I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Tag: dementia

  • the final new year

    the final new year


     

    She sat in her large recliner covered with worn blankets for extra warmth.  She was shrunken with age and her spine was so curved by scoliosis she slumped down into the bowels of the chair. It seemed to swallow her tiny body.

    She lost weight since she went to this place three months ago.   She didn’t eat. Her meals were pureed in a blender and fed through a large syringe. Open, please. Thank you.

    She wore bright blue flowered pajamas which I knew didn’t belong to her. She was covered by a Christmas blanket and looked like an incongruous mixture of Hawaii with the North Pole.

    Her beautiful white hair was uncombed, and she periodically raised her right hand to carefully brush a few strands from her forehead. There, that’s better.

    Two other women sat in similar recliners in the dark den lit only by the reflected light of a massive television screen which was the focal point of the room.

    The sitcom How I Met Your Mother was playing that afternoon.  No one watched this episode about misadventures on New Year’s Eve. I found the irony in the sitcom’s name since the woman in chair number one was my mother.

    She needed care for the past four years, and I regularly sat with her as her dementia progressed in medical jargon from mild to moderate to severe. Severe was where we were on that first day of 2012.

    I tried to talk to her about visiting my aunt, her sister-in-law, over the weekend.  No response. Mom had adored my Aunt Lucille so I thought she might be able to find her somewhere. Instead, she gazed at her black leather shoes on the floor in front of her. Slowly, very deliberately, she bent over and painstakingly reached for her left shoe. I moved to help her because I was afraid she’d fall out of the chair.

    Do you want to put on your shoes, Mom? She stared vacantly at me and shook her head. Ok, I said and returned to my seat on the large overstuffed sofa next to her chair.

    I made conversation with one of two sisters who cared for my mother and the two other mothers who sat in the recliners.   Mothers and daughters and sisters. We were all connected in the little den with the big tv.

    My mother ignored me as she continued her ritual of laboriously picking up her black shoes one by one, tugging on the tongue to ready it for her foot, fiddling with the shoelaces as if to adjust them and then lowering the shoe to the floor in front of her to the same place it was before. She did that over and over again. Ad infinitum.

    During one of her attempts, she dropped a shoe beyond her reach, and I put it in front of her chair with the other one. Do you need help to put on your shoes?  I asked again. No. I have to keep on this road, she answered.  She was on a mission.

    The mother in chair number two told me she tried to help my mother with her shoes earlier. She told me to get away from them so I did, the woman said with a note of exasperation.

    I’m sorry, I said.  That wasn’t really who she was. But I was wrong. That was who she was now.

    I talked and tried to avoid watching my mother and her little black shoes for an eternity that was only an hour. Mom, I have to go, I said.  She looked at me with some level of recognition and said Don’t leave me.

    I’ll be back in a day or two, I said, hugged her and kissed her on the cheek and told her I loved her.

    I love you too, she said.  I really do.

    *********************

    I didn’t know on New Year’s Day in 2012 that my mother would be gone in April after years of waging war against an unknown enemy who robbed her not only of her body but also her mind, her memories. It was a losing battle, but I expected the loss.

    Estimates place 1.6 million homes around the world in 2020 hadn’t known its mothers, sisters, wives, daughters as well as its fathers, brothers, husbands and sons wouldn’t live to see the first day of 2021. Shocked, dazed, saddened by the unexpected deaths of family members and friends, the fight against another unknown enemy called Covid-19 was briefer than my mother’s war but just as deadly.

    Vaccines discovered at “warp speed” offered hope of victory over the Covid-19 devil in 2020 although the roll out at the end of the year has been poorly managed in the US in keeping with the tradition of pandemic mismanagement established at the federal level in previous months. Agent Orange is so busy trying to keep the presidency through wacky shenanigans since the November election that he has no time to participate in governing. The president is AWOL, and time has stood still during the political transition while members of the current administration remain persistently unconcerned about preserving either our national security, our democracy or our sense of compassion for the people whose lives will be forever changed by the events of 2020.

