What Red House?

The next evening after the last entry, I went to visit Mom. I decided to try to discover how much she remembers about the red-bricked house we lived in for six or seven years when I was young.

When I first broached the subject, she could not recall the house I was talking about. (We have taken her by the house in recent months.) I continued to describe it until she began to show a slight interest. She acknowledged that she could vaguely remember living there, that “it was on the north side of the street, wasn’t it?” That's right!

I brought up several memories of living on 19th Street, but she did not appear to connect with any of them. Finally, I think she became frustrated, either with me for “bugging her,” or with herself because she was unable to remember what I was talking about. Finally, she had enough and called a halt to that discussion with this rationalization: “Oh, well, what does it matter? We can’t go back there, can we?”

Mom’s mother had a serious memory problem for the last few years of her life. Back then the nursing home people told us she had “hardening of the arteries.” Perhaps it was what doctors now refer to as “vascular dementia.” But what I remember about her memory loss was that it was more predictable than Mom’s. She appeared to lose happenings “in order,” so to speak.

For example, when we visited, for a while she knew all of us, Mom, my four sisters, and me. Later when we would go to see her, however, she thought I was her daughter. Then eventually she looked upon my youngest sister, six years old at the time, as her daughter. In her mind, according to the way she reacted to us, she was moving backward in time and reliving different periods of her life.

As she moved backward with the age of my sister for Mom, she also “lost track” of her second and third husbands. Mom’s father died when she was only fifteen years old; then her mother remarried. Eventually her second husband died, and she married another man. This latest one is the one she forgot soonest, and she worked her way backward to her first husband and Mom as a little girl. When we asked her what she did that day, she told us about all the chores she did that morning, how she milked the cow, washed the clothes, or went to the field to work, and then came back in to cook lunch for the hired hands or “the threshing crew.”

My grandmother and my mother are the only two people I have ever been around for long periods of time who have had significant memory-loss problems. I have visited in nursing homes with patients who remembered very little; but, of course, it is quite a different matter when it is your loved one.

We lost our dad suddenly at the age of forty-six years. We managed to survive through all the stages of grief, agonizing as they were. But losing Mom slowly is just as painful, in a different way. When I think, "I need to call Mom and ask her what she thinks about...," my hand stops in midair as I am reaching for the phone. Then I remember. "Oh, never mind. She doesn't know."

But I call anyway, just to chit chat for a few minutes, being careful to keep my voice light and filled with love for her.