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Ma Chronicles: Caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s (part 4): Grief
Grief feels like the year 2001, when dozens of people smoked cigarettes in a dimly lit divebar. My lungs are heavy, eyes burning hot, and each strand of hair and pore of skin is soaked in the smell of it.
I’m choking, but everyone wants me to smile. It’s so loud in here, no one can hear me speak, so I field the second half of their comments with nods and control the muscles of my face to look interested.
I’d like to slink off to a safer haven, anywhere, a bathroom would do, where a row of women are fixing their lips and their tops and no one is looking anywhere except at themselves in the mirror. But the lights are too shocking and bright; they reveal the rings on my forehead, rough red skin below my nostrils, and that blue vein newly appearing on my temple.
It is 2024, and I have been losing my mom day by day to Alzheimer’s, for the past nine years probably, but officially and rapidly, for the past four. She does not know who I am or where I was born. She only remembers our dogs in our childhood home. I am like a cardboard cutout in a family photograph, but she asks for her daughter, they say.
Somedays, reality sounds like the deadening ring of tinnitis, like I can hear the still air hanging above me, in the interim between breaths, but days like today, I muffle my sob on the phone with her, while elevating my voice to a high pitch “yes, yes Mom, that is wonderful. Yes we will all get together soon”. She thinks I am her sister today and now I speak for her siblings and try to leave her on a happy note.
When we hang up the phone — panic, like the year 1995, running away from a boy I thought I liked, down a dingy stairwell in a closed library parking lot, like I’m trying to hold onto something as precious as virginity, as innocence, childhood, while reality encroaches like the squeak and scrape of tennis shoes behind me turning to descend the next flight of stairs.
What will happen next? What will happen now?
Consumed by disease, my mother lives on, and she follows the exact path of what we have all have read. Yet I cannot face the thought of it: what would she will look like if her neck muscles weaken, if her words slur, if she, once the most beautiful writer shakes to hold a pen.
