The last few days have allowed some reflection on my middle-aged life, filled with memories, special people and a reminder or two that life is flying by. Monday after work I drove a few miles to have coffee with Jane, a woman I’d never met, but whom I’d heard about years earlier from my mother. Jane and share a name; it’s her last and my first. I was given it to honor my paternal great-grandmother, who died (along with her husband) when my grandfather was five years old. So, he was sent to live with his uncle (whom I met fifty years later as a small child). All this occurred in a small town in Arkansas that literally disappeared in later years, lost from all records that I can find. The site of this former town is perhaps now occupied by a crossroads or maybe just a cotton field. Regardless, it’s now gone, along with my grandfather and the man who raised him. But during that time this man raised a family and they in turn raised families, such that one of his granddaughters was now serving me coffee, more than half a century later and almost a thousand miles away.
Jane and I easily slipped into conversation, on topics ranging from cats to music, but quickly found common ground in talking about our mothers, and what they had in common. We weren’t comparing genetic traits, since they’re not related by blood, but rather behaviors they have in common, thanks to the modern plague known as Alzheimer’s. We shared our experiences, our coping strategies, and the dark humor so essential to those of us who watch our loved ones gradually disappear before our eyes. She told me of her mother’s knack for disabling her chair alarm, buying herself some temporary ‘freedom’. I relate my mom’s increasing tendency to ‘forget’ to take her blood pressure and cholesterol medication and wonder aloud if she’s truly forgetting or deliberately making a choice. But despite the gloomy topic, I appreciate the conversation and the camaraderie and leave with a beautiful bouquet of flowers from her garden that Jane has ready for me to take to my mom with her regards.
After work the next day, I’m unusually double-booked in a social sense. First I joined my ‘brother’ Steve for a beer and a talk, a rare treat considering that his day job is often two time zones away, and that he has three females to consider when scheduling (one nurse, and a high school and a middle school student). So, he and I cherish our rare beers together and our conversation hops from topic to topic. On this day some of those topics stretch back more than twenty years, to those days when Steve helped us build our home, holding one end of a rafter while I flailed at nailing on the other, as our little house slowly took shape. And also to later days when he and I buried some of our best four-legged friends together, now each resting under a headstone in the middle of our orchard-to-be. Yes, I don’t use the term ‘brother’ lightly, applying it to only one other individual that doesn’t share my blood. But Steve (who encouraged me to start blogging in the first place) has been there for me for twenty years now, and yesterday we examined some of those shared moments, good and bad, from the perspective of our bar stools. I highly recommend it.
I left my beer and nachos and headed to mom’s for my weekly drive-by. Preoccupied by my conversation with Steve, I had violated my own rule of always calling her ahead of time to give her a heads-up. So when she answered my characteristic “shave and a haircut” knock, I was surprised to see that she was still in her bathrobe at 7:00 PM. “Just being lazy” was her explanation. “Not having anyone to talk to” was her reason for forgetting things (including forgetting the fact that her dinner and bridge partner of four years had recently died). “I don’t want to tie up the washing machines” was her excuse for not having washed a slipcover that had been removed from a couch cushion at least two weeks earlier. However, for the next two hours, we had a nice visit and she loved the flowers from Jane, though I had to explain at least four times where they came from and how I had located Jane. Yes, with each month that goes by, as Mom struggles to retain her skills, her memories, her appearance, indeed even an interest in the things around her, she slowly spirals.
As I’m doing increasingly as of late, after a series of ‘I love you’ hugs with mom, I head to the nearby home of my oldest brother to unwind before the hour-long trip to my own home. Even more than the earlier talk with Jane, It’s cathartic to talk about Mom’s decline with someone who understands it first-hand. But after four years of watching the process, I think I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for that lurch that will take mom to a place where neither party recognizes the other. It will be a dark day and I confess that I can’t really make myself imagine what it will be like. However, now in the company of family, it helps me to ‘vent’ about the previous two hours with Mom, and equally importantly to then recharge my batteries with other happier stories about my nieces, or dogs or movies, or whatever.
Because as important as my ‘brother’ Steve is to me, those bonds are a lot stronger when they’re fifty-plus years old, and when the guy on the other end looks and sounds a lot like the guy in my mirror.
Posted on August 27th, 2008 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Family Life | 1 Comment »
