Goodbye, Mom

So strange, to feel sad and yet to find a bit of gladness at the same time.

Last Saturday I took Eldest Daughter Kate to Lewiston for a visit with Mom. We arrived at the midday meal time. The first thing that struck me as I walked in and looked across the room was how very much she resembled her own mother, my Grandma Humphrey, with her hair now snow white.

Mom slumped, birdlike or perhaps mouselike, at the dining room table, nibbling sporadically at half a roll smeared with jam. A full plate—chicken drumstick, roasted baby red potatoes, steamed orange and yellow carrots—had been pushed aside, as had small plastic glasses of water and pink lemonade.

As always, she brightened when we greeted her but didn’t really know who we were. We settled in, one on either side of her, resting our hands on her shoulders and talking gently. At one point she laughed merrily, sounding so much like her old self that I put my head down and cried.

Kate encouraged her to eat some of her other foods but Mom wasn’t interested. She finished the roll—a 40-minute task after we arrived plus who knows how long before we got there to eat the first half.

For some time Mom’s speech has been a garbled mix of English and Klingon (or perhaps something less guttural than Klingon). She’ll start a sentence with a few words of English and segue without a hiccup into a waterfall of speechlike sounds: all the intonations and accompanying facial expressions of a sentence and none of the meaning.

We’ve learned to respond to her tone of voice and non-verbal language for an interaction that seems to satisfy her. Amazing how far an “Oh, really?” or “I see what you mean” can carry a “conversation.”

She came across loud and clear with “Don’t push me!” as Kate and I tried to maneuver her from dining room chair to walker to upholstered chair in the main seating area. That made us laugh because she communicated quite clearly in that moment.

With the aide’s help we got there at last and nestled in, talking and giving her some loving human touch with pats and hugs. She told us quite a bit, most of it in words we couldn't understand.

But at one point she said "Jan," my older sister's name, very clearly in the middle of a sentence. We loved hearing that because Jan has been the one on the front lines with both Dad and Mom for at least a decade and it felt as if this still registered with Mom. She also said "Bill" a couple of times--my dad's name and we think she meant him, in whatever mash-up she was sharing.

At one point Kate, trying to reach Mom with who we were, leaned in and said, “This is your daughter, Barb—Barbara,” pointing to me, “and I’m her daughter, your granddaughter.”

Mom looked right at me and said quite clearly, “You have the world. Bless you! You’re mine.” I burst into tears. It felt so strange and wonderful to have her say something that made some kind of sense. When she said, “You have the world. Bless you!” I felt as if she were responding to Kate’s identification of herself as my daughter because all Mom’s life being a wife and mother meant more than anything to her. “You’re mine” meant she knew I was her daughter.

I don’t know if any of that is true. Life is what you make of it and that will be my truth for this visit.

We hugged and kissed Mom and told her we love her, then headed back to Spokane.

There I helped Kate move and did a thousand other things for the next 3 days: worked on presentations for the conference I was to attend later in the week, rode my bike officially and unofficially, went to meetings and events, smelled the lilacs in Manito Park, ate ice cream at The Scoop, spent time with friends, and drove back across the state to Grand Mound, near Olympia.

All of this hurly-burly explains why I didn’t look at personal email until late Tuesday night. That’s when I discovered that Sunday night Mom’s hip broke and she fell. She was in the hospital and failing fast.

Operating on a 92-year-old woman with dementia who’s on blood thinners and who doesn’t understand what’s happening didn’t make sense.

We were waiting for the end and she would spend the rest of her life—however long it lasted—in bed on pain medication. I felt angry that we treat our animals better than we treat humans when it comes to the end of life.

Wednesday morning my brother Don called, sobbing, to tell me she had died peacefully in her sleep during the night. I called my younger sister and couldn’t reach her so I had to leave a message. There’s no harder voice mail to leave in the world but who would want to learn this from an email rather than a human voice? I knew we’d start planning the service via email and she would see that; with 6 siblings we carry on a lot of family business that way.

