Even warm water is too hot for her, so I keep making it cooler until she’s content.
I ease her back into her chair, put a towel around her shoulders. She keeps talking to me, but over the sound of the hairdryer, it’s pointless to figure out what she’s saying. She doesn’t seem to notice.
I pull a soft brush through her white hair and swivel the dryer back and forth, careful not to let it stay in one place for too long. Her scalp is more sensitive now that her hair has thinned so. Sitting in the chair facing the mirror over her sink, she still knows which way to lean her head as I move from the side to the back and on to the front. Her hair falls into shape as it dries, revealing soft waves.
I hold her glasses out to her, but she looks at them quizzically. This is new. I center them gently over her ears, push them up on the bridge of her nose. Her hair washed and styled, she looks more like her old self, like the mom I remember, the mom I wish she still were.
~~~
Mom’s memory slides back in time like an eraser on a whiteboard, clearing people and places, wiping days both happy and painful from her mind. She no longer asks about Dad, why he doesn’t visit her, how he died. If Dad can slip from her, anyone can.
I unhook from the wall the picture of her family, taken when she was three, and place it in her hands. She adjusts her glasses, looks intently, and rubs her fingers over the glass as this Ouija board brings the figures posed for the portrait to life. Her six brothers and one sister, in late nineteen-twenties’ attire, surround her immigrant parents who sit dignified and proud at the center. Mom, the baby, stands between her parents wearing high-top brown shoes and a sweet dress. She used to name everyone, ending by pointing to herself and declaring, “And that’s little me.” Today, I have to name all of her siblings for her.
“That’s my mommy. I love you, Mommy,” she says as she lifts the frame to kiss her mother’s image. “And that’s my daddy. He loves me so much. And I love him.”
What was my mother to her just weeks ago is now my mommy, and I sense the growing lapse that shrinks her world, the years tumbling down one against the other like dominoes.
She asks again, “How’s my mom?”
Mom seems to grow smaller from Monday to Monday. I look for her in the line-up of white-haired women, some sleeping, some staring at or through the television. She is, like usual, seated in a green wing chair in this large, homey living room, sound asleep, head tilted to one side. Although I barely tap her shoulder, she startles awake and gives me a puzzled stare. I kiss her on the cheek, say “Hi, Mom,” and suggest we go to her room.
One year ago, she would smile and greet me by name. I’d help her stand, place her walker in front of her, and we’d head to her room.
Today she is in her wheelchair, which makes it infinitely easier for me to take her to her room for our visit. When I ask if she wants to use the bathroom, she ponders for several seconds, then says, “I guess I should.” It’s a close call; she makes it just in time. When she scratches and rubs her left thigh for a long time, I ask her if something is wrong with her leg. She begins to tell me about a rabbit, but then her voice trails off.
Later she asks, “Did you see Grandmom this morning?” I’m not used to her referring to her mom as “Grandmom,” so I ask if she means her own mother. She does, and she wonders if I saw her after mass. I give her my new standard answer, “She’s doing well.” That response satisfies her. A few minutes later, she asks again, “How’s my mom?” And then again and again. She holds tight to that mother-memory.
~~~
There’s so little to talk about now. She used to regale us with stories of how her mother knit sweaters for her, having the skill to examine a certain style in a store just once, then go home and recreate it from memory. The mention of a certain aunt or uncle used to launch a barrage of tales.
Today I ask, “Do you remember Aunt Louise?” and she gives me a blank stare. I specify, “Your sister-in-law Louise,” and she says, “Oh, sure.” But while the name might spark a glimmer of a connection, she doesn’t follow up as she used to with detailed stories. There’s nothing there. I assume a safer subject will be Uncle Frankie, her brother, but she can’t match that name to a memory either.
“You used to play together,” I remind her.
“Well, where did we play?”
“You told me you played up in the attic.”
She shakes her head, “No, I don’t think I did that.”
What happens when you have no memories left? When you have no memory of having had memories? Where do your thoughts land? Or do you no longer have thoughts? How does your body remember to keep living when your brain no longer knows to keep thinking?
~~~
It is difficult to reconcile this Mary with the one who was our mom. Marked young by her love for Dad, a love that never stopped growing, she cherished her role as wife and mother. Her love for the seven of us was utterly boundless. And when our own babies were born, what would we have done without her steady hand, insightful mind, and loving heart. Any confidence I had in knowing I was the captain of that baby’s ship came from her. Her gentle manner with all children gave us the fullest example of how to treat the smallest humans.
