Georgina Runte Eulogy and Funeral

The funeral for my Mom was Tuesday (April 6) at St Mary's Anglican Church. The Church is small, intimate, and filled with golden light from the yellow windows that frame the half dozen stain glass pieces. About 20 people showed up, which is a lot for someone who had outlived just about all her acquaintances.

Her former boss had long since passed away, but his wife showed up to speak to Mom's working life; a member of the Eastern Star showed up to speak to Mom's long service within that organization (she joined in 1943); a couple of the residents from her condo showed up to speak to her participation in the life of that community; one was also a member of St Mary's congregation and told me how Mom sat in the fourth row each Sunday until she had to stop coming because the timing conflicted with her medications; and how the Minister and the Deacon (both also long passed) had alternated visiting her each week to give her communion. The lady from the Eastern Star described visiting Mom and how Mom had insisted on making and serving everyone tea, long after she had gone completely blind.

My brother Ron spoke with his unique blend of sensitivity and humor, perfectly capturing both my Mom's generosity and her fierce determination to stand up to bullies in two perfectly balanced anecdotes from his childhood. I hadn't heard either story for years, but recognized immediately how perfectly they summed up my Mother's character.

This is what I said:

Yesterday would have been my Mom’s 101st Birthday, so it is impossible to sum up a 100 years in just a few words. And one problem with living to over 100 is that there aren’t many people left who can bear witness to the first half of that life. So I can only speak to the last half of her life, and my memories of her as my mother.

My mom loved the arts and she loved to travel. She had season’s tickets to every symphony and every play in the city; and she read constantly. When her vision gave out, she listened to books on tape. I remember the librarians trying to get a sense of what sort of books she preferred and were confounded when she couldn’t be pinned down and simply wanted more of everything.

She traveled across Canada, across Europe, across China and Japan. When I say “across” Europe or China or Japan, that doesn’t really cover it, because the rule was, starting when I was ten, which means she must already have been in her 50s, we had to climb to the top of every castle, every cathedral, and every monument: the top of St Paul’s in London, the top of the Eiffel tower, the Great Wall of China. Where ever, whatever, she was always game. When my mom was in her 70s she actually fell off a castle in Denmark.

And wherever we went, Mom would seek out the art of that region: an exquisite Swiss clock, a fabulous Flemish vase, a set of Danish glass two decades before it became fashionable in Canada. Of course one of my strongest memories is helping to lug the vase or the clock or the Danish glass all across Europe as we hopped on and off trains, sometimes passing the packages through open windows because the train only stopped for 2 minutes at that station. That could often be quite the challenge, especially with my reputation as the kid who broke everything he touched.

One of my favorite memories was when we were in Denmark one summer having lunch at their version of Zellers when my mom suddenly had a craving for an orange float. She tried to order one without much success, until another customer started translating for us, but he and the man behind the counter were both incredulous at the suggestion of putting ice cream inside a glass of orange pop, so she had to repeat several times with assurances that that’s what was meant; and then watching my mom drink it, and by then I and my brother Douglas had joined her, the counterman and the translator also had to try it... and the punch line is that when we returned to that store on our next visit four or five years later, we discovered that orange floats were a house specialty.

So that was my mom: always game; always rising to meet every challenge; taking from each place she found herself, something beautiful, or meaningful, or significant; and leaving a little bit of herself behind; leaving the Earth and the lives she touched better off for her having been here.



My daughters than each took a brief turn speaking; Tigana talking about her favorite memory of her Grandmother at Christmas Dinner years before; Kasia saying "I love you Grandma" while laying a pink Teddy bear on the table next to Mom's picture (and later into her grave).

After the service, we had tea in the Church basement, as fitting a tribute to Mom as any, tea having long been central to her social life. Mom's favorite niece -- the daughter she never had -- and her husband were there; along with the two of her nephews. And the irrepressible Mrs. V., the woman who half raised me when my Mom had to go back to work full time: she brought my daughters each a doll with hand knitted dresses and regaled us all after the service with her own near death experiences. It was nice meeting her son again after nearly 50 years, as great a joker as I remembered him. And a friend of mine from Edmonton came to be supportive.

Only the minister and the immediate family went to the grave side; we buried my Mom, my brother Douglas, and my Dad Henry all at the same time. A month earlier, I had booked the other two burials for April 6, thinking I'd take care of that matter on the same trip as we came up for Mom's 101st birthday; I'd had no sense then that she would be joining them. Burying all three at once was harder than I thought it would be. I'd thought I'd already dealt with the other losses, and Mom's came at the end of an exceptional life, but it hit me pretty hard. And my kids. Kasia cried out when she realized that they were burying her Grandfather that she had never met. It was a tough moment. The minister asked if I wanted to shovel in a few symbolic shovelfuls but I couldn't do it.