    Blessed are those that mourn, for they shall be comforted, according to the gospel of Matthew. Garth Brooks sang of “taking any comfort that I can.” I’m hoping 2021 will be known as the year of comfort for mourners everywhere.

    Stay safe, stay sane and please stay tuned.

     

     

     

     

  • easter, comes the resurrection


    Ten years ago this Easter my mother was in a secured memory care unit of the Atria Westchase assisted living complex in Houston, Texas. Pretty and I had just bought a second home in Montgomery, Texas so I could be closer to Mom as her dementia progressed. On that Easter Sunday in 2010 I arrived in time for a chapel service before lunch with my mom.  After lunch, well, here’s what happened…

    The traditional Easter egg hunt came to us mid-afternoon through the children of the staff members. The day was beautiful, and the fenced courtyard area was the perfect setting for a party. Those in our lunch group pushed their walkers or were wheeled outside into the bright sunlight, those who could sat in the Adirondack chairs under the portico. I met three other daughters who were visiting their mothers that day which made me glad I was there with my mother, too.

    The Latino women who were the caregivers for the memory care unit brought their children to enjoy the search for the pastel colored plastic eggs filled with candy in the tranquil setting of the facility’s outdoors. Eggs were hidden everywhere, including on and around the residents.  Jim, a tall, sad, unshaven man who never spoke and struggled to move opened the chocolate egg Rosa placed in his shirt pocket; he ate the candy before the kids arrived. No one tried to stop him including my mother who in days of yore would have surely reprimanded him in her best elementary school teacher tone.

    The small group of children burst into the courtyard with an exuberance all youngsters bring to filling an Easter basket. Ages ranged from four to twelve, with one six-month-old baby girl held by her mother. They were dressed in their Sunday best. Little boys wore ties with their jackets, little girls wore pretty spring dresses. It could’ve been a movie set, I thought, because they were strikingly beautiful shildren. They flew around grabbing eggs with gusto as their baskets filled quickly. They were noisy, laughing, talking – incredibly alive.

    It was the resurrection. For a few brief minutes, the stones were rolled away from the minds buried deep in the tombs of the bodies that kept them hidden. The children raced around the residents searching for treasures, exclaiming with delight when one was discovered. One little boy overlooked a blue egg under a wheel chair, and my mother tapped his shoulder to point it out to him. He was elated and flashed a brilliant smile at her. She responded with a look of pure delight. The smiles and the murmurings of the elderly were clear signs of their obvious joy that proclaimed the reality of Easter in those moments.  Hallelujah. We were all risen.

    Memories were made and lost that afternoon. The children who came to the place where their mothers worked to find eggs among the old people were unlikely to forget this day.  Years from now some will tell the stories of the Easter Egg Hunt with the Ancient Ones.  The stories will be as different as their own journeys will take them.  For my mother and her friends, no stories will be told because they won’t remember. My mother doesn’t know I was there for her on Easter this year which is not unexpected.  But I remember I was, and it is enough for both of us.

    I was born on another Easter Sunday morning in April 1946, and that makes the year 2010 my sixty-fourth Easter. I recollect a few of the earliest Easters from my childhood: sacred religious days for my loving Southern Baptist family who rarely missed a worship service on any Sunday of the year but never at Christmas or Easter. I also remember having a hard time finding eggs in the church hunts. My baskets never runneth over. But to be honest, in recent years Easter Sundays had been difficult to distinguish from any other day of the week.

    When I moved away from my family in Texas in my early twenties to explore my sexual identity, I didn’t know I’d be gone for forty years. I also had no way of knowing one of the costs of my freedom from family togetherness was my absence from family rituals.  Distance, travel time, money, job obligations, girlfriends—these were the obstacles I had to overcome for visits home. Or maybe they were just excuses. I usually made the trip home at Christmas and less frequently one more time in the summer. But never for Easter.

