I’ve
put this column off long enough. I
started to write it on Mother’s Day, but I couldn’t do it. Maybe I’m in denial. Perhaps if I don’t write about it things will
improve. But I know that is not true.
Things are not improving, they are getting worse. My mother has Alzheimer’s disease. I can’t say this with 100% certainty, neither
can a doctor. It is only after death
that Alzheimer’s can irrefutably be diagnosed.
But it really doesn’t matter what you call it---my mother is slipping
away.
When I
moved to North Carolina to attend seminary 41 years ago, I became a permanent Tar
Heel. My Alabama home is a ten hour
drive away. With the exception of
occasional visits, our primary contact has been the phone. I would faithfully call my mother every
Sunday afternoon. She would update me on
family news and tell me who had died in the community. We would compare notes about our church
services. (She doesn’t like the new
music they sing in her church.) She
would tell me about a television show she enjoyed watching. And we would talk again the next Sunday.
It
was just a few years ago that my mother retired from the furniture
business. When I first moved to
Lexington she was still coming to the Furniture Market once a year. Her health finally prevented her from coming
to the market and then she started having problems at her store. There were times she couldn’t remember how to
transfer a call. She was forgetting
things and she was tired all the time.
We finally convinced her to retire but she wasn’t happy about it.
I
started to call her more often. She was
having issues walking and fell more than once.
Her mind was playing tricks on her.
One night she kept calling my brother, who lived about 30 miles away, to
tell him she couldn’t get the children who were playing in the yard to come in
and it was raining. She was so
persistent he finally drove to the house.
There were no children. But
Mother had been standing in the rain calling for them to come in.
After
she fell one night and spent all night on the floor, we knew we needed to do
something. We found her a very nice
assisted living center. She adjusted
fairly well and because she was getting three meals a day and taking her
medications as prescribed, she improved physically and mentally. I would now call her 3 or 4 times a week. She seemed satisfied and we would sometimes
talk for 15 or 20 minutes. We were
planning to have a family reunion this summer, but it would not happen.
My
mother is in a nursing home now. She
can’t walk; she can’t even get up out of the bed by herself. She has to have assistance eating. She doesn’t know how to answer the phone
anymore. She is slipping away into a
foreign world that we cannot enter.
Over
20 years ago I told a narrative story one Sunday of a lady who had
Alzheimer’s. The story was fictitious,
but it was much more powerful than I anticipated. It affected a few people so deeply that they
had to leave the sanctuary. These were
family members who had a loved one with Alzheimer’s.
Even
though I have had many church members and friends who have been down this
painful path, I could only sympathize with them until now. Now I am walking with them and the pain is
much greater than I imagined.
In
my story the woman with Alzheimer’s was slipping away to a happy place in her
past. She was surrounded by family and
friends, sitting on the front porch of her childhood home. She was comforted by their presence.
My
mother was an orphan. She didn’t have a
happy childhood. But as she slips away
from us I hope she is going to a place of joy and comfort where she is
surrounded by love. That is our hope, is
it not? Jesus has gone to prepare a
place for us in the Father’s house where there are many rooms. The greatest promise is: “Where I am, there you will be also.” Wherever this foreign world of Alzheimer’s
is, my prayer is that my mother will not be alone and that she will be
comforted. I have to believe that this
promise is true.