It didn't help that the Minister kept saying my name instead of Doug's or Henry's as she lowered the urns. I can't blame her for getting confused, since she'd only met me a day or two before. She was nice, and it provided a moment of comic relief, albeit in a creepy sort of way. But I'd been nervous about getting everything right throughout the day, even though Mary had kept me organized and relatively sane through the process. I was also grateful for the presence of cousin Mike who kept reassuring me throughout that this was just a family affair and that it was all good. He reminds me a lot of Doug, the way he can reassure and restore common sense with just a few words.

And then we were done. Mary took the kids over to visit her father's grave in the same cemetery while I handled the paper work. Later, Mary and I had supper with Ron and his wife Joan; we determined to see more of each other now that we are the last of the family.

In the end, what gets me through is my wife and kids. I don't know how I could have handled any of this had I still been single. It's not just Mary's organization and support, it's that my kids are so full of life, such an reaffirmation of the life force, the continuance not just of my family but of the meaning of life, that they make it possible to carry on in the face of death. Its hard to explain, exactly, but my Mom and brother carried the memories of who I was for the first half of my life, but the loss of that identity, the absence of any external validation of what I think I remember, is compensated by the potential for new memories to be made with my wife and kids. When I was sitting with my Mom in her final days I kept looking at the photos of my kids on my blog taken at the San Dieago zoo. The life, the exburence that comes through in those four photos got me through not just those last days with Mom, but through the funeral as I kept picturing them in my mind. I miss Mom, I miss Doug, but...life is good.

Georgina Runte (Dodie)

The nursing home phoned me late Monday morning to say that my mother had likely had a stroke on the weekend: her speech was slurred, her tendency to lean to one side was more pronounced, and her oxygen levels had been low. The initial call was framed as an update: they knew we were already planning to come up the following week for Mom’s birthday, and thought that would be fine; but needed to discuss some treatment options in the interim. Mom’s oxygen levels were back up, but she was experiencing difficulty eating and drinking. Was I in favor of increasing her fluid levels?

The second call was more urgent; she had lost the ability to swallow. By 4:30 I was on a plane to Edmonton to be with her.

She was unconscious when I arrived, but seemed to derive some comfort from my being there and holding her hand. I sat with her through the evening and tried to get a sense from the staff what her condition was, but no one was able to be definitive. One staff member I know and trust told me she was growing weaker by the hour; another, more medically qualified, member said that Mom seemed to have stabilized and was resting comfortably, and that it would certainly be safe for me to go home to sleep for a few hours. A third said she could offer no such guarantees.

In the end, I judged mom to be stable and comfortable, and with the nurse’s promise that I would be called if mom suddenly started to get worse, I risked going to Mom’s condo to sleep. I might as well have stayed as I was unable to sleep: restless, I paced and read and distracted myself as best I could, but eventually gave up and returned to the nursing home in the early morning.

I sat with her through the rest of the day, holding and stroking her hand. She would occasionally withdraw her hand briefly: as mentioned in a previous post, if I held her hand too long the blood would stop flowing, so I interpreted this as her hand having fallen asleep, especially as my own hand would sometimes start to have pins and needles after holding in the same position for too long, so I would leave it be for a bit and just talk quietly to her. My impression is that she knew and appreciated my presence, but was too busy breathing to have much energy to respond. The staff kept reassuring me that hearing was the last sense to go and that Mom knew I was there. (I had just read some recent research where the researchers were able to communicate with a man in a vegetative state by asking him to imagine two different types of scenes -- one for 'yes', the other for 'no'-- while in a MRI machine, so I am inclined to believe that they were right about my mom.) So I alternated between stroking her hand when I ran out of things to say (it's amazingly difficult to keep talking to someone who is not responding), and talking when I judged her hand was getting tired. But I made sure she knew I was there with her.

At about 2AM, I lay down for an hour's break. Mom was calm and her breathing had been steady if labored for several hours so I judged it a good time to break; the nurse had assured me Mom was not in pain because she was laying quietly, whereas those in pain tend to wave their arms around and appear agitated. Mom's movements were few and slow. 45 minutes later, I heard Mom say something, halfway between a moan and a call, and woke up. Then I realized I must have dreamt that because the 'quiet room' was well down the hall from her room and it would not have been possible for me to have heard her. So I turned over to go back to sleep when the nurse knocked on the door and told me my mom had gone. I said, "Oh so that was her I heard?" and she gave me this really odd expression and said, "No, it was just my time to check on her. [Name] had just checked on her a minute before, and your mom was fine then; but I didn't know that she had gone in already, so I went again just now, and she was gone. But we didn't hear anything. She just went quietly in her sleep."

I had been sorry I hadn't been with her, but the nurse told me, "Its often that way. The family will sit all day, but when they leave to go to the washroom, the patient will go in that moment. We think that they know and wait to spare the family that last moment. Its either that, of they wait until everyone is there. We had a woman last month, the whole family was there and they were waiting for hours, but when the last grandson arrived, and they all started singing a hymn, she left. It happens like that a lot too. Either way."