If she were twenty-something today, she’d have a YouTube channel, TikTok followers, and a busy Instagram sharing her lightbulb moments with the world. She kept a household of nine people, a count that included six daughters and one son, well-choreographed in a house with only one full bathroom. For example, she bought tan rectangular dishpans, wrote our names on them in black marker, and arranged them on shelves she had Dad nail up over the washer. Into those bins went our laundry, mail, books, barrettes, nail polish, baseball cards, and any other odds and ends she’d find around the house. Just google “family bin organizers” now — Mary was ahead of the curve.
To help us set the table correctly, she taped a hand-drawn chart of a proper place setting inside the door of the dining room buffet. We had no excuse for not putting the fork and napkin on the left and the knife and spoon on the right. You can buy those charts now.
She put plastic bag bread wrappers over our socks and secured them with rubber bands just below our knees before our feet went into shoes and then into red rubber boots when we played in the snow. We were the only neighborhood kids whose feet stayed dry for hours. I saw foot-shaped plastic bags in a catalog once. If Mom had patented her ideas, she wouldn’t have had to stretch dimes into dollars. If someone suggested, “There’s no way you can (fill in the blank), she’d stay up all night figuring out a way.
Clarity is trapped inside her…I have no way to make meaning from her words.
When our youngest sisters, identical twins, tell us that Mom doesn’t recognize who they are anymore, we find it difficult to believe. Over the ensuing months, the other five of us come to understand. I tell her my name when I see her now, and she repeats it as if it’s the first time she’s ever heard it.
“You gave me that name,” I add, trying to help her recall.
She lets out a laugh, as if to say, Yeah, right. It surprises me that I don’t feel abandoned or unloved or even disappointed. I feel protective and wonder how I would feel not to recognize anyone in my life. I give her a hug and tell her I love her so much. She replies, as she always does, that she loves me, too. Not being able to put a name or a past memory to my face doesn’t prevent her from knowing that I am someone she loves.
“How’s my mom?” she asks, the perpetual question. “She’s fine,” I reply, and she is reassured by that simple answer.
I try to engage her in conversation, remind her that I am married, and that I have three children. She smiles and asks, “The same three?” I stifle a laugh, make a mental note to share this remark with my kids, and add that I also have four grandchildren. She nods and smiles.
“There was a bad little boy running around in here.” She shakes herself, an odd, side-to-side movement from shoulders to waist, something I’ve never seen her do. “That’s how I get rid of it, by shaking it.” Some distant dream or memory tumbles through her mind and emerges in jumbled words. “It’s broken. Even now, it’s broken.” And my heart, too, is broken that clarity is trapped inside her, that I have no way to make meaning from her words.
~~~
Sitting with Mom in her room today, I admire her Easter flowers. I ask her if she likes them, realizing as the words leave my mouth how silly the question is. Of course she likes the flowers. But isn’t that what we ask toddlers? Do you like your new train? I can no longer chat about a favorite recipe or what her fellow volunteers are doing, so I ask if she likes her flowers.
On the sofa facing her chair, I take her hands in mine. They are always cold, so I rub them between my own. I twist her engagement ring around so the diamond faces up.
“Your ring is so pretty,” I say. She smiles and stares at her hand, blinks long and hard. Sometimes the blink holds and she drifts off momentarily.
Spending time with Mom these past years brings me questions I have never before contemplated, but no answers. Though I wouldn’t wish my mother’s current state on anyone, her dementia has shown me that a circle of life with many missing links can still offer meaning and have room for love. Back in the common living room, I kiss her good-bye and give her a long hug. “I’ll be back. I love you, Mom.” When she looks at me and says, “I love you, too,” I know she means it, despite not recalling my name or the names of my husband or our children and grandchildren. Somehow she knows that she loves me and that I love her. I suppose that makes sense, given that her own mother is the only person she can conjure up from her ninety-eight years of life. Motherlove holds mightily and maybe that’s enough memory for her now.
—
Marcia Roberts Gregorio is a retired English teacher who spent decades guiding young writers. She holds an M.A. in English literature and an M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction Writing. She lives in Chester County in southeast Pennsylvania.
