Tag Archive for: Mom

Mom and Kenny Rogers

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KennyRogers.jpg
By John Mathew Smith & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA – KennyRogers, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75141455

Kenny Rogers died last night. He was my mom’s absolute, first-line celebrity crush. She used to joke that she would marry him in a second if he showed up at her door. Every time we got in the car to head out to cross-country ski, we would settle in to our prescribed places in her baby blue Volkswagen square back and she’d pop in a cassette and crank the volume. If it was a sunny day, we’d roll the windows down and sing along, she and I, while Katy stared out the window trying not to get carsick and Chris cranked up the sound on his Walkman to drown us out.

I don’t know that I was a massive fan of Kenny Rogers, but I loved the effect his music had on Mom. Before she and Dad divorced, he was pretty much in charge of the music for road trips – Doobie Brothers, Little River Band, those were his choices and I never really thought about whether or not Mom would have chosen them. But after the divorce, it was Kenny Rogers and Anne Murray in Mom’s car, belted out with feeling. I think I get it more now. After my divorce I had the sensation that there was more room in the world for my choices, that while I hadn’t disliked the music or trips my ex chose, I hadn’t ever felt fully free to stretch my limbs out in to space and freely choose what I would have preferred.

My ex and I had similar taste in music – we both grew up with Def Leppard, Led Zeppelin, The Cars, The Rolling Stones, Mötley Crüe. But I also loved REM, 10,000 Maniacs, Depeche Mode, and The Thompson Twins. As young adults, he drifted toward Green Day and The Killers, which I liked, but I stockpiled Indigo Girls and Annie Lennox and Pink as well, which he jokingly called “chick music.” It was really a seamless, unspoken understanding that when he was in the car, we’d listen to his preferences and when he wasn’t the girls and I could indulge ourselves with our girly stuff.

Right now, as mom is sequestered inside her assisted living facility, safely taken care of but also on hospice, I am resisting pulling up the audio of “If I Ever Fall in Love Again” because I know it will push me over the edge of this lump in my throat in to a crying jag and I’m not ready. I’m reserving it because I cry at least once a day now, and I find a sweet release, but this cry will be different. It will be the tears I shed for the loss of my mom’s voice. The only place I can hear it now is in my own head and I don’t want to waste it or erase it or cover it up with Kenny and Anne singing to each other. It will be the tears I shed on behalf of mom because she won’t know that he’s gone and couldn’t grieve for him. It will be the tears I shed for the idea that I might not see Mom again if she dies before they lift the ban on visitors. I want to sit with her and hold her hand one more time, maybe sing some lines from The Gambler to her and dig deep in to her reserves one time to see if her spirit can conjure up that feeling of freedom, wheeling along the highway, windows down, one hand surfing the waves of air as we laugh and harmonize on our way to play in the snow together.

“You got to know when to hold ’em
Know when to fold ’em
Know when to walk away
Know when to run…”

Treading New Ground

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I had thought that, since I lost one parent already, there would be a sense of familiarity, of deja vu, of “been there, done that” when I lost the next one. Not in a dismissive way, just an “ok, I’ve got this, I know what to expect” kind of way.

Nope.

Dad was diagnosed with lung cancer. He told me early on, I was there to listen, I went down when he had surgery to remove part of his left lung and some lymph nodes, I let him bounce ideas off of me for future treatments. We weren’t certain of the timeline, but we knew he was sick and he was absolutely honest with me about how sick he was. It was excoriatingly, skin-flayingly, teeth-grindingly painful in the last week to watch him suffer. He knew me until the minute he died in my arms.

But Alzheimer’s or dementia or whatever the hell this is that Mom has is a completely different animal. She isn’t having some diseased cells cut away. She isn’t calling me to tell me about the latest drugs or therapies her doctor has offered. She might live for six months or six years. She has no idea who I am.

This one-sided relationship is teeth-grindingly painful in a completely different way. When Dad took a turn for the worse, it was obvious. Over a period of several days, he began having pain in his legs and hips and when they took x-rays it was clear that the cancer had spread to his bones. An MRI showed it was in his brain, too – the cancer cells lit up like the night sky I once saw in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico. From that point forward, we knew there was no rallying, no bouncing back.

Mom’s slide has been gradual except when it seems to leap forward, and there have been many times over the last year when she was almost able to snap out of it and recognize me and have a conversation. The cruelest part of that is that it gave me hope. It made me wonder how we could capture those lucid moments and prolong them, whether there was some magical drug that she could take that would clear the way for a return to herself. Those moments, when they are gone, are all I can hope for and envision, but they are much fewer and farther between and I know I won’t get a signal that tells me I’ve seen the last one. I didn’t get a sign the last time I spoke to Mom on the phone that said it wouldn’t happen again. I didn’t get a warning the last time she called me by name and knew I was her daughter so that I could savor it.