So my Mom passed away about 2:45 March 31, 2010. She would have been 101 April 5.

Part of me had kind of hoped she would make her birthday, but I know that's silly: there is no prize for crossing a particular finish line. Indeed the Chaplin had told me earlier in the day that vast majority went just before their birthdays. "You tell them that they are going to turn a hundred and they say, 'No, no I don't think I want to be a hundred', and they'll go a day or two before. So we don't ever mention their precise age unless they specifically ask..."

I was surprised to learn there were four residents older than my mom, two of whom had lived at home up until and only arrived in the nursing home after their 101 birthday. So we are definitely living longer. He related the story of one lady who on her hundredth birthday had announced to her family that she was the oldest person in the building, and when he had looked away not to disagree with her, she had noticed and demanded to be taken to someone older. so he had wheeled her to a resident who was 102 and they had had a long if shouted conversation (both being quite deaf).

A lot of staff told me stories like that over the two days I was sitting there. Each one made a point, on their own and spontaneously to see Mom and to tell me a story about her. Two of them were fighting back their own tears. It was very clear to me that they sincerely cared for my mom. Their support was very important to me, and I know that they had always taken very good care of my mom. I want to say here that I have always appreciated the humor, warmth, patience and above all, the commitment to the care of my mom and the other elderly in that home (The Dr. Gerald Zetter Care Center). Doug had spent months researching nursing homes before permitting himself to place her in one, and I had come up and toured the three 'finalists' with him, and in the end there had been no question in my mind that this was the best one. There was something about the culture of the place that was obvious even on my short visits that made it the place we wanted her to be. Then Doug had gone there to feed mom supper every day for two years, so he had really gotten to know and trust the staff before he passed away. I could only visit for a weekend once a month or so in the two years since, but I got the same impression of the staff, partly because they treated me as they had Doug, and partly because I was able to observe them with other residents when they didn't even know I was watching, and they were all unfailingly great. I know I could not do the job they do.

I miss my Mom, and Doug, a lot.

The Last Cup of Tea

Now that Mom is over 100, she had become increasingly frail.

She has become so thin, that her skin is essentially transparent, like those "living skeletons" used in biology classes: her bones and blood vessels, and what little muscle mass remains, are all clearly visible. The cell phone photo below doesn't really capture the effect, since it's hard to tell that you're looking through the layer of skin here; but you can maybe get a sense of the skin if you look at the wrinkles, which are like ripples on the surface of a pond; you only see the medium you're looking through when something disrupts the surface. Or look across the top of the fingers, you can sort of see the gleam of a reflection floating just above the bone; that's her skin. I can actually watch the blood flowing through her arteries/veins.


My mother's hands


What makes this particularly disconcerting is that I also had the experience of watching the blood stop flowing. I was, as is my custom when visiting her, holding and stroking mom's hand. This seems to provide her with some comfort. But on one occasion I happened to glance down as my thumb crossed various veins and arteries, and realized that I was cutting off the blood flow in each one in turn. I could actually see the blood stop moving, back up, and the color draining away 'downstream' as the supply was momentarily cut off. And I wasn't pressing hard; the lightest touch imaginable. That left me in a bit of a quandary, pitting psychological support against blood supply.

Then today, I happened to be watching one blood vessel as she crooked her fingers to take the cup handle to drink her soup, and I watched the blood in one of the vessels struggle to climb the 'hill' created by the bend, and not making it: little droplets of blood would climb half way up, like cars on a train, but roll back at the last moment.... It was unnerving. I also noticed dozens of little bruises all over, which I deduce are caused by blood vessel failure. (Quite aside from the fact that I have complete faith in the staff at her nursing home, the location of these bruises are completely wrong as 'grab points' or bed sores, but adjacent to what appears to be the end of a blood vessel.)

Similarly, whereas I used to rub her neck for her whenever I visited, there simply isn't any detectable muscle mass back there for me to message any longer. Looking at her arms and legs, the increasingly number of bruises, and her general frailness, I worry that her time is running out; but listening to her chatting away and laughing at my jokes, I think she she's good for another four years.

Much of what she has to say doesn't really make sense, at least not as part of our consensual reality. It is perfectly consistent and reasonable if one is prepared to accept that my mother, like the hero of Slaughterhouse Five has come loose in time and is moving back and forth through her life; or that there is an afterlife, and it consists largely of visiting with friends and relatives. Whenever I ask what she was doing today, she answers, "Not much of anything today. I was up late visiting with _____ (fill in the blank -- today it was our wonderful neighbours of 30 years ago, the Whitbreads) so decided to just take it easy today." Sometimes this comes across as her remembering some event from years before; more often, these seem to be current visits with those from beyond the veil. It's hard to explain exactly, but the visits sound to me as accurate projections of how people would have interacted had they been all gathered together in the same room, though most of them had never met in this world, at least not as adult contemporaries, being from different generations. Mom is now constantly with her mother, her sister, my brother, and sometimes one or more of her brothers. These are the people she talks with while I'm with her, and to whom she often attempts to pass the cup I have just put into her hands. "Tea Evie?" she'll ask. Significantly, she never sees anyone in this group or as visitors come to call on this group, who are still alive. When she talks about my visits or those of Ron, my other surviving sibling, it is quite clear that she is referring to our visits to her in the nursing home, and not to the group in the Garden (behind her mother's house in 1948), the usual setting for those visiting in the beyond. If mom were just "confused", wouldn't one expect her to mix up the quick and the dead?

