It was Tuesday. Six chairs and four people sat at the kitchen table. It had been a month since my return from Scotland, and the family dinners that I had missed so much when I was away had become normal once again. Now I longed for the North Sea.
Dinner conversation collapsed in to the usual pattern: Mary said a prayer; dad complained about work; Mary yacked on about tennis and school; I talked about work; dad ranted about my older sister, Margaret, and her mooching boyfriend Kyle; mom listened.
After a heaping helping of seconds, my dad pulled his chair from the table and settled in to the black leather arm chair in his office. Finished with his food, we were now free to leave the table.
Mary snuck out after him to avoid the after-dinner clean-up. If I had been in a better mood I may have yelled at her to stay and help, but I was tired. Too tired to listen to her usual ramblings about why she was exempt from kitchen duty.
“Suzanne, I don’t have time to help I have too much homework.”
“Sorry that I actually go to school and have tennis.”
“It’s not like you’re busy.”
At 15, “little Mary” has her moments of being a huge bitch, but being the youngest she gets away with it.
Left alone in the kitchen, I tackled the dishes and complained about my boss while my mom handled the leftovers that would be my Dad’s lunch in the morning.
“Joe wasn’t even in the office when I got there this morning. I had to wait 30 minutes before he even showed up!”
No response.
“And then I had to call every golf league member about the price change because he forgot to include it in the bulletin.”
No response.
Sometimes my mom becomes so internally preoccupied that she checks out from reality. It’s like talking to a brick wall. In these situations I’ve found that it’s best to leave her alone and let her think. So I continued to scrub away dinner scraps, carefully placing the rinsed dishes in the dishwasher.
“If I get sick I want you to put me in a home.”
I switched off the water and turned around to look at my mom covering the spinach casserole with pink plastic.
“What are you even talking about?”
“I want to be put in a home. You can find a nice place and visit me. I don’t want to be taken care of.”
“That’s a little dark and premature mom, don’t you think?”
She let out a breathy sigh, shrugged her shoulders, and placed the leftovers in the fridge.
My grandfather died when I was 10 after losing his humanity to Alzheimer's. Reduced to an infant, a 6’3’’ man in diapers, he could no longer walk, or speak, or remember us.
Is this what she thinks will happen to her?
My grandma took care of him at home; my mom and her siblings alternated weekends to drive up to help, until every couple weekends became every weekend. Eventually a hospice worker came to the house, but there were always family members around -- taking him to the bathroom, changing him, feeding him, talking to him.
This went on for five years. I was too young to be sad about a man I had never known when he was healthy, a man that would never know me.
Put me in a home.
At 21, the idea of my parents in a home was not something I had ever really thought about, let alone my mother having Alzheimer's. But as I stood in the kitchen, my hands wrinkled and wet from the soapy suds, that’s all I could think about. An image was stamped across my eyes and I couldn't blink it away. There was my mom, sitting in my grandfather’s rocker, her warm blue eyes faded into an absent stare.
Yeah, she forgets where she puts her keys, but doesn’t everyone sometimes?
She always asks us to leave her reminder post-its, but she just has a lot going on.
She works too much.
Yeah, she works too much.
A few nights later, during a different clean-up conversation, my mom would tell me that she was afraid.
“What if something’s wrong with me?”
I didn’t tell her that I was scared too -- scared that I might lose her; scared that she might someday forget me.
“Mom, there’s nothing wrong with you. Really, you’re worrying about nothing.”
Dinners passed, the kitchen was cleaned and eventually I stopped worrying about an illness she might get years down the road. But there are still moments, like when she misplaces her keys, that the familiar feel of panic sets in and I am terrified all over again.
She just has a lot going on.
She works too much.
Yeah, she works too much.
Word Count: 815
Intended Audience: Lives
No comments:
Post a Comment