I’m so sad. I’m sad that my parents didn’t have the old age they deserved. I’m sad that Dad lost his loving companion of so many years and had only her shell there with him. I’m sad that when he died just after Thanksgiving in 2012 we couldn’t tell her. She wouldn’t understand, if she did it would cause her pain, and then she would forget but have a lingering sadness, so why do that to her?

I’m sad that a woman who was a storyteller all her life and kept all the family memories in circulation had to lose her memory. I’m sad that the woman who made sure she never missed a birthday card to anyone couldn’t tell you how old she was or how many children she had. I’m sad that she suffered pain and had to go to the hospital.

And yet I’m glad. I’m so glad that Kate and I had that last sweet visit. I’m glad Mom laughed and that my laugh sounds a lot like hers. I’m glad we hugged her and kissed her and told her we love her. I’m glad Mom spoke so clearly and said something I can treasure. I’m glad that at the end she didn’t have to suffer long and she went to sleep.

My older sister Jan wrote a beautiful obituary that tells you more about her life.

Goodbye, Mom.

For My Dad, on His 94th Birthday

The day my dad was born—November 3, 1917—was the day the first engagement involving U.S. forces in Europe took place near the Rhine-Marne Canal in France during World War I. This seems appropriate, somehow, for my World War II bomber pilot dad, who was to take part in some incredibly pivotal battles that he never talked about to me and who may well have flown over that same canal, since he flew in the European theater.

I really only learned about the significance of my dad’s war activities when my brother Jim got him to talk to a video camera a few years ago as part of an oral history project. The final edited version places Dad’s actions in context with a historian’s perspective, and left me in awe of his accomplishments and those of his fellow members of the Greatest Generation. My sister Jan put together an amazing scrapbook and did research about his unit, but none of this was anything Dad ever really told us about. “I did my duty,” was all he said when asked.

I had known a bit, sure, thanks to Mom. That it was mostly college kids who made it into Officer Candidate School and that my dad, who had only completed high school, studied on the bus all the way there while the college boys drank and whooped it up, and he passed the entrance exam. That he became a pilot because one day, slogging along in infantry training, he looked up at the planes flying overhead and thought that looked like a much better place to be than down on the ground. That he flew so many missions that Mom knew when he left on the one that, statistically speaking, was “the one he wouldn’t come back from” (but he did). That he lost a tail gunner. That he landed a plane with the engine shot off. (And took a picture of the plane afterwards.)

My favorite story was about the time he smuggled my mom (shhh, don’t tell the Pentagon) aboard one day disguised as a member of the crew when they were testing some kind of secret equipment back in the U.S. (I don’t know what—maybe radar?) and she got to find out what it was like to ride inside a B-24 (or maybe a B-17 “Flying Fortress,” since that’s what he trained in).

Mom wrote an amazing letter describing it, complete with him slapping her hand gently as they walked out to the plane—her trying to walk like a man in the jumpsuit and heavy equipment—and saying, “The pilot and the co-pilot do not hold hands!” (Back then, children, people wrote by hand, with pens, on paper, and if you were my mom you first wrote a draft copy to compose the letter and kept that for your children to marvel over decades later. Good luck with my emails and blog posts.)

One day I asked Dad why he didn’t become an airline pilot when he came home. I thought that sounded like a romantic job, an exciting job, unlike his mysterious work in management at Potlatch Forests Incorporated (“PFI,” for those of us who grew up as Potlatch kids in Lewiston, Idaho). He looked at me and said dryly, “I didn’t want to be a bus driver.”

So he came home a captain and went back to the mill, where he had worked since high school. He worked his way up, he took Dale Carnegie courses, he rose through the ranks, and he ended up managing the Lewiston mill and having some kind of oversight of a bunch of little mills sprinkled around North Idaho. His career with Potlatch is the reason I’ve been to places like Headquarters, Jaype, Pierce, and a bunch of little towns you’ve never heard of, some of which may no longer exist, and walked in the St. Maries Paul Bunyan Days parade as a little kid. I got to ride on the last log drive on the Clearwater River thanks to Dad’s job, on the wanigan (cook boat)—possibly the last major whitewater log drive in the United States, according to one history.