One purpose of my visits serve is to get my mom a cup of tea. She likes a cup of tea of an evening, but it is not included in her official nursing home diet, so she only gets it when I'm there. She is supposed to be drinking an 'Ensure' type drink, which they thoughtfully warm for her, and which she seems to quite enjoy; but ultimately, it's not her beloved cup of tea. I realize that the tea fills her up without providing nutrition, but one has to balance nutrition against the psychological value of a really good cup of tea. And I do use one of her protein drinks as the 'cream' substitute, so I do get something into her. This trip, however, I was forced to acknowledge that the logistical issues had become untenable, and it was with great sadness that I realized that this might well be her very last cup.

I'd noticed on my last few trips that Mom was having increasing difficulty with sitting up straight: she now perpetually leans 35 degrees to the left. No amount of pushing her upright seems to help; she immediately re-adjusts to what must seem level to her, and actively resists attempts to help her hold her cup straight, complaining that I'm going to spill the contents to the right, when I manage to hold the cup level for a second. I've heard about people who've had strokes being skewed from the vertical like this, and given that mom is totally blind, she can't even use visual cues to keep herself aligned. This isn't a huge problem for the staff or I spooning in her pureed dinner, and she can usually manage her cup of (usually quite thick) soup by herself, though some days as much lands on her apron-sized bib as in her mouth, dribbling off the left edge of the tilted cup. But tea is a different matter entirely. Mom likes it hot, and being significantly thinner than the soup, her trembling hand and bad angle inevitably send near scalding tea splashing onto, and soaking through, her bib. Doubling the layers of the bibs helps a bit in terms of keeping her from getting burned, but ultimately, the experience is no longer a calming one. She is aware of the tea dribbling off her lips, and her hand feels around for the lake of tea on her lap, and of course it upsets her that she has spilled. Cold drinks present no such problem, being drunk through a straw, but even if I could keep the tea cool enough to drink with a straw, it is not really the full 'tea' experience anymore.

One minor compensation is that I will no longer have to deal with the problem of Aunt Evie. Whenever I would offer Mom a cup of tea, she would inevitably pause half way to her first sip and say, "but you haven't gotten any tea for Evie!" There would follow several minutes of frantic cup chasing as Mom would say, "Here Evie, take my cup!" and reach out to place the cup in Evie's hands, which did not, as it happen, extend into this world. I was generally able to intercept the cup before it crashed to the floor/spilled over Mom's legs, but this would often engender some conflict as Mom would demand to know "what are you playing at?" trying to grab away the cup of tea she was offering her sister. And it became quite clear over the months that while there is a good supply of buns and scones on the other side, it is apparently impossible to get a really good cup of tea. (In this context, the Red Rose ad campaign, "only in Canada, eh?" takes on an entirely new dimension.) I have the strong impression that Evie, although quite happy with 'life' over there, would dearly like a cup of tea and a cigarette. Asking my Mom or I for a cigarette is a lost cause, but she does seem to feel the prospects for a cup of tea worth pursing. I have not yet worked out the theological implications of all this.

100th Birthday

Sunday, April 5th, was my mother's 100th birthday. It was a small affair, attended only by myself, my wife, and our two daughters. There were several reasons we didn't want to make too big a deal out of it.

First, my mom has good days and bad days, and I didn't much care for the idea of having a lot of people descend on my mom's nursing home if it turned out to be one of the bad days. In the event, she was mostly okay. (The nurse told me that mom hadn't wanted to get out of bed that morning, but that they had coaxed her into her wheel chair because they knew we were coming.) She was awake for most of the two hours we were there, and not in too much pain, and alert and in moderately good spirits, so we could have had more visitors, but you never know.



Mom having a cup of tea as one of the nurses we really like joins us for the celebration.

Tigana, Kasia (just peeking in over Tigana's shoulder), me, and Mary with my Mom on her 100th birthday. Mom is appreciatively cuddling with the extra soft, fuzzy purple blanket we gave her as a birthday present.

 

 

Second, we had had a big reception for mom's 90th, when she still lived on her own, and Mary had catered for about 60 people. But when we looked at the invitation list from that birthday, except for a few relatives, there wasn't actually anyone left on it... Mom has managed to outlive all of her friends and contemporaries. The one niece who still lives in Edmonton offered to come, but had to cancel at the last minute as her husband came down with a terrible cold -- and you don't take a bad cough into a nursing home (unless you're looking for an earlier inheritance).

