We celebrated our mother’s 90th birthday not knowing it would be our last celebration as a family before her mind would drift away into the wilderness of dementia. Over the next five years, she would slowly dissolve into that wild place with no need of commemorating any more birthdays.
My crash course introduction to her imaginary world began with a home visit to plan her surprise 90th birthday party. I arrived on a Friday evening that weekend in early June. After kisses and hugs were exchanged, I offered to take Mom out to dinner since no familiar culinary aromas were wafting from her kitchen. Her response: “Let’s just share a pizza.”
When I returned, boxed pizza in hand, the dining table was set for two with the same dinner plates I remembered from my childhood. As we ate, I asked about who was still living on our street from “the old days.” Mom gave somewhat hazy answers and then quietly said, “I wonder when your father’s coming home.”
I stared at the tablecloth, the one I knew so well from so many past family dinners, a beige latticework pattern with intertwined sunflowers in happy shades of yellow, sage, and white. But this time, I noticed the flowers were faded and there were worn-out spots with dirty, tattered flannel backing peeking through holes I had never noticed before.
I responded, “Oh, Dad’ll be home soon. Isn’t this his bowling night?”
Part of me knew my father had actually died 14 years earlier. I questioned the sanity of that other part of me that said my dad was bowling somewhere. I never expected how easy it was to cross that line from reality into the wild, the badlands where my mother was now living for I don’t know how long.
Mom, drumming her fingers on the table, looked at me and said in a sly whisper, “I know where he is.”
The two parts of me at the table still sharing the same chair slowly asked, “Where is he, Mom?”
“He’s with that woman up the street!”
Realizing I was now in a play I had never seen nor read, the actor part of me took over, and I exclaimed, “Oh no, Mom. Dad’s cheating on you?” I waited for my next cue in this impromptu play. It came faster than I expected.
“Could you pass a napkin, please?” The inquiry scene involving my philandering father was over.
After the table had been cleared, Mom said she was tired and would be going to bed soon. She instructed me not to close the garage door all the way but to leave it up slightly. With trepidation, I asked why.
“Because Floppy has run away, and when she comes back I want her to be able to get in the garage.”
Floppy was our cocker spaniel from my childhood. She would not be coming home that night nor any night thereafter. The rational part of me wanted to scream, “Are you crazy? Floppy died 40 years ago!” My line, however, was “Oh, okay.”
I carried my suitcase down the hall to my bedroom, my room where many years ago I had slept, studied, and learned to dance playing my 45-r.p.m. records. As I passed my mother’s bedroom, I glanced inside and froze. There, under her mattress, I recognized the handle of my father’s hammer.
As Mom exited the bathroom, she embraced me and said, “Nighty-night, don’t let the bugs bite,” as I had heard her say so many times to me in my childhood. Somehow, her words now took on a more sinister tone. Instead of questioning why Dad’s hammer was under her mattress, I said, “Nighty-night,” continued into my room, and locked the door as quietly as I could.
The next morning, after a restless night, I was grateful to wake up, realizing I had not been bludgeoned to death in my sleep. As I cautiously unlocked and opened my bedroom door, I was met with the comforting aroma of coffee and toast. Mom was already seated at the dining table.
“How did you sleep?”
“Like a log,” I lied.
“Well, I didn’t sleep at all!”
“Why not, Mom?”
“You didn’t hear your uncle and his whole family from Pennsylvania come in last night? All those kids in and out of the house, slamming the doors! I don’t know how you slept through all that racket!”
This time I did not respond. I no longer wanted to act in this play.
My intention of organizing her Fourth of July birthday celebration was then circumvented with clandestine meetings with my two brothers. Which one was going to take her car keys away? Who was going to research local nursing homes with memory care facilities? Who would make the appointment with the doctor at the Alzheimer’s clinic to assess the degree of her dementia? The urgency was overwhelming.
Somehow, we pulled together in this family emergency, and Mom was admitted to the Sunrise Nursing Home, where she would wander in her twilight for five more years.
One morning, very early, I arrived at the memory care wing. The attendant said Mom had slipped into a coma sometime earlier that night. The only way to know that she was still with us was her breathing, which was now slow and shallow. The nurse who escorted me to Mom’s room said, “If there’s anything you would like to say to your mother that you haven’t already said, I suggest you say it this morning. She won’t be able to respond but she can hear you.”
So, in that small, minimally efficient room, I sat at my mother’s bedside, held her shriveled hand, and started my waterfall of words, my litany of gratitude between a son and his mother, beginning with my earliest memories of my childhood, which, at that moment, were somehow all wonderfully transformed into warm recollections.
Mother’s wilderness journey ended that first day of June. She died one month shy of her 96th birthday.