I learned that the smell of sawdust—and the not-so-pleasant smell of the adjacent pulp mill—meant the livelihoods of half the town, or so it seemed.

I learned (although not firsthand—just through listening when the men came back at the end of the day to the hunting camp we went to near Salmon each year) that you only shoot when you know for sure what you’re aiming at, you make sure you shoot to kill, you put a wounded animal out of its misery, and if you shoot it, you pack it out. (And—not that I’ll ever use this knowledge—that when you hang and gut a deer, you want to be careful not to perforate the bowel.)

I learned the rules of gun safety: Treat all guns in the house as if they are loaded (although you never put one away loaded) and never, ever point one at another human being in “fun.”

I would have learned to fish, but he made me clean the first one I ever caught and the squishy guts put an end to my trout-fishing career.

He started jogging sometime shortly after I was born as a “late in life” baby (he turned 45 three days before my birthday), thanks to Dr. Ken Cooper’s book Aerobics. He ran on the track around our barn that had been created for my brothers’ motorcycle riding antics until one night when he stepped on a porcupine in the near-darkness. That day I learned some new words as he pulled the quills out. He switched to running in place indoors, counting his steps silently to himself until near the end when you’d hear him call out the last few numbers as he finished, soaked with sweat.

I remember him startling younger sister Julie and I any number of times by honking the horn if we passed in front of the car while getting ready to load up and go somewhere—particularly if we were all dressed up in our finery for a big night out at the Elks Club, where he was a member and was once named “Elk of the Year” for the state of Idaho thanks to leading the drive to build the new club.

At the Elks Club he’d say, “Mrs. Greene?” and lead my mom to the dance floor, where they waltzed and did the foxtrot to whatever combo was playing covers of Charlie Rich songs and big band-era music.

The “Elk of the Year” plaque hung in the basement near the pool table, where all of his kids learned to play and where we learned what a wily pool shark he was. “Rrrrrrack ‘em up!” he’d call out with delight after once again sinking the eight ball while half our balls sat forlornly on the table.

He taught us to play gin rummy and pinochle, too, and usually won, although I’m pretty sure he was secretly delighted when we mastered enough of the strategy of the game to take a hand or a game.

I learned many folksy sayings from my dad, whose parents hailed from the hills of North Carolina. “Whatever smokes your drawers” was a favorite when he was happy to leave a choice up to us, and I still remember the smile I got one day when he said that in the kitchen and I jumped up to hold myself suspended in a sitting position over the kitchen sink, saying, “Tsssssss.”

And in recent years, I’ve learned that he will answer with infinite patience as my mom asks a dozen times in a row when it will be time for dinner, or where they live now. Her dementia has left him without the full companionship of the woman he has been married to for 67 years or so. Fortunately he can turn down his hearing aid and miss some of her many laps around a short track, as I put it. And fortunately, one of the things that remains steadfast in Mom’s memory is that he’s her husband and she married the right guy, who happens to be a terrific dancer.

Thanks, Dad, and happy birthday.

Related Reading

• 3 Things My Mother Taught Me
• Friday the 13th, or, Why Some People Need to Lose a Driver's License
• Mom Frmrnyis
• For Someone Who's Supposed to Be So Smart...Ways in Which I Am Stupid

Don't Buy That Case of Stuff on Sale. I'm Serious.

Nearly a decade has passed since I helped prepare my parents for a move to assisted living for Mom’s dementia, but whenever I enter into a frenzy of cleaning, sorting, down-sizing or right-sizing I’m taken back to these days.

They owned so much STUFF! I had no idea until I saw it all spread out in heaps and mounds all over the pool table, end tables, coffee table, folding tables, and every other flat surface in their basement.

When I’d visit and she’d tell me she was “busy sorting” I had no idea what this meant. The topic wasn’t much of a conversation-starter so we’d move on.