Third, I wasn't sure how big a deal to make of the fact that mom had made it to 100. When we last discussed her age earlier this year, she thought she was about 92. When I told her she was actually 99, she became very depressed, and said "Well, if that's true, then I'm done!" Fortunately, she forgot the conversation, and when I returned the next day, thought she was in her 80s.

One of mom's surviving nieces (a woman Mom considers the daughter she never had) sent a great card. It's almost impossible to find a card that says "Happy 100th", 'cause, let's face it, there's not that large a market. And being blind, mom can't actually read her cards anymore. So they picked a birthday card that played "The Age of Aquarius" (which Mom could hear if not see); and the card read: "On your birthday, free you mind — it's not the age you are it's the age you believe in". Which is way too funny, given my mom's situation!

Most of the time Mom is in her Mother's back garden, having tea with her mother and her sister Evie, with occasional visits from either her brothers Tom and Charlie, or my brother Doug. It's 1948, she's 39, and her father has just passed away. She spends a lot of her time there, which in my view is a perfectly good place to be if the alternative is bedridden, blind, mostly deaf, and bored in a nursing home. The only problem for me is that mom isn't always clear on who I am, since in her world I won't be born for another 3 years; but she does seem to remember my daughters, Tigana and Kasia. I think their having unusual names helps her keep them straight. She hasn't remembered who Mary is since Mom went to the nursing home.

On my last visit up to Edmonton, Mom had started talking about her aunts, Rose, Daisy and Violet, whom she believed were staying with her at her house. As she chatted away about them, I thought, "say, here's a chance to take some notes!" because it is a part of the family genealogy I don't know well. (Mom was the one who kept all our relations straight, with Doug as our backup, but since her memory has failed and Doug is gone, there is no one left to ask who is who.) So I started jotting down some things and asking mom a few questions, hoping to probe a bit, but had to stop when mom mentioned that her dad had recently died (in her world) as the result of being attacked by raccoons. Oops. I'm pretty sure if it had been raccoons, someone would have mentioned that somewhere along the line, so I had to concede that mom's Alzheimer's makes her an unreliable source, and abandon my note-taking.

Her 100th birthday visit was good. She only eats pureed foods now, so we mashed up a piece of birthday cake with some tea (her drink of choice) and she wolfed that down faster than anything I've seen her eat in the last decade. When I commented that I hoped it wouldn't spoil her supper (her not eating enough being an issue) she responded that the birthday cake was a heck of a lot better than supper! (Actually the food in this particular nursing home is better than most; even pureed, Mom usually says how much she enjoys the food. She's just, at 100, not that interested in eating any more.) We gave her an extra soft, cuddly, purple fuzzy blanket for her birthday present, as she is perpetually cold, and she seemed to really like it, refusing to let go of it for the duration. And I got her a cup of tea, the one thing she can never get enough of.

For us, her reaching 100 is great in the sense that she has had a long and largely good life. She was taking care of herself right up to her move to the home two or three years ago; and was mostly lucid up to my brother's passing last year. His daily visits provided the stability she needed to stay anchored in this world, though she had already started to visit with her mom and Evie on a regular basis. But actually being 100 kind of sucks, and it saddens me to see how far her health has declined this year. Still, as long as she is happy visiting relatives, and she is not in too much pain, well and good.

It takes six weeks to get there.

Another brief trip to Edmonton to feed mom. Of interest here was that Douglas has now joined the circle of deceased relatives sitting with her.

We haven't told mom about Doug -- there is no point since she wouldn't be able to remember for more than a few minutes, and we and the majority of the staff at the home felt it would just be cruel. (One staff member and one neighbour thought we ought to tell her, but they seemed to be projecting their own 'need to know' onto Mom.) The first few days Mom asked after Douglas, and I would just reply that he wasn't here today, that I had come instead. After that Douglas became confused in her mind with her long dead brothers, especially Tom, when talking to me; or she would say her "son was coming" to the staff, and they'd simply answer in terms of when I would be there next. But suddenly this week, for the first time, she was including Doug in her conversation with those from beyond the veil. As in: "Evie, why don't you have another cup of tea? Douglas, get Evie some tea, will you?" And clearly not addressing me, but the unseen individuals on the other side (in both senses of the phrase) of her.

Not sure how I should interpret this, but it does make one wonder. If there is something after, and if one retains volition, then Douglas would certainly want to sit with Mom. As before, it's something of a comfort knowing that Doug is there for Mom when I cannot be.

Mother Part I

With the passing of my brother, Doug, the care and feeding of our mother has fallen to me.

