2021 was the first September 14 of my life where I didn’t send flowers or a gift to my Mom for her birthday.
She’s in Memory Care, and the last two years, I sent her bouquets of flowers that she never received. She doesn’t really recognize flowers anymore, or me. She stares at me with vacant big brown eyes.
Her beauty at the age of 81 is extraordinary, dark eyebrows framing big eyes, long thick lashes, and creamy olive skin. When I visit her, I lean in to wrap my arms around her, inhaling the smell of her skin, a scent I know as well as my own, a scent that evokes long silky nightgowns trimmed with lace, perfume before bed, and toilet paper wrapped around her hair to keep her bouffant hairstyle intact, a trick she learned in the 1950’s and has done every night since. Well, that was when she had her mind. She no longer wraps her hair.
It’s also a scent that releases a flood of sobbing in me as I bury my head against her neck. She holds still, perplexed I’m sure, as to why this strange woman in the glitter boots is weeping and holding her. She looks at me with empty eyes. My teenagers rush to me, putting their arms around me, all of us holding our Moms.
It takes me a while, but I am finally able to control my shaking sobs, wiping my tears and sitting down across from her, I scoot my chair as close to her wheelchair as possible. I want to climb into her lap and hang onto her. Instead, I hold up a book with Winnie the Pooh on the cover, she lights up and laughs, cooing with delight.
I hand her the book, and she runs one manicured nail along the words in the book, softly reading to herself, making out the words, saying them aloud, and smiling at the pictures.
It amazes me that at the age of 84 with no memory left, she can still read.
It also amazes me that at the age of 52, I still want my Mom.”’
I actually feel jealous of the book. I want her to smile at me like that, run her finger along my cheek and read the emotions on my face. But she doesn’t smile at me because she doesn’t know who I am. As a schoolteacher, she loved to read. When she retired, she gave me most of her children’s book library, and I always bring a stack of her favorites when I come visit.
What happens in the brain of someone with dementia that causes a mother to forget her children, but still recognize Winnie the Pooh?
I don’t know.
The one thing I do know? That I agree with the wise philosopher Pooh Bear:
“Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”
I take one of her hands and massage it. She doesn’t move much anymore, and her hands have turned purple and cold. Her purple splotchy skin color turns to light pink as I rub her hands. I gently run my hand along the burn scars on her left hand where she laid it on the hot stove as a child. I wish I had been there to hold her when that happened.
But I’m here now.
None of us six kids know what to do. We are helpless against the onslaught of dementia that has taken our beautiful spicy Mom from us. She grew up speaking both Spanish and English in San Diego, with my Mexican grandmother decked out in her diamonds and furs, and my postman grandfather, a potato farmer from Idaho. Her home must have been loud, with seven brothers and sisters, but most of them are gone now. One older brother recently drove seven hours to see her in her Memory Care. Uncle Howie was known as the fearless veteran, the brother who craved danger so much, he volunteered for six tours of duty in Vietnam. After visiting my Mom, his wife called to say that he only lasted a few minutes before he ran out sobbing. She didn’t know who he was.
It’s a common reaction from all of us who love her.
Maybe if I wore a Winnie the Pooh costume she would respond to me with delight?
I wheel her outside and gently remove the book from her hand after she drifts to sleep. I watch her chest slowly rise and fall with her breath, wondering what goes on in her mind. Is she in a dream state? Does she have any memory of her six kids? Her seven siblings? My Dad? They were together for sixty years and never spent a night apart. Maybe it’s a mercy that she doesn’t remember him, and doesn’t remember he’s gone. He can no longer hold her. They were so intertwined, we could never imagine a world where one stayed here when the other left. I wonder if her brain refused to understand he’s gone, and so it just checked out. I wonder if she still sees him in her dreams, or remembers holding her babies. Or is her life now just a series of dozing and waking and jumbled sounds?
Pooh says, ““If you live to be a hundred, I hope I live to be a hundred minus one day, so that I never have to live a day without you.”
I understand, Pooh. I think she does too.
Pooh also says, “I wonder how many wishes a star can give?”
If I were able to wish on a star tonight, my wish would be that she feels how much, how deeply, she is loved…
I hope Pooh was right when he said, “The most important thing is, even when we’re apart, I’ll always be with you.”