There is a part of me that wonders if I am a little bit narcissistic in my grief. A part that thinks maybe it shouldn’t matter so much whether she knows who I am, that tells me to just get on with caring for her the best way I know how without worrying whether she remembers I’m hers. Because somehow, I want to be special. I don’t want to be just one of another cast of characters who comes through to visit and smile at her. I want to be her daughter, not for any sort of recognition of my efforts, but because I mean something more. There is something about the reciprocity of a loving relationship that makes it feel whole. When I sat with Dad during his last days, holding his hand and telling him stories, even though he couldn’t speak, there was a familiarity. He squeezed my hand and his eyes danced during the funny parts, and his rough, calloused thumb rubbed back and forth against mine when I was being serious. We had a history that was fully intact until the moment he took his last breath and when I grieved for him, I grieved for all of it simultaneously, the loss of his body, his Self, and our relationship.

This time, I am grieving in stages. While there are parts of Mom’s Self that are still fully intact – her sarcasm and playfulness comes out sometimes with her husband – I have lost the history of our relationship as mother and daughter. She knows I am familiar, but she doesn’t know why. Our inside jokes now belong to me, even though she is physically still here. When we sit together, I can’t tell her stories about my kids or my husband because it confuses her – she doesn’t know these people, why am I talking about them? We can’t reminisce or look forward to sharing family holidays together or significant moments in the future because she isn’t coming to my girls’ high school graduations or weddings. There is a quality of suspended animation to it all, a sense that I am walking without a foundation beneath me.

I wish I had a succinct ending to this post. I usually am able to close the loop with some sort of insight, but maybe the fact that I can’t this time is an apt metaphor for how all of this feels right now – loose and unfinished.

It’s Not About Me

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“My brain is just mush right now!”
“It’s all just a blur. I don’t know why I can’t remember.”
“You can put it in that…thing over there that is meant to have food in it. That big, white thing. Right there.”

Mom is struggling. Whether it is due to her poorly controlled diabetes or the onset of dementia, or her family’s gene pool playing out its hand and dealing her the early-onset Alzheimer’s her mother had, I don’t know. And frankly, it doesn’t matter. The reality is, she can’t be alone these days for long without consequences. And since her husband recently spent a few days in the hospital for surgery, my brother and spent a few days tag-teaming her.  I got up at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning and headed down I-5, a little over four hours in the car chasing NPR stations as I went without one stop to pee or eat.  It’s been six months since I saw her, although I speak to her on the phone every few days, and I’ve been increasingly worried about her.

I wasn’t quite sure what I would find, but I was on edge. Her husband went in early Thursday morning for surgery and she sat vigil at the hospital, calling me every few hours to report, and getting increasingly panicky. By the fourth call, she had lost the thread that he was there for surgery and wondered why the doctors were giving him antibiotics and wouldn’t let him come home.  At 7:30, she called to report that she was at home, but it took her more than an hour to find her car in the parking lot at their small, local hospital, and she was annoyed.  When I checked on her Friday morning, she wasn’t sure whether she would go visit him, but she still couldn’t remember that he’d had surgery. She said he was at the hospital with a “bad cold.” My brother spent the afternoon and evening with her on Friday and texted me updates that scared us both. He considered hiding her car keys, but couldn’t get her out of the room long enough to dig in her purse and find them.

The hurricane of emotions picked me up and threw me side-to-side. I agonized over the four-hour distance between us, the kids I have at home that still need me a great deal, and thoughts of where do we go from here. Occasionally, I railed at the genetic sequence that put this destination squarely within my own sights and called Bubba to remind him that I’ve ordered him to push me off the edge of the Grand Canyon as soon as I forget the names of my friends and family. Time and time again I was sucked back into the ruts that demanded I “fix it,” find a solution, put some plan in place to deal with all of this.

And on my way home today, I remembered; it’s not about me. It just isn’t. This is about her. Occasionally, I saw glimpses of fear before she masked them. I felt tenderness when she followed me into the kitchen to see what I was cooking for dinner and lamented my eventual departure. I watched as she doted on her two cats, continually seeking them out to be sure they were warm and dry and fed. And when I have the presence of mind to recall that this is about Mom, I can relax and listen. I can sit with her and listen to the same stories over and over and reflect on what her touchstones are, think about the moments in her day that she holds on to. If I listen closely enough, she will tell me what she wants, and for now, that is the most important thing.