The Station Man

I talked with an older lady friend recently, and she asked how Mom is doing. The friend is almost eighty years old and is having some problems with her memory, but she does not understand much about Alzheimer’s. I explained that Mom is on medication that helps keep her calm and congenial. The friend asked, “Does it help her memory?” The answer is, “No.” The medicine stabilizes her moods and prevents a great deal of the anger and agitation she has experienced in the past year. But her memory is unpredictable. No one can anticipate what she will remember.

My dad, along with his father, ran a service station when we were young. My grandfather closed the station upon the death of my father, after fifteen years of its being a “landmark” in the little town where we grew up. This occurred almost forty years ago. The building has been closed for quite a while, yet it still looked like it always did until recently. Now someone has opened a flower and gift shop, adding some decorative touches to the outside and making it look quaint and interesting. It really is lovely to drive by and see plants and flowers where the cars used to drive through to "fill ‘er up" with gasoline.

We all thought Mom would be happy to see the “station” in use rather than to see someone come in, tear it down, and build something modern (and unrecognizable) in its place. But that was not the case. One day Pop drove by the particular corner to show her how someone had fixed up the “station.” Mom’s response to us later was, “I wonder what your dad is going to do for a living now, since they rented that building out to someone else.”

At times like this, she thinks Pop is “a friend.” But at night she often worries about our dad. They used to close the station about 8:00 each evening. So now she wonders where he is. Sometimes she is slightly upset, as if he is just taking too long to close up. But at other times she seems to feel that he isn't coming home.

A few weeks ago Mom went through a time when she thought Daddy had abandoned her. She didn't call him Daddy (she rarely does that nowadays). She just called him "her husband." She said that she must have had a part in his leaving her; however, she did not know what she had done wrong. One of my sisters reassured her that she had done nothing wrong, that this was one of the dirty tricks her mind is playing on her! To have her think our dad might have left her is one of the saddest things to all of us.

Tonight I don’t know how to end on an upbeat note. Maybe I shall dwell on the fact that Mom is in excellent health and always glad to see us come in the front door!