Memory Flatlined

Memory Flatlined

My mother doesn’t know who I am. She refers to each of her daughters as “that woman” and confuses her son with her late father. The dementia has been so gradual and we, not willing to admit that our mother could be vulnerable, have looked over the signs and delayed the inevitable.
After the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, I struggled with the idea to offer my life a sacrifice to save her from “the home.” Mother had done whatever it took to help all of us. The things she sacrificed during her motherhood bordered on necessities. She relinquished even the thought of luxury to help her children. She had a very positive outlook and a strong constitution and enjoyed working.
In the latter years her forfeiture was a game plan to have a claim on independence. Her money is now spent without her knowledge on every effort to make her comfortable against her will. Mother is no longer with us. In that is the pain. Emotionally I want to enclose myself in a cocoon and weep.
I did not agree with the decision to put her in a nursing center. There would be no purpose, no gain. She would lose the self-respect and independence she has left and life would have no meaning for her at all. She would use all her energy in a negative fashion thereby worsening her condition. I sent emails to my siblings in the wee hours of the morning in which I described my sudden feelings of sweaty palms and wanting to rush to her side yelling, “Stop, don’t do this. I’ll save her.”
We found the solution in a friend who lives across the street from Mother. We hired the caregiver with Mother’s resources to watch over her with angel eyes and a house monitor. Mother’s life in the condition she is in, is being managed most successfully. I would have to call the plan genius.
Until the caregiver took over, Mother did not eat a balanced meal. She ate bread, crackers or cookies soaked in milk or water. I suspect she had done this longer than we like to think. Now she not only looks forward to the hot meals the caregiver brings her, but also the tenderness and loving care.
Why do people lose their memory? There seems no common denominator, no preventive plan that we know of. A mind is contained in the brain, an organ like the heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, etc. When the body part diminishes we suffer whatever deficiency results. Some things we can repair and continue to function, some we cannot.
The best we could hope for amid the slowing down of our physical capabilities would be that we maintain our dignitythat we not have to be cared for by our own children. To survive beyond our own autonomy is not living at all.
The mind is the tool that sculpts the soul. It is discarded with the body. My mother is in a resting state next to death. She can no longer evolve in this world because it takes participation of the mind to do so. There are some mystical and wise things she tells me occasionally, as if she has access to some realm that we do not yet know aboutsome place that her soul visits and returns. I call her each day and she plays the piano (her musical skills have augmented, not diminished) while I listen over the phone. She plays only happy tunes. It is our way of communicating.