    This Easter was special for me because it was a day with no excuses necessary. I shared a Sunday sundae with my mother for lunch today at a table neither of us could have envisioned a few years before. Today was just the two of us, and if there were barriers between us that once seemed too impenetrable, they were now lost in the cobwebs of time.

    We were all risen, indeed.

    Stay tuned.

    (This is an excerpt from my third book, I’ll Call It Like I See It.)

  • Aunt Selma’s funnies


    In 2007 Pretty and I had to make a life-changing decision for my mother Selma because she was unable to make decisions for herself anymore. Like many other Baby Boomers, I was responsible for my mother’s care; I moved her from her home in Rosenberg, Texas to a Memory Care Unit in a long-term care facility in Houston that was 40 miles from her home. She was 80 years old at the time and furious with me for moving her. She was never able to go back to her home. I managed her care from a thousand miles away in South Carolina (and ultimately from a second home in Texas) as she progressed through the various stages of dementia for five years until her death.

    My mother’s older brother Charlie had five children – the youngest of my first cousins is Dennis who lived near her Houston residence and visited her while she was there. His mother Mildred and my mother were good friends as well as sisters-in-law. In honor of both of our mothers for Mother’s Day, Dennis sent me this wonderful bittersweet collection of his memories of visits with her in Houston. He calls them Aunt Selma’s funnies.

    There was not one time that she did not recognize me upon my entry into this huge warm room that had a giant bird-cage full of birds and a very large aquarium. As soon as she saw me enter and walk towards her, she would smile and kind of turn her face sideways, giving the appearance of a pleasant surprise, and say, “Well looky here, precious darling, you came all that long way to come and see me today! Oh my goodness! ! I just can’t believe it, that you are here. How nice.” “Come on in here now precious,
    let’s go to my room, I want you all to myself. Tell me something about the family, anything at all, please?”

    Now the “precious darling” quote goes all the way back to Christmases of long ago, the times that our family planned to go to her and my Uncle Glenn’s home for Christmas dinner. We would drive up into the driveway and she would beat us to the welcoming ceremony and come racing out of the house towards us, dressed in a solid red pant suit, hollering “Precious darlings, come on in, come on in!!!” The day was filled with sights and activity that I would usually only get to see every other year or so. A silver Christmas tree, or one that had been flocked, my family never ever had a tree with snow sprayed on it, and as a child, this was most interesting to me, and I always wondered how the white stuff got there and if it was going to disappear one night during the season. 

    Then there were the card tables set up everywhere with plates and glasses, to be eaten on by the over flow attendance of family members, and then later for cards and dominoes with coffee cups. Upstairs was the giant’play’ room with the pool table, dart board, and golf green runway where you could practice your one shot putting.

    Now back to my wonderful Aunt, after this flood of Christmas memory would escape me, as we left other smiling gents and grannies in the Memory Care unit’s commons area and proceeded to her room.

    “Aunt Selma, did you hear about that bad storm last night?  There were some houses that were destroyed by the wind, but not one single person was even slightly injured!! And a school bus ran off the road in all that water, and each and every child was pulled from the water and saved.” ” I’m tellin’ you right now Dennis, God is on his throne!!” “Yes, Aunt Selma, indeed he is!”

    “Well you know I’ve said this before and now I must say it again, I really do miss Mildred so much and just can’t believe that she is gone!” “I know Aunt Selma, I still can’t believe it either, it just doesn’t seem right.” ‘I know, oh HOW I know, it’s just not right. She always came to see me, she would make those trips down to West Columbia and always stop by and stay a few nights with me. Can’t believe it!” “I know what you mean Aunt Selma.”

    “Some one stole my car about two or three years ago, and they took my hearing aids too, they were in the car.” 

    “You know we have a church service here, but it’s not Baptist.”
    “Sheila doesn’t go to church, it hurts, but it will be OK.“
    “Here, have a lemon square and a few cookies, I just love them, and they are free. They put this stuff out all the time for us to snack on. Go ahead, take one of these packages of graham crackers also, all are free.”

