Losing your place in her heart

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/05/2024 (849 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I could tell by her face that she didn’t know who I was.

She smiled at me as she would anyone who approached her, always happy for company.

“Oh, hi!” she said.

There was no awareness that I had been away for two months — the longest I have gone without seeing her in more than 30 years.

While I was relieved she didn’t lament my absence, and it made me feel less guilty for having been gone so long, it was yet another reminder that our mother is retreating further and further away from us.

How can you reconnect with someone who doesn’t remember what they had for lunch, let alone their child’s face and name? Meaningful conversation is difficult.

I couldn’t tell her about where I’d been since she didn’t know I had been away, even though I’d told her beforehand.

She can only tell me how she is doing in the moment.

I can only imagine how, for her, one day must run into the next, with time now incalculable.

Her short-term memory can be measured in seconds, and her long-term memory has been reduced to blurry vignettes of people and places from long before I was born, like old glass-plate photographs in need of a good dusting.

And though my mother can still recite the names of the five children she gave birth to — and two of her siblings she helped raise — she does so by rote. We no longer seem to have identities or life stories that intersect with her own.

I realize that not only are we losing her, and she us, but that the longer we know our mother with dementia, the harder it is to conjure up the person she was before — the bustling, oh-so-capable mother who was always doing something, and usually for someone other than herself.

Hemming my sister’s skirt with a mouthful of pins as partridgeberry muffins baked in the oven and a pot of moose soup simmered on the stove.

Effortlessly setting another place for an unexpected guest while making it seem like having another mouth to feed was the thing that had most brightened her day.

Dressing up like a stick of gum to accompany my father to church, where he would wear the white surplice she had washed, hung on the line and then ironed just hours before.

Painting kitchen baseboards and trim on a hot summer’s day, her cheerful face freckled with flecks of white oil paint, in contrast to the dusting of flour she had worn while making bread that morning.

She seemed to be everywhere in the house at once; everything to everyone.

That person has been banished bit by bit by Alzheimer’s over the last 20 years.

“Would you like to play Scrabble?” I ask.

“Sure,” she says.

We head to our usual wing chairs in the library. I get the board ready, setting out the little wooden pews, the notepad and pen for keeping score, the black drawstring cloth bag of letter tiles.

“I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name,” she says in the polite tone she reserves for strangers.

“I had five children,” she adds cordially, rhyming off our names from oldest to youngest.

She looks at the Scrabble letters in front of her with obvious bewilderment, an always sharp speller now struggling to find words.

We get through the game, and I give her a kiss and a hug before I go.

“I love you,” I say, and mean it.

“I love you,” she replies automatically and distractedly, like she’s answering the call and response of prayers said during the hundreds of church services she attended in her lifetime.

A personal care worker comes in, looking for mom.

“Oh, I love YOU,” my mother tells her, with obvious affection, hugging her tight.

It’s a jolt to my heart, but it makes sense that she would feel more warmth in that moment for someone she sees daily, someone more familiar than this woman who has appeared out of the blue.

That’s the thing about dementia. It greatly narrows your world, confining you to small snapshots of life or transporting you to cobwebbed corners of the distant past.

It’s an arbitrary time-traveller; a ruthless robber, stealing great swaths of your life — whole decades when you raised children, nurturing them from infancy to adulthood.

On this day, those children are gone from her mind.

We are just names, like beads on a taut and fragile string of memory.

Pam Frampton is a freelance writer and editor who lives in St. John’s. Email pamelajframpton@gmail.com X: pam_frampton