Once I went downstairs to look for myself, though, it appeared that each and every day of the week she started the task anew based on a different sorting algorithm.

• “Today, I’m putting all craft projects into the craft project pile.”
•  “Today, I’m putting everything into piles by kid so if it’s a craft project by Barb it goes in the Barb pile.”
• “Today, I’m sorting by holidays so if it’s a craft project by Barb related to Christmas it goes in the Christmas pile.”

All of these without reference to the previous day’s system or any apparent progress, so of course she would never finish sorting.

I took the girls with me sometimes to keep me company while I combed through closets, drawers, the three-car garage, and the dusty piles in the basement for anything actually worth keeping.

I had ONE method: if it pertained to one of their six children, it went in a box with that kid’s name, and if it was something personal about Mom and Dad such as a scrapbook or photos it went into the box that would move with them. Other than that, Helloooo, Estate Sale Lady.

We found amazing quantities of some items. I only recently—and I’m serious about this—used the last of the plastic wrap I took with me.

The girls took a lot away from this. Things like finding six unopened bottles of nail polish remover in the bathroom cupboard stick with you, I guess.

Now any time I have more than one of something (due to innocent stocking-up-on-basics-that-are-on-sale on my part, honest) they say with a note of sad warning, “Mom, are you turning into Grandma?”

When we moved into this house about three years ago I wastefully—wastefully!—threw away multiple partial bottles of various skin lotions that promised oh so many magical things, all because one of the girls was there and spotted all the containers as I packed up my bathroom.

I also have to watch my grocery-buying, although that’s getting easier since I’m starting to put up more of my own food. I only have so much pantry space and there will always be another sale on pasta so I no longer buy six bags of bow-ties (we do love our bow-tie pasta).

When I cleaned Mom’s fridge I found three bags of the fake baby carrots. Bag #1 in front was crisp and orange. Bag #2 right behind it was looking a little saggy. Bag #3 behind that had turned into green slime.

I realized that in Mom’s brain the trigger for something like “I need carrots” fired at the store and she bought carrots, but the reset to “carrots purchased, return to neutral setting” never took place. Her brain just keep pinging on “buy carrots, buy carrots.”

Since she’d spent a big chunk of her life producing food in large quantities to feed her six children and their assorted friends and relations, her food-buying philosophy was firmly grounded in the notion that it never hurt to have a little extra on hand. As in, if they dropped the bomb you’d want to shelter in our basement, where you could live the next 40 years on a diet of canned tomatoes, string beans, and pickles.

Couple this lifelong pantry-stocking with an inability to know that you’ve already bought something so you’re buying even more than you meant to….

…and you’ll understand why I make an extra effort to keep tabs on the condition of my bathroom closet and my produce drawer.

And why my girls do, too.

Friday the 13th, Or, Why Some People Need to Lose a Driver’s License

Two things happened today, one lucky and one unlucky.

Lucky: My older sister sent an email to the family distribution list to announce that finally—FINALLY—my dad will no longer be endangering the pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, small pets, landscaping and signposts of Lewiston, Idaho. That is to say, she’s going to sell his car and he won’t drive any more.

Last week Dad turned 92. For years his hearing has been going, his eyesight has been getting worse, and his interest in following all those “suggestions” planted along his route (like, say, STOP, or 35 mph, or SLOW—School Zone) has been decreasing while the terror threat level has been increasing.

Some of his cognitive abilities have probably faded a bit, too, since he can’t tell you much about whatever little incidents are behind the numerous scrapes, dings and dents in his gold Honda station wagon. (Ever since my parents moved to Lewiston in 2001, I’ve told any friends planning to visit the town to flee for their lives if they see a car matching this description headed their way.)

My sister has been dealing with this for years, bless her heart. Even after she worked with Dad’s doctor and had a meeting with him and Dad that included some tearful moments and the clear statement that his driving days were over, Dad went right back to the dementia facility where he lives with Mom (who has vascular dementia, which I’ve written about here and here) and tried to load her in the car and take her for a visit to his younger brother. Luckily the on-the-ball staff at Guardian Angel knew about the situation and handled it with great creativity (lured him back in, snagged the keys, disconnected the car’s battery, and called my sister. Way to think on your feet, people!).