    I expressed a desire to take her out to lunch sometime: “No reason, we can always eat right here, and it’s all free, it’s all on this account that Sheila handles for me.”
    “I’m sorry I have to say it again, but I sure miss Mildred, you could call her and ask a question and she would always have the answer, and gave good advice too, you know that?” “Yes Aunt Selma, she sure did.”

    “A lot of folks here have a wreath hanging on their door for Christmas, but I don’t.” Oh Aunt Selma I would love to bring you one next time I come.” ‘No thanks precious, that’s being taken care of; someone is bringing me one from my place in Richmond Rosenberg. You know, I used to have a house with all this stuff in it.”
    “I’ll try to tell you this without crying, this will be the first Christmas that Sheila can’t make it here to see me.” “Well Aunt Selma, I’ll come to see you then, and I’ll bring one of my nephews with me.” “Okay then, that would be great, then it will be just like all the other Christmases.” “Yes, it sure will.”

    Thank you,  Cousin Dennis, for sharing your memories of Aunt Selma’s funnies – and for the visits that inspired them. I had to laugh out loud when you mentioned the “stolen” car comment. Having to take her car away from her was the beginning of the end of her independence. I guess she always knew that on some level.

    I miss our mothers especially on Mother’s Day, and I miss you, too.

    Dennis (r.) and his brother Martin

    on their way to visit Aunt Selma

  • Images


    IMAGES

    She sits in her large recliner that is covered with worn blankets for extra warmth.

    She is shrunken with age and her spine is so curved by scoliosis she slumps down into the

    bowels of the chair.   It seems to swallow her tiny body.

    She has lost weight since she came to this place three months ago.   She doesn’t eat.

    Her meals are pureed in a blender and fed through a large syringe.

    Open, please.  Thank you.

    She wears bright blue flowered pajamas which I know don’t belong to her.

    She is covered by a Christmas blanket and looks like an incongruous mixture of Hawaii

    with the North Pole.

    Her beautiful white hair is uncombed today and she periodically raises her right hand to

    carefully brush a few strands from her forehead.   There, that’s better.

    Two other women sit in similar recliners in the dark den lit only by the reflected light of

    a massive television screen which is the focal point of the room.

    How I Met Your Mother is playing this afternoon.   No one watches this episode about

    misadventures on New Year’s Eve.

    I find the irony in the sitcom’s name since the woman in Chair Number One is my mother.

    She has needed care for the past four years, and I have sat with her as her dementia progressed

    in medical jargon from mild to moderate to severe.   Severe is where we are for sure.

    I try to talk to her about visiting my aunt over the weekend.   No response.

    Instead, she gazes at her black leather shoes on the floor in front of her.

    Slowly, very deliberately, she bends over and painstakingly reaches for her left shoe.

    I move to help her because I am afraid she’ll fall out of the chair.

    Do you want to put on your shoes, Mom?

    She stares vacantly at me and shakes her head.

    Ok, I say and return to my seat on the large overstuffed sofa next to her chair.

    I make conversation with one of two sisters who care for my mother and the

    two other mothers who sit in the recliners.   Mothers and daughters and sisters.

    We are all connected in the little den with the big tv.

    My mother ignores me as she continues her ritual of laboriously picking up her

    black shoes one by one, tugging on the tongue to ready it for her foot, fiddling with the

    shoelaces as if to adjust them and then lowering the shoe to the floor in front of her to the

    same place it was before.     She does this over and over again.   Ad infinitum.

    During one of her attempts, she drops a shoe beyond her reach, and I put it in front

    of her chair with the other one.

    Do you need help to put on your shoes?  I ask again.

    No.  I have to keep on this road, she answers.   She was on a mission.

    The mother in Chair Number Two tells me she tried to help my mother with her shoes earlier.

