Switzerland

My mom has mostly stopped talking. First, she lost random words, then entire sentences.  It’s been a cruel progression, or rather an unraveling. She isn’t mute but she can no longer hold thoughts and memories.  Ever pragmatic and practical, she just doesn’t say much anymore.

Her mind, like the Sears department store in the shopping mall near her Memory Care facility, just suddenly closed for business one day.  It used to contain a wealth of merchandise -- clothing, jewelry, home appliances, tools, lawn and garden supplies, paint, sporting goods, automotive parts, electronics, and of course, baggage, lots of baggage.  But now the big building that anchors the Northgate Mall in Marin County is vacant, and the red letters that screamed SEARS no longer appear on the expanse of the pinkish grey stucco wall.

Who would have imagined that Sears, such a formidable icon of American retail from my childhood and before, would ever fail? But Target and Walmart and Amazon came along and the whole business changed.  SEARS declined.  It lost its way.  It’s kind of like that with my mom and the dementia. 

Ever business minded, my mom would like this metaphor. She owned her own small  pharmacy in downtown Denver; she spent her days behind the cash register, ringing up prescriptions and maintaining an odd inventory of products. She got a kick out of putting “racy” items at the counter.  I can’t remember exactly what these were, but they involved breasts and penises, and made me incredibly uncomfortable when I worked at the drugstore as a teenager.  

She actively invested in the stock market, and now her “winnings” pay for her exorbitant assisted living costs. The day when she stopped understanding money and abdicated all control of her finances to me floored me. She just let all that go. I had stopped by the ATM Machine to get her a twenty.  When I popped back into the car, and handed her the bill, she looked very confused and said, “I don’t need that, do I?”

Like the Stock Market she taught me to play, she’s volatile within a reasonable range.  The medical marijuana she takes has improved her mood and she is much less anxious.  As she is less anxious, I am less anxious.  Some days she’s better than others, more alert, somehow. Other days she’s barely present and struggles to move her feet. She’ll look down and announce, “That one won’t work.”   I know how to keep her going – I take her hand, encourage her to take her time and lift her foot.  I tell her we’re on an adventure, that we will have some fun and get some food, or go see a movie.  She is happy always to see me. By the time I punch in the combination to unlock the exit door from her building, she’s forgotten where she is and where we’re headed.  But she still knows how I am.

I’ve been working this past year to let her go, and to put more space between us.  For someone so very complicated (I’m still analyzing her past) she now is remarkably simple. At 89, she is losing her mobility, control of bodily functions, and her speech. She still enjoys eating, though often forgets what to do with a fork or spoon, reverting to using her hands.  I don’t say anything, unless there’s a bowl of soup in front of her.

She has lost my father and several of their friends and relatives who populated her world.  Occasionally she asks where my dad is, and I remind her that he is dead. “But he’ll be coming around the corner,” she asserts.  “You’ll see him again soon,” I tell her.  “Probably In heaven, watching a Broncos game.”  Her awareness of her own loss of function is also thankfully disappearing. She used to stop mid-sentence and frustrated would announce, “I can’t even talk.”

“I wonder what’s going to replace Sears,” I say to my mom as we drive past the mall on our way to lunch. As we drive, I blast Frank Sinatra tunes on Pandora and my mom sings, remembering lyrics to these songs, not missing a single word.   This singing comforts both of us.  I am surprised at how many lyrics I know too, since this wasn’t my music; it is hers. 

The loss of language has happened gradually over a decade; in my mom’s brain, there’s a tangle of vines, like the Himalayan Blackberry on the hillside across from my house. This tangle produces a canopy that limits light to plants growing beneath, killing them off.  And so it is with language.  I used to be able to find the word or complete her sentences for her, or guess what she was trying to tell me about and fill in.

But lately, I have no clue.  When I spend time with her we don’t say much.  I ask simple questions like, “How you feeling today, mom?” and she responds, “Good,” or “Fine,” or “Ok.”  If I ask her what’s new, she always answers the same, “Absolutely nothing,” because from moment to moment she can no longer remember what she has done or what has happened.

She exists in the present, and increasingly, in this silence.  My mom never was a big talker.  She lacked the chat gene. People who used to call her were taken aback by the shortness of their conversations.  She would hang up within a minute or two.  It wasn’t personal. It was just my mom. It wasn’t that she didn’t have thoughts and judgments -- she had many; however, she quickly got to the point, with a directness that often disregarded feeling.  The autism spectrum wasn’t a thing when she was growing up, so my mom never was placed on it.  But I think she belongs there.

I struggled with her communication style for much of my life.  I didn’t think she had much interest in what I had to say since her responses were so abbreviated.  My dad, on the other hand, loved lengthy heartfelt discussions.  He kept the questions coming and listened carefully to my answers.  He also loved telling stories, and if the story contained something positive about him, he loved to repeat it, at least three times.  This was a running shtick with him.   I landed somewhere between the two of them, with a passion for using words and an aversion to small talk.  I relish meaningful dialogue.

 

“Mom, will you be sure to put something in your will that let’s me take you to Switzerland if you suffer from dementia and can’t write or talk?” my daughter asks.  “They allow assisted suicide there.”  We sit at our dining room table in the warm afternoon sun, discussing the state of my mother.  I’ve told my daughter that if I lose my mind, I do not want to hang around.  “Absolutely,” I say.  “Just tell me it’s time to visit the Swiss Alps, and then let’s fly away.”