Doug went to the nursing home every day, summer and winter, blizzard or rain, to feed mother supper. He only missed four days in four years, right up until he fell ill himself. Blind and with no memory, she could neither see her supper nor remember it was there without his patiently spooning it out for her. Mother was always a slow eater, and now at 99, it routinely takes three hours to get her supper in. Her meals are all pureed, but she still has to compulsively chew each mouthful to liquid. There are frequent pauses to reheat the current course in the microwave, since the meal obviously gets cold over three hours, and reheating the food significantly increases not only her enjoyment of the meal, but also the chances of her actually eating. It all looks like baby food to me, but it is clear from looking at the trays of the other residents, most of whom do not require pureeing, that the food here is excellent; far superior to hospital food, with much less repetition in the offerings. With only three or four exceptions in four years, she has always raved about the soup; she expresses similar enthusiasm for the entrée about one day in three. Mom also loves the strawberry flavour Ensure, a liquid meal substitute, and I have found that by mixing her "Great Shake Plus" protein drink into her tea, I can usually get that in too.

Mom was extremely dependent on Doug; more so even than I think Douglas realized. Before, when I'd come up to visit, I would often go to the nursing home when Douglas wasn't there, to increase the visitor-to-hours-alone ratio for mom, but I quickly discovered that Mom wasn't the same person when Doug wasn't there. Most of the day she would sleep, or daydream, and neither the staff nor I could sustain much interaction with her. As soon as Doug showed up, however, his voice would trigger an instant rally, and she would sit up and engage with him for the duration of his visit. Of course, by definition, Douglas never saw her when he wasn't there. Douglas would talk about her good days or bad days, but the truth is, it was probably good hours and bad days, because she was never really there outside of the brief window of his suppertime visits.

Some evenings she would be lucid and have lively conversations with Doug; other evenings she would be engaged, but very confused; others she would simply sleep through the entire meal, not eating. Doug and I suspected the sleepy or confused days correlated to when she got her pain medicine renewed, but we could hardly begrudge her pain relief. Initially, Mom had more good days than bad, but increasingly Doug reported she was having more bad days than good (and that was Doug's biased sample of the 'good' part of her day, at that.) As mom declined, I eventually gave up trying to visit her when Douglas wasn't there. As even supper times became increasingly problematic, I came to see my role not so much as visiting Mom, as supporting Doug. I'd regale him with my ongoing monolog as he struggled to feed mom, and we'd get a decent visit out of it, whether or not Mom was able to participate. She was usually able to say hello and goodbye to me, but as Doug needed to sit by her good ear to feed her, she often couldn't hear me, and didn't usually remember that I was there, or who I was, without a good deal of prompting from Doug. But of course, the vast majority of days Doug was there on his own.

It must have been incredibly hard on Doug. I don't know how he managed, especially as the percentage of 'bad' days increased. Staff subsequently told me that it was not unusual for him to take until 10PM to feed her supper (which starts at 5). As mom became increasingly confused, it must have been hard to sustain conversation or find rewarding moments. (The worst was a brief period in February when Mom went completely deaf for a couple of weeks -- blind and deaf must have made trying to feed her supper very difficult and frustrating. Fortunately, her hearing partially returned in March.)

Living in Lethbridge, I can't be there every night, of course, but I have managed to get up to Edmonton for a week to ten days at a time. Whenever I'm away from home for a week, I feel guilty throwing all the parenting responsibilities onto Mary, and I miss my wife and kids horribly; but whenever I'm at home in Lethbridge, I feel guilty about abandoning my mom. There really is no way to balance that out, so we just do the best we can. (Mary is content -- and farsighted enough -- to have me role model for our kids that it is sometimes important to put others' needs first; at some point, we will want our daughters to occasionally abandon their husbands and children to come feed us supper...)

I have a great deal of confidence in the nursing home staff, who provide excellent care for my Mom. I think Doug's having been there every evening went a long way towards forging a connection with the staff, and by going up every few weeks, I've managed to maintain that positive relationship. But staff are not family, and my being there seems very important to mom. Not only don't I want her to feel abandoned, but I can provide the three hour meal service and the little touches (like extra cups of tea) that the staff's heavy workloads preclude. I cannot always get her to eat, but my batting average is better than the staff's (just because I have a longer timeframe in which to succeed).

Mother Part II

Good Days and Bad Days

I've been fortunate that most of the days I've been visiting mom have been good days. Once or twice she's known who I am, remembered my daughters and wife, and been able to hold a normal conversation. Most days she's been talkative and upbeat, but 'confused'. A couple of days have been bad, with mom either being too sleepy to eat, or too grumpy.

"Confused" is not really a fair description. The doctor diagnosed "Alzheimer's", but I do not believe that to be entirely accurate. The real problem is that mom has lost her memory, and is blind, an unfortunate combination.