    She told me to get away from them so I did, the woman said with a note of exasperation.

    I’m sorry, I say.   That isn’t really who she is.

    But I’m wrong.   That is who she is now.

    I talk and try to avoid watching my mother and her little black shoes for an eternity

    that is only an hour.

    Mom, I have to go, I say.

    She looks at me with some level of recognition and says Don’t leave me.

    I’ll be back in a day or two, I say and hug her and kiss her on the cheek and tell

    her I love her.   I love you too, she says.   I really do.

  • Humpty Dumpty


    Hello to those who read my essays and thank you for stopping by to take a look!   This piece is one I’ve written in the last few days, and I hope to post more this month than last, which turned out to be one.  Uno.  I can’t get The Red Man to shut up, but my own work is more difficult.   Go figure.

    HUMPTY DUMPTY

     

    Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

    Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,

    And all the King’s horses and all the King’s men

    Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

    —— Old English Nursery Rhyme

     

                I noticed the red dried blood and purple bruising on the top of her left hand as she sat with both hands folded in the large brown leather recliner that was her assigned seat in the den and wondered what in the world had happened.   This semi-conscious frail woman with wispy uncombed snow white hair slouched down in a chair that swallowed her…with her feet up in their usual elevated position.  Her green sweat suit pants and bright flowered cotton blouse she wore today didn’t belong to her, but they were clean and looked comfortable enough.  She sat on a white pad to prevent accidents to the leather chair.  She was dozing when I came through the door and didn’t stir when I bent to kiss her unwrinkled forehead.   She looked up at me and smiled and then closed her eyes again.   My mother wasn’t interested in talking today.

                Her caregiver Kathy sat across from me on the well-worn sofa and noticed my glance at Mom’s hands.   Kathy was a tall woman and big-boned as we used to say when describing a woman her size.  She had just stepped out of the shower when I arrived for my visit and her hair was wet and pulled back from her not unattractive face.   She had a great smile and genuineness I liked.  

                “Has your mother always been a scratcher or is this something new?” she asked.   “Most of the time when we struggle to get her to take a shower she scratches Norma or me.   I’ve got a new one right here.”   She pointed to a fresh scratch on her hand.   “Yesterday Selma thought she was scratching me but instead she scratched herself so hard on her own hand she made it bleed and then pulled off the band aid I put on it.  It looks worse than it is, though.”

                The idea of my mother being a “scratcher” was like a foreign movie without subtitles.  Difficult to comprehend, yet I knew it was true.  I’d heard a nurse say the same thing in her hospital room a few weeks ago to the young aide who was to give Mom a bath in her bed.  “Be careful, she’s a scratcher,” the nurse said.   I had almost fainted.  My mother, the prim and proper little woman who taught second grade in a public school for twenty-five years and played the piano in Southern Baptist churches for more than fifty years, was a scratcher.   It’s a world gone mad.

                “No, it’s not new,” I said.   “I’m not sure how long she’s been doing it, but I know it happened at least once during her hospital stay several weeks ago.  I’m so sorry she does it to you, but I can tell you it’s completely out of character for her.”

                “Oh, no, don’t worry.  I totally understand.  We’ve seen most everything with our Alzheimer folks,” Kathy said.

                I had entrusted the care of my mother six weeks ago to the two sisters, Kathy and Norma, who lived in the country twenty-two miles from my home in Montgomery, Texas.   Their brick house was an unassuming ranch style with a beautiful swimming pool screened and covered like the ones I had seen in Florida.  This made sense when I found they grew up in the Melbourne area.  The sisters came highly recommended to me by a friend whose father lived with them for seven years before he died last year.   My friend said her family had chosen them from several options and never regretted the choice.