Now the car is physically gone so that won’t happen again, and Dad seems to have accepted it. I feel great certainty that lives have been saved (and I know for 110% certain that property damage will go down).

The email from my sister arrived this morning, providing an appropriate context for….

Unlucky: I was almost hit by a car today. Driven by an old man with gray hair who couldn’t quite meet my eyes at first after we both stopped, shaken. A man who made me think of my father.

Backing up, here’s what happened:

Leaving a great potluck we had at work and lugging a small laundry basket with my Crockpot, the remains of a batch of African Yam Peanut Soup (vegan AND gluten-free—I’ll post the recipe one of these days), the coffee travel mug I won as a door prize, and my backpack with cell phone, laptop etc., I looked both ways before stepping into the crosswalk.

This crosswalk is one of several on Spokane Falls Boulevard, a four-lane street that runs through the heart of the WSU Spokane campus. We’re looking forward to the new Martin Luther King Jr. Way that will help route some of the traffic to the south edge of campus and off this particular road, to help calm the traffic. As you might imagine, I’m looking forward to that even more eagerly after today.

As you enter from either direction, road signs tell you that you’re coming into a campus. Westbound on SF Boulevard, though, drivers have a tendency to slingshot around a curve as the street crosses over the Spokane River. They come shooting into the heart of campus, passing one crosswalk about a half-block before reaching the one I was using.

There’s a median we like to call the “Island of Refuge” in the middle of the road. I crossed the eastbound lanes successfully, paused at the median and looked to my right. I saw cars and trucks up the street with plenty of room to stop, paused, and took a step.

Over the years we’ve all learned to be a little bit bold in asserting our rights as pedestrians on this stretch. It’s like taming wild animals: make eye contact, speak in a soothing voice, but show them who’s the alpha.

I took another step as I looked to my right again, just to be sure we all agreed I had the legal right of way.

A compact car was bearing down on me without slowing a bit, doing at least 35mph in this 25mph campus zone.

The driver and I both realized this at the same moment. I heard the brakes screeching and the smell of burning rubber filled the air as I leaped back toward the median. The car was about three or four feet away by the time I started my backward move—close enough that I could have fallen forward and hit the hood with my hand, had I not been trying desperately to avoid any physical contact whatsoever.

When the car came to a stop—smack dab on top of the crosswalk I had entered—we both just stopped. I stood there, looking at the driver, who had his head down and didn’t seem to want eye contact. He finally rolled the window down, looked at me and said, “Sorry. I guess I was daydreaming.”

“Okay, well, this is a campus zone,” I said, not knowing exactly what to say. (Screaming “You stupid a-hole” isn’t really my style. I can hear all of you saying that, though, and I don’t disagree.)

He rolled the window up and pulled away, revealing a rear tail light held in by tape that demonstrates he’s been in at least one impact accident already.

I looked to my right again. Every other driver was frozen at the wheel, probably thinking they were going to witness a body flying into the air and hoping it wouldn’t make them late to some important meeting. I crossed the rest of the street, took a few steps, then realized I needed to stop.

I set my laundry basket down, bent over and propped myself up with my hands on my knees, breathing rapidly and realizing that I was shaking all over with a fine tremor—adrenalin rush. Two coworkers stopped and helped me out by carrying the basket to my building and giving me an arm to lean on while I walked, feeling pretty shaky all the way.

The man who almost hit me today may have kids somewhere wondering if it’s time to take away Dad’s keys. I have an answer for them. And I know we were just incredibly lucky that my dad didn’t hit or kill someone while he was still driving.

Have you talked with your aging parents about how you’ll all know when it’s time for them to stop driving? Have you thought about your signals for yourself?

