Mother's Day

Thinking about starting this new blog, I spent some time rereading the last one, in which I wrote about caring for my parents before my father died, and moving my mother into memory care assisted living. Any one of those entries is a decent snapshot into how things were; reading them all at once was overwhelming. Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, I didn't notice how awful things were becoming. I just kept dealing with one more thing, one more thing, one more thing, because that's what you do. 

We are doing elder care all wrong, in this country. The "system," to the extent there is one, is just awful.

Anyway. For those playing along at home, Mom is still in memory care. She has declined to the point beyond ever again being able to come visit my house, which we used to do weekly before COVID. She's in hospice, not in a dying-any-minute way like it was with Dad, but just shifting the priorities in her care. There is no cure for Lewy Body Dementia anyway. Whatever else might take her would be a mercy. A doctor friend calls pneumonia "God's off-ramp." We should be so lucky.

On a recent visit with Robin, my mother greeted her as if she were me, then looking over at me, asked "who'd you bring?" On another, with my brother, she greeted me as me, and kept asking him when he was going to propose ("it's not really in the plan"). "I don't know about this new boyfriend," she said as we stood up to leave. "OH! He looks just like Rick!" Exactly like him, in fact. 

Knowing what's knowable about her illness, we thought we were prepared for the inevitable day she would not recognize us as her grown children, and that it wouldn't bother us when it happened. Neither of those things turned out to be true.