Being blind, Mom has no basis on which to distinguish between dreaming and waking. Ever had that experience of waking up in a hotel or at a relative's and taking a second or two to remember that it's not your own bed? Or just that that was a dream, and now you're awake? Where the rest of us can open our eyes and look around to orient ourselves each morning, Mom has no access to accurate updates. On the contrary, her eyes insist on feeding her false images. (This is apparently fairly common among those who become blind as adults.) For several years, Doug would have to remind her that she was blind, so that whatever she was seeing wasn’t real, and Mom would go, "Oh yes, you're right." Doug would remind her that she was in the nursing home, and she would say, "Oh yes, of course!" And Mom would be able to orient herself back to the real world. As her memory has increasingly failed, however, her ability to recall that she is in a nursing home (which she has never actually seen) or even that she is blind, given that she is 'looking' at something right there right now, has also declined. So she isn't 'confused', so much as reacting to the sensory data available to her, which unfortunately is inaccurate. I am convinced, if mom could only see, she would be reminded of who and what was around her, and consequently lucid much more of the time.

As it is, however, with little to ground her in our world, she spends much of her time in her own. I often arrive to find her in animated conversation with people who aren't there; or when I ask her about her day, she'll tell me about visiting long-dead relatives in cities to which she's never been; or tell me that sitting on the plane all day has been tiring, and ask when do we expect to land? (Well, not an unreasonable question given that she spends the day in a reclining wheelchair, about as comfortable as a typical airline seat.)

Increasingly, Mom spends most of her time in 1948 -- just before or just after her father passed away -- surrounded by her friends and family. She often has tea with her mother as they sit in the kitchen after supper; or with her sister mid-afternoon. Her brothers amuse and help her; various relatives come to visit on a daily basis, especially a contingent from England who seem to be staying with them. These visits are the source of considerable enjoyment for my mother, who seems to revel in the company.

It does create a minor difficulty for me, however, in that I was born in 1951, and therefore do not yet exist in this world. When I tell her that I'm her son and here to visit with her, she looks confused and troubled. "Who did you say you were?" "I'm, Robert, your son."
She shakes her head as if to clear it, and says, "Robert? I don't have a son 'Robert'. My sons are 'Doug' and 'Ron'."

"I'm your third son."

"I only have two sons." And so on. I try to imagine what it is like for her to be sitting having tea in the backyard at her parents' home, and have some complete stranger come in and claim to be the son she hasn't borne yet. Freaky weird.

Even weirder for her is the disorientation that occurs when she falls asleep during dinner. I guess Doug was better at reading the signals, but I can't always tell when she is opening her mouth for the next spoonful, and when her mouth falls open because she's fallen asleep between chews. On one recent memorable occasion, I spooned in a nice dollop of pudding, and Mom shot up in her chair sputtering and crying out.

"What's wrong?" I shouted into her good ear.

"Um, urfph, ack" mom choked out, feeling around for a napkin. When I put it into her hand, she spit the pudding out.

"What's wrong," I asked again. "Did it taste bad? Was there something in it?"

After a moment or two mom calms down and says, "Well, no, I guess there was nothing wrong with it, really. But what was it doing in my mouth?"

"Um, I put it there?"

"You put it there?"

"It's chocolate pudding," I said. "It's good."

"Well, yes, I suppose it was. But what is it doing in my mouth?"

"Why not? It’s desert. It's supper time, and that was desert."

Mom's trademark head shake trying to make sense of what I'm saying. "But I was just getting on the train, and suddenly I had a mouthful of pudding."

She'd fallen asleep, and drifted in to a vivid dream between one mouthful and the next. Okay, again, how weird would that have to be? You're walking along the platform about to board your train, and suddenly and inexplicably, a spoonful of chocolate pudding materializes in your mouth. (Magic realism story idea in there somewhere, for sure.)

On my most recent trip, the problem of not knowing who I am was further compounded by her insistence that I was a woman. Her hearing seems to have lost the lower registers, and with the added difficulty of a slight cold that made my voice more than usually squeaky, she became convinced that she was hearing a woman. Having visualized a woman sitting next to her, it must come as something of a preposterous shock for said woman to then claim to be one's son.

It doesn't bother me. I don't really care whether she knows who I am or where she is, so long as she is happy. Her waking dreams seem to be mostly upbeat -- she often tells me she has had "a wonderful day visiting everyone" or "it's been a nice quiet day with Evie" (her sister). Got to beat sitting alone, blind and aching, in a nursing home.

Mother Part III

A Bad Day

The worst visit to Mom's nursing home for me this week was so bad that it's the stuff of black comedy.

As I arrived, the woman from the adjoining room waved me over. I hadn't seen her on this trip so far, but she had in the past often given me very helpful updates on my Mom. "Hello, [name deleted]," I said.

"Hello," she greeted me with her raspy voice. "Could you help me?"

"Of course," I said, "What can I do for you?"

"I'd like to die, now. Could you kill me?"

"Ah..."

"You have to hurry, though, before the staff come back."

The evening went steadily downhill from there...

