I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Tag: dementia

  • The In-Between Years

    The In-Between Years


    This post was originally made on December 31, 2012 – many of you might have missed it, and others will be reminded perhaps of what you were feeling on that New Year’s Eve ten years ago when you read it for the first time.

    Through the good or lean years and for all the in-between years is a line from a Frank Sinatra classic All The Way. As I lay 2012 to rest for a final countdown before the ball drops in Times Square in New York City tonight, I ask myself to rate the year as good, lean or in-between. Understand this is a subjective, biased, prejudiced and totally personal evaluation. It meets none of the standards for any Academy of Anything and as such, is not subject to review by a replay official. I’m not sure if the year passed as quickly for you as it did for me, but I confess mine seemed to pass faster than a falling star so I hope you have a notated calendar to refresh your memories as mine does for me.

    The first day of 2012 I was in Texas and spent New Year’s Day with my mother who lived in a personal care residence with two other older women and the two wonderful sisters who cared for all of them. She was in the severe stage of her dementia and, although I had no way of knowing it on that day, she wouldn’t survive the year;  neither would the other two women who shared the home and enjoyed my New Year’s visit. I’ve always loved women of any age, and these were some of the most entertaining ever.  It was a good start to the new year.

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    Mom

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    Miss Ann

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    Miss Virginia

    Whenever I’m in Texas I always have great visits with my favorite Aunt Lucille who lives in Beaumont, one of my least favorite Texas towns. My aunt will be ninety-three years old in 2013 and is an avid reader and crossword puzzle aficionado. She lives now in an independent living apartment in a retirement community in Beaumont. The nearness of neighbors and a standing dinner group of six women from her building in the late afternoon for dinner suit her social nature, her need to be out and about. Movies? Politics? TV shows? Books? Ask my aunt about any of these and she’s in her element with an attitude toward life that says hey take your best shot at me, but I’m hanging in for as long as I can. In 2012 I saw her more than a dozen times which was more than I’d visited her in one year…ever.  Each visit lifted my spirits and was just plain fun.

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    My favorite Aunt Lucille

    The year confirmed my status as a bi-stateual with extended periods of time in Texas and South Carolina plus keeping the roads hot from here to there and back. My partner Pretty traveled with me whenever she could get away from her job – I managed to coerce other friends to make the trip when she couldn’t go with me and refused to let me drive by myself any more. Even with my “new” eyes from a second cataract surgery in July, my truck bears the dents and dings of my parking misadventures and alas, let’s face it. I have a GPS but occasionally disagree with it, and then I find I am not there when I need me. I am somewhere else.

    Pretty and I did some fun trips during 2012. At the end of February, which is our anniversary month, we drove to Valle Crucis, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains for a couple of days of work and play. She worked.  I played.

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    Blue Ridge Mountains, Boone, North Carolina

    Six months later in August we had a family vacation with our son Drew and his girlfriend Caroline. We drove to the northeast to sightsee and spend time together, to try to re-group from the losses earlier in the year. Abraham Lincoln blessed us in Gettysburg and we traveled safely to the shores of Maine, along the coast in Rhode Island, saw beautiful scenery in Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Boston was a hit for many reasons not the least of which was its good food. We counted on Caroline to make sure we ate at the best restaurants according to her online guides.  Iphones were in; Pretty and Drew had dueling GPSs that didn’t always want to go in the same direction. So many gadgets…so much confusion. So much merriment.

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    On my birthday in April I was at the funeral of the woman I knew as a second mother for over forty-five years. She and my mom were as close as sisters. They were both heartbroken when I had to separate them four years ago because they could no longer take care of each other. Willie Flora was eighty-two in March of this past year and my mom was eighty-five that same month. Willie died on April 14th in Richmond, Texas and my mom died eleven days later in Willis. It was sorrow upon sorrow.

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    Willie

    In September my neighbor Heather and I had a shower for another neighbor, Becky, who created additional excitement by announcing that her water broke a couple of hours before the shower was to start. High drama, but we moved the time up, she came and opened her gifts, had a piece of cake and was then whisked away by her husband Gary to the hospital where she gave birth to her third baby boy four hours later. George is growing by leaps and bounds and should be a fine nuisance for his older brothers Oscar and Dwight.

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    Dwight plus Oscar plus cookie jar = Good Times

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    George in his New Baby phase

    In November my third book was published and I was thrilled with how it looked when it came from the printer. I loved the cover and had a sense of accomplishment as I placed it in my office next to my first two books. I hope my cyberspace friends will want to read the final version since you’ve shared a number of the stories with me in the past year right here on this blog. There is freedom in growing older and a sense of entitlement to Call It Like You See It — and even sweeter to see what you’re calling in print

    Good year? Lean year? In-between year? The votes have been tallied by an unreliable CPA (me) and I have to report the in-between has it. Births and deaths mark our beginnings and our endings, but the middle is what keeps our attention. I’ll lay 2012 down tonight and pick up 2013 in the morning. I can’t predict what will happen in the New Year, but I can predict I will struggle to stay awake to ring it in.

    Pretty and I wish all of you a Happy and Healthy New Year!  Thanks for stopping by…

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

    P.S. I would lose my favorite Aunt Lucille in 2013. I think of her often and am grateful for that Texas time with her.

  • 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.