                Mom lived in a Memory Care Unit for the past four years in a large assisted-living residential community in southwest Houston.   The setting was relatively plush and her unit housed twenty patients.   The cost rose every year she was there and was now almost $6,000 a month for her care for moderate to severe dementia and the related deterioration of her physical capacities.  Incontinence and lack of ability to walk without a walker were major changes in her condition in recent years.   Her world was sustained by her routine and the familiar surroundings of her private small apartment that defined it.   Locked entrances and exits set her boundaries and she adjusted to this world with an acceptance bordering on relief from the necessity of trying to preserve an identity she had long forgotten.   When I visited her in the Memory Care Unit, I typically found her in good spirits and checking her watch to see what she was supposed to do next.   Was it time for a meal?  Should she be in the dining room?   Did she need to go to the living room for a movie or exercise class or Wheel of Fortune or Bingo?   Were they going out for ice cream?   Someone had a plan, and my mother loved a plan.

                God bless long-term care insurance and the benefits it provided that covered the last four years of my mother’s stay in Houston.   Unfortunately, her benefit period ended this fall and economic realities made change unavoidable.   Her move to the house in the country was an answer for one problem but generated a host of others.   On the day I drove her to her new home, the conversation was dramatic foreshadowing of the days to come.

                “Mom, don’t you think it’s beautiful to be in the country like this?” I asked her as we rode along in my pickup truck.

                “Yes, it’s beautiful all right, but I wouldn’t want to live out here,” she replied.

                Indeed, she did not go gently into that good night, as the poet Dylan Thomas described.   When we arrived at her new home, she had forgotten the hamburger and fries I’d bribed her with at lunch to improve her mood.   She reluctantly sat down in the den with her two new compatriots, Anne and Virginia.   Anne had mild to moderate dementia and was in her early eighties, I would learn later.   She was an attractive frail woman with pulmonary issues and needed frequent breathing treatments.   Virginia was eighty-nine and proud of it and was in a better mental and physical state than either Mom or Anne.   She forgot words but generally followed conversation threads and understood contexts.  She was the only one of the three women who didn’t need a walker.    I liked the two women immediately and hoped Mom would, too.

                “I don’t understand why I have to be here, and I don’t think it’s right for you to bring me  without telling me we were coming to stay,” Mom said to me when we sat down on the sofa in the den.   Anne and Virginia each sat in large recliners facing the sofa and listened to our conversation.    Lack of privacy was a new challenge in the intimate den, I thought.

                “Well, they did the same thing to me,” Anne said to Mom.   “My daughter Beverly and her husband just brought me in here one day and left.”

                “Me, too,” Virginia chimed in.   “But I like it now and I’m glad you’re moving in.   You can have the other big chair.   I hope we don’t get anybody else because we only have three big chairs.”

                And so began the next chapter in my mother’s battle with the devils of her own mind and body.   Within ten days, as we began the process of changing to local doctors and pharmacies for her medications, she developed a severe urinary tract infection, which is not uncommon for women of her age and physical state.   But she required treatment in the community hospital for a week and after I brought her home from that stay, she hasn’t been the same.   She says little and doesn’t eat solid food.   The sisters feed her a liquid diet through a contraption that looks like an oversized eye dropper to me.   She’s had company in the hospital and in her new home – visits from nephews, cousins, other family members and even a visit from her former pastor.   She greets everyone with a smile and says a practiced thank you for coming.  The level of recognition appears to be distant with no connection to the present. 

                Her main question for me in the hospital as she lay attached to tubes of all sorts day after day was, “How long are you going to be in the hospital?  I didn’t know you were sick.”   I told her I didn’t know how long but I was glad she was there with me.    

                Did she have the uti before she moved?   Probably.   Would she have been so sick if she hadn’t moved?  Maybe not.  The mind and body work strangely in tandem, I’ve observed, and my mother is seemingly lost without her old planned life in the Memory Care Unit.   Hopefully, time will allow her to find a new routine that will offer her the comfort of consistency.   Her world is like the world of Humpty Dumpty, however.   All the King’s horses and all the King’s men won’t be able to put Humpty together again as he once was.  The fall has been too great.