Something mystical happened with my Mom today. She was speaking in her dementia gibberish, what experts call a “word salad,” meaning a jumble of incoherent words, when she suddenly stopped and stared at my dress. It’s a Retrospecd dress with scenes from New Orleans in the 1800’s on it. After a long time, she said, “What a beautiful dress!” My sister and I looked at each other, amazed. She said a complete sentence that actually applied to the situation, a gorgeous shining moment of lucidity.
Then she asked me if I was a Stop sign.
My sister said, “Did you hear that? She just said a coherent sentence. Are we getting her back?”
“Well, she did just ask me if I was a stop sign.”
We laughed, but it was undeniable: for one glorious moment it felt like we had our Mom back.
I haven’t seen her in months and I just want to drink in every detail, so I sat across from her, pulled her wheelchair close, and held her hands. Often when I hold her hand, she looks perplexed. But not this time.
This time, she gripped my hands with her bubble gum pink nails, looking deeply into my eyes, almost like she was searching for something.
I looked deeply back into her big brown eyes, because I was searching for something. I was searching for my Mom.
Sometimes it feels like my Mom is under an enchantment from a wicked queen, parts of her brain under a sleeping curse.
Other times, for me, dementia makes me feel like I’m stumbling around in one of those scary dark forests in fairy tales, a lost child looking for my Mom, trying to find home.
Today I found home in the grip of her hands.
I sat between my older sister and brother, Maria and Carlos, talking to both of them in between talking to her.
My brother said something that made me quickly turn my head to look at my Mom and she burst out laughing.
Maria said, “Do it again!” I flipped my head and made eye contact with my Mom again, and she again erupted in laughter, the exact same game I used to play with my daughter when she was an infant, one that made her squeal with delight.
I wondered if my Mom would respond to peek a boo. I put my pink feather jacket over my face and quickly dropped it. She erupted in laughter again. This is new behavior none of us have seen from her. Though she’s leads a jolly existence, finding humor all day long in her dream world, she rarely responds with laughter to something we’ve done.
It felt like we were interacting with her, and it was thrilling.
It wasn’t one or two moments, it was many many moments, moments where my Mom was my Mom.
Then again, my Mom is still my Mom, whether she’s able to respond to us in way we understand or not. She is living in a spiritual tender world, a world that doesn’t make sense to me, or those of us currently anchored in the concrete world.
I held onto her hands for a very long time. If I tried to extract a hand to scratch my nose, she held onto it and it felt like the old days when she’d stitch up a hole in my shirt, or the knee of my pants, but this time, she was mending some of the torn places in my heart.
I have spent a lot of time looking at my Mom’s hands in my life, while sitting at church, where my only entertainment was studying every single ridge and scar on my Mother’s hands, or all the hours we spent tying quilts together. She’d put quilts on quilting frames, and when the boys in high school would come over to see me, she’d put them to work tying quilts with her. My Mom loved tying quilt after quilt, for every baby born in our neighborhood, for every birthday and holiday, she made a quilt.
The writer Floyd Skloot described his dementia this way: “I have been rewoven.”
Maybe that’s my Mom. She has been rewoven, a gorgeous quilt with threads that unraveled and then were rewoven into a lush tapestry of laughing; sleeping; words that come out jumbled and tumbled, and that occasional golden thread, the one that catches the light with its luminescence, the one we kids recognize as a single beautiful moment of our Mom.