3 Things My Mother Taught Me

My mother turns 88 today—September 13, 2009. Born in 1921, she grew up through the Depression, taught school, married a dashing World War II bomber pilot and hometown boy, raised six kids, had a brief stint as “Mother Trucker” working with my dad in a truck dispatching office after his retirement from a lifetime working for Potlatch, had some seasons as a snowbird heading to Death Valley with Dad and going on an Alaskan cruise—and got dementia.

Now everything from her long life is gone, except for her love for my father.

The number of her children and our names and faces: Gone. When I visit, my father does a good job of saying hello in a way that reintroduces who we are and how we fit into her life. She always smiles her best hostess-y smile when we arrive, but it’s clear that she doesn’t really recognize us.

Her actual age and what has and hasn’t happened already in her life: Gone. Sometimes she refers to her mother , dead in 1986, as still living. Sometimes she talks about whether or not she and Dad should have children since they haven’t had any yet. Sometimes she’s living in Spokane, although they’re in Lewiston. Sometimes she lives in the big house they used to own outside Lewiston, instead of in the dementia unit at Guardian Angels.

What she just said and where a normal conversation would go next: Gone. I like to describe it as running a lot of laps around a very short track. (I've written a bit before about what this is like. This means I'm repeating myself. This is of some concern.)

Her looping would be familiar to anyone who has spent some time with a dementia patient. As soon as she finishes a sentence—if she does, and if she uses English rather than throwing in a few Klingon words created by the strokes that cause her dementia—she might pick up that thread of thought and start all over again. And again. And again.

Fortunately, the thing she repeats more than anything is how much she loves my father and how well-suited they have been for each other through nearly 65 years of marriage. She repeats things about how they met or things they did together, and often gets those right: “He was always such a good dancer,” with an arch look and a smile.

If she has to forget everything else and repeat just one essential element of her life ad infinitum, at least it is love.

This essay is my birthday present to her, although I don’t know if she can still sustain enough cognitive continuity to read much.

How sad that makes me, when she turned me into an incredibly fast, retentive reader with her teaching skill. She posted names of things on flash cards all over our house so that I learned to see words as entire and intact units, rather than painful constructs of sounded-out syllables. This makes me a good proofreader because I know at some subconscious level that the shape of the word is wrong, even before I can tell you where the typo is.

The best gifts she gave me, though, were lessons in how to lead my life. Because of her, I have these qualities:

I’m a feminist. She told me stories about my grandmother—to be told here another day—to illustrate why I should be able to take care of myself as an independent woman before I married. Admittedly, she did assume I would marry and have children. Her wish for all her children was that we have a marriage as happy as hers (we all got there eventually).

I believe in service to my community. Long before I ever heard of the notion of privilege or paying it forward, my mom gave me both those concepts. She told me how lucky I was, to grow up in a home with two parents who loved each other, plenty to eat, never any fear of losing the roof over our heads, a college education.

More important, she told me there are lots of people who don’t have all those things and because of that, they may not be able to do and be everything they want in this world. So I need to use the gifts I’m given and whatever talent I have to contribute, because I can and because some doors will open for me that may not open for others.

I try to be kind, and I look for the good things that abound. Kindness is underrated in this world. My mother was kind and she taught me empathy.

If we saw someone who had any kind of problem that made life more difficult—say, someone with a disability, or someone who was morbidly obese—Mom said something like, “Oh, life must be so difficult for them. Think what it’s like just to try to go see a movie” (or whatever seemed relevant).

This wasn’t said in a patronizing way—it was said to help us put ourselves in someone else’s shoes.

My mother was almost always cheerful, too, and I have her sunny optimism most of the time. My dear and sometimes brooding husband knows I’m his Sally Sunshine. (Every marriage should have one.)

Thanks to Mom, for me the glass isn’t half-empty, it’s half-full, or maybe you need a glass that’s a different size, or we’ll get something to drink later instead of right now. The lines “We’ll just make the best of it” and “Things will turn out all right in the end” can carry you through many of the bumps in life’s road.

These were good lessons. Thank you, Mom.

