Mother's Days

A year ago on Mothers Day I was in Illinois visiting my mother at Arden Courts Alzheimers Assisted Living.  She had moved there from her independent living apartment just two weeks after her husband Will had died.  They married when she was 70 and he was 75, hoping to have a few good years together.  They had 18.

Back in February, I had gone to Illinois for the funeral and to arrange for the care she would need now that he was gone.  My last sister Martha, who lived nearby, had died in August, just six months before, and I was now the only daughter left.  Will’s daughter Linda and her husband had been managing many aspects of my mother’s life as well as Will’s, with amazing devotion and generosity.   Once Martha was gone and I realized how badly my mother’s memory was failing, I stepped in and did all that I could from California and during a visit in November.

And then Will died, at age 93, on February 6, 2010.

So there I was, frantically trying to make arrangements to keep her in her home with round-the-clock care.  It wasn’t working.  It would be double the price of assisted living and I would have to manage it all from California.  I wanted so badly to do the best thing for her.  One night, leaning on her walker in her living room, she looked at me and said, “You are doing a really good job, Ruth.”  I will never forget the look on her face as she stood there or the quality of her voice when she said the words I’d been waiting 57 years to hear.

I was proud of the way she accepted the necessity of moving to assisted living.  This was when I most appreciated her matter-of-fact, practical, down-to-earth nature, which otherwise had left me stranded in the more complex and creative parts of my personality.  Before dementia really set in, she was the kind of person that just wanted the facts and then let’s get on with it, if that’s how it has to be.  I didn’t feel guilty that I was moving her, just a heavy sadness that her life was shutting down towards its last chapters.

She also felt it, and made another unforgettable statement as we sat down to dinner at the round oak table in her kitchen, the very table from my childhood. 

“I’ve lost my husband, and now I’m losing my home, and I’ll never have another one.” 

My mother didn’t often express her personal feelings; I felt honored to be entrusted with this intimate disclosure from her heart.  But I almost couldn’t bear the poignancy of those words.

Arden Courts turned out to be a lovely place with exceptionally wonderful staff, where she felt at home and content for four months until she broke her hip, had surgery, and went to a nursing home for rehab.  From there I moved her, for the last time, to Berkeley Pines Care Center, here in California.  

Where I visited her yesterday, Mothers Day 2011, with a card, flowers, a new shirt, and a Happy Mothers Day balloon which will last at least a week, reminding her that I think of her, and visit her, and love her.  She still has a daughter.