Love and Hope - a Journey Through Alzheimers

Do you ever wake up and not know where you are?  If you've traveled a lot on business, you know the feeling. But to wake and not know who you are, that would be a terrible thing to behold.

My stepmom married my Dad two years after my Mom died.  He grieved for my Mom terribly, but he was still a relatively young man, and lonely. She was a widow with three grown kids. They were set up on a blind date by a female friend of my Dad's.

She was always a bundle of energy, 5 feet nothing and 95 pounds of whirlwind motion, laughter and care.  An expert seamstress, she joined a group of ladies from the church who handcrafted stuffed teddy bears to give to kids being brought into the trauma unit at the hospital.  I've written of them before, the ladies making the bears from scratch with clothing and accessories, all unique, cowboy bears, farmer bears, made with love, and all at their own expense. 

I remember one story of a trip the ladies made to the hospital with the newest batch of bears. While they were there, a very elderly man was brought in, muttering in pain and confusion, hurting and alone.  His eyes lit up at the bears and he asked to hold one. She gave him one and he hugged it to him, like a little child would, talking to it, breathing deeply of the comfort of soft fur. The ladies let him keep it, a small bit of peace for someone lost and alone.

She had her little moments of forgetfulness, like any aging person, but a previously diagnosed cancer was in remission and she was doing really well, still active in church and in volunteering, taking dance classes, and working in the garden.  But one morning, a few months later, she came into the kitchen and sat down, looked at me and I realized she did not have a clue as to who I was.

What struck me, was not that, but the look on her face as she realized this, realized she should know. I obviously wasn't a burglar or a neighbor over for coffee, I was a girl with red hair like everyone else in the family, wearing a fuzzy robe that she herself had washed and put in the guest closet the night before.  I will never forget the look of her at that moment. It was the most starkly exposed face I'd ever seen, a face in which unknown terrors haunted the edges; the face of a fledgling dove about to tumble from the nest.

It came into our lives quickly, one moment she was laughing, engaging in board games and puns with us, her face bright, her wit razor sharp. Then came those moments where everything just went sort of dim. The doctor only confirmed what Dad had suspected and kept from us for some months until he knew for sure.  Alzheimer's.

It's a terrible disease for all involved. We read what we could about it, we planned as a family and we prayed.  There really wasn't more we could do.

As the next year and a half passed, there were a  few moments she was quite lucid, and happy. But those were the hardest for all of us, for in those brief moments she was fully aware that her mind was going, what was happening to her, and how helpless she was to do anything about it.

The disease's progression is as predictable as its course is certain.  Mood swings and aggression, words that made no sense, dropping to the floor like marbles, tears as she tried to mentally gather them up, anger at the very air around her. She always was gentle with my Dad though. Only with him would she remain calm, the reasoning that was blind and deaf somehow responding to something in him that her mind could still see.  Dad cared for her at home, no matter how bad it got.   We arranged for a home health aide to come in and lend a hand a few hours a week but he refused to let anyone else care for "his girl" or to send her to skilled nursing care. When she passed, it was quite sudden, after she contracted pneumonia. From her sudden coughing to her collapse, was just days.

Sometimes when you get to the far edge, the edge just breaks away.

We laid her to rest on a tree-covered hilltop. We visit, we bring flowers, we hug and shed some tears, neither of us immune to having our hearts broken.  Then we smile through the tears, sharing their stories as we make the long trip home to photos and a little stuffed bear wearing the colors of the flag.

Would she have lived her life differently had she known her fate ahead of time? Perhaps not. Perhaps, in essence, she did, her mother dying of the same disease, as she and my Dad courted. 

She lived life to the hilt, a wheel in motion, racing downhill, a light against the darkness, the whir of a needle into the soft fabric. I have a picture of she and my Dad on their first date, and you could see something in their smiles that would be lost on so many people.  Love is a story that tells itself.

I woke up the other morning abruptly, the glaring ringtone of the bat phone waking me with a message just after I'd fallen asleep.  For a moment, I did not know where I was at. The small room was cold, with no sound of a dog checking on me as I came awake.  I was in a hotel room, traveling in the previous day when duty called.  My heart was pounding as that particular ring will do that to me, the surge of adrenalin. There would be no going back to sleep.

But I was aware, of every tick of the clock, of the feel of my skin, missing the soft panting of doggie breath waiting to see if I was going to get up and leave or go back to sleep.  I was so blissfully aware, of these moments, these sounds. It was a new day, and even if tired and cranky, I'd leap right in, like a deer into the brush, feeling no thorns.

So I go, and so I watch, finding sense in the senseless, finding my purpose even as sparrows fall to earth. People watching from a distance would think me too quiet, too still, shouldn't this activity be a frenzy of lights and motion, like on TV?  But there is a great activity in being the quiet observer, standing in a stillness that smells of silence,  breathing in so many scents in damp cold air. Sweat, blood, and a flower that only blooms in the dark, the wind so scant it's like breath on a mirror. Each smell blended yet distinct, always overlayed with the copper tang of life spilled. The air hums along to the night's quiet as all I see, smell, and feel, forms into a substance I can almost feel on my flesh, capturing it, recording it there in the stillness. The truth is often still, inarticulate, not knowing it is the truth.

When I get home again, I'll once again see that photo of them on that first date, the feelings there so sudden and so very unexpected, incapable of being formed into sound. I'll look at another photo, the last one we have of her where she was completely with us, a laughing woman on my deck in the Indiana summer, her movements that of a bird, free and spirited. There is no fear in her, in that memory, even as the picture lies silent. But there is hope.

Those last days with her were difficult, but they taught me a lot.  Not just visible confirmation of what my Dad was truly made of, but that words aren't necessary to define what you believe, that nestled in the strong crook of an arm of the one who understands you without words, you know exactly who you are.  Even when she didn't know who I was, she taught me about not being limited by fear but going forward with hope, even if the future is not articulated.

Home and love, love and desire, can be what propels us silently onward.  Hope and love, love and desire, can also merely sound, that people who have never hoped or loved or desired have for what they never possessed, and will not until such time as they forget the words.