Mom frmrnyis

My mother has dementia caused by microvascular disease: blood vessels in her brain shrinking and drying up, and a series of mini strokes. My older sister’s graphic description of her MRI a few years back was that it looks like Swiss cheese.

The dark spots are places where her life used to be stored. The woman she used to be has been packing up and moving away a little bit at a time since at least 2000, and probably sooner.

I can date it with some precision because she and Dad went to visit my brother Don and his wife Lisa in Seattle for a fake millennium party December 31, 1999. (Fake, because sticklers know that the new millennium started 1-1-01, not 1-1-00. At the end of 1999 you’ve had 999 years go by, not 1000. Duh.)

After Mom and Dad arrived, said their greetings and started settling in, my mother went to the bathroom. On her way back, she just sort of stopped and stood in the short hallway. Lisa found her there with a very lost expression on her face. She clearly didn’t know where she was, and from the way she looked at Lisa, she apparently wasn’t quite sure who that young woman was either.

Lisa is wonderful. She very gently said, something like “Gladys, it’s so nice to have you here in Seattle visiting your son Don at our house, and I’m Lisa and I’m so happy to be married to him.”

Mom sort of came to and put on her hostess smile—the one that covered up any amount of misbehavior, spilled cocktails, red wine on pale carpets, burned hors d’oeuvres, or late-arriving guests with a gracious sense of welcome. “Of course!” she said brightly.

They sat down to talk, and Mom admired a pretty Christmas tree ornament. The way Don tells the story, that’s all I need to write about the next half-hour or so.

Here’s how the scene goes: She looks at the ornament, says how beautiful it is, asks where they got it, smiles and nods at the answer, and looks away briefly. They try to move the conversation on. Her eyes roam back to the ornament, she rediscovers it and says, “Oh! What a beautiful Christmas tree ornament! Where did you get it?”

Variations on this continue for some time until Don finally snaps (he’s never had small children) and takes the ornament off the tree so it ceases to exist as a cue in her visual field. Problem solved. At least, the short-term problem.

I have a huge folder of emails to and from my siblings both before and after that date. There are six of us. I lived in Coeur d’Alene at the time, about 35 miles from Mom and Dad. Jan, my older sister, lives about 90 miles south in Lewiston. Everyone else is farther away: Seattle and Friday Harbor in Washington, Twin Falls, Idaho, and Albuquerque at that time for world-traveling Jim (who subsequently went to the Philippines and now Mozambique for the State Department).

So Jan and I made up the team for a story I may tell another day: me accompanying Mom to medical appointments, discussions with Dad, Mom getting lost driving to her hairdresser of 20-plus years, negotiating and manipulating towards the decision to move to assisted living in Lewiston, finding a place, Mom’s struggles with her memory loss and ultimate surrender, packing, sorting, estate sale, move, disorientation, settling in, group meals, hoarding of desserts in various drawers, more problems, moving again to a special dementia facility where they live today.

I’ll be visiting tomorrow with my girls, who are very kind and loving with their grandparents. When we visit, the conversation takes a lot of laps around a very short track (similar to another blogger's description), often with topical cues coming from the TV that never shuts off and always plays at a volume that accommodates Dad's habit of keeping his hearing aid turned down.

Mom is very pleasant and seems happy to see us, although I’m pretty sure she can’t quite place us at first. Dad generally does a graceful job of saying, “Oh, hi there middle daughter Barbara Kaye! And here’s Kate and Laura!” He’s cuing her with names and roles. Her hostess skills must be in her bones instead of her brain, because she always rises to the occasion.

A friend of mine who helped care for her mother-in-law with Alzheimer's described it as being like an anthropologist visiting a tribe with its own customs. You observe but you don't try to bring them into your culture because that would be cruel and disruptive to their way of life. Gladys Land is a happy place, so we visit and then take our leave.

So about Mom frmrnyis, the name of this piece? That’s what happened when I got my fingers off by a key typing “dementia”. I looked at it and thought, “Well, that’s probably what it’s like in there—close, but not close enough to make sense.” So I left it.