The aid who brought my mother's supper tray told me that Mom hadn't eaten or drunk anything all day. The pressure was therefore on for me to get something into her.

Mom took two sips of soup, and then carefully held out the cup at arm's length. Thinking that she was aiming for her tray table, though way off the mark, I attempted to intercept it. This provokes a very hostile reaction. "What do you think you're playing at! Let go!"

"Oh, sorry. I thought you were looking for the tray table."

Mom gives me a disgusted expression as if I am a total moron, and says, "I was passing it to Evie, as you could see plainly see. What did you think you were doing, ripping it out of her hand like that?" and proceeds to stretch her arm out once again. Where the cup hovers precariously, and begins to tip onto the floor. I again attempt to catch the falling cup, and mom again goes ballistic at my interference. "What is wrong with you? This is completely unacceptable behaviour! It is not appropriate to grab my cup out of my very hand. If you interfere with us again, I shall have to ask you to leave." And again proffers the cup to her long dead sister.

"Evie's not here," I say. "This is your soup, and you need to drink it."

Again, Mom tilts her head and takes on this look of complete incredulity that anyone could have the gall to maintain something so patently absurd. "What do you mean 'Evie's not here?' She's sitting right there. You can see her," [Points] "on that wicker chair right there. That's Evie! Now stop being so rude!" And so on.

Eventually I give up arguing with her over who's there -- because, truth be told, I'm not absolutely positive that just because I and the staff can't see or hear them, that mom's family aren't in fact sitting around visiting her. Mom's not only completely convinced, she's convincing. I'm not sure whether I find this creepy or reassuring, but there is a long tradition in our culture that those on the other side sometimes crowd 'round to welcome you to the next world. Fair enough, if spending time with her family helps her with the transition.

But on this particular evening, Mom refused to eat at all. "I've already eaten, thank you. I had two great big buns, and a huge bowl of soup, and turkey, and desert, and there is simply no way I could take another bite." When I pointed out that they had just brought her meal and it was sitting untouched on the tray table in front of her, I was again on the receiving end of that disgusted look that I was contradicting not only her but the obvious facts sitting in plain sight. "You can see my empty plate right there! I had these two great big buns, and--"

"Mom, they don't serve buns here. You haven't had a bun in four years."

"How would you know? You weren't here when I was eating them." And so on. Again, the facts as I know them are in direct contradiction of the facts of which she is equally sure. She has eaten a huge meal with her family, and is now sitting having a quiet cup of tea, and what am I on about?

In the end I had to go home with nothing concrete to show for my visit, except for my own grieving: seems to me, if she is not only spending all her days visiting beyond the veil, but now taking her meals there as well, it may not be long before she moves there permanently.

Mom

An older photo of my Mom, before she went into extended care home

A Visit to Mom

Spent Reading Week visiting my aging mother, now 96, blind, and victim of a failing memory. I found my visit depressing, as her health and quality of life go into decline. She had recently hurt her leg, making walking painful or impossible. Unable to continue working out on the condo’s treadmill, she is rapidly losing circulation in her feet and legs, crippling up completely; and her neck and shoulders are another source of constant pain as she attempts to compensate for her weak leg by holding herself up in her walker. She needs a hip replacement, but at 96, I’m doubtful she could survive the operation or that she would have long enough to benefit to make the recovery period worthwhile. But without it, I can see only further rapid deterioration in her condition.

Equally depressing is her loss of memory, and frequent disorientation. Being old and unable to sleep at night, she often falls asleep at the kitchen table. Being blind, the line between waking and dreaming is often blurred. Whereas the rest of us wake up, look around, and say, “oh yeah, I must have fallen asleep in the kitchen” or “Oh yeah, I’m at my Mom’s this week”, she has no visual cues to her whereabouts or time, and the best available references are in fact the dream images that thus persist into her initial waking state. Consequently, my brother has frequently found her wandering her apartment looking for her baby, a recurrent dream responsibility now 50 years out of date. Even when fully awake, her memory is so impaired that at times she cannot remember what was said only moments ago. I have to tell her that my wife Mary has gotten her job/promotion to assistant professor perhaps 16 times in three days: indeed, often by the time I had told mom something or answered a question, she would forget what she had asked and would ask the exact same question over again.

And she would repeat the same story about my Dad over and over – obviously their divorce much on her mind as she evaluates her life and weighs its meaning, but even with repeated opportunities to try different approaches in response, I find it an awkward subject to address. Each time she tells the incident, she expects me to be surprised by this ‘revelation’, but I’ve heard the same story now 20 or 30 times in the last year alone, and had first heard it maybe 25 years ago, so it feels inauthentic to feign surprise yet again.

I try to change the subject by asking her questions, but her answer to any query about family history is always “I’m sorry, I don’t remember anymore.” And indeed she doesn’t, telling me, for example, that it is too bad that she never met my brother’s wife, though of course she has hundreds of times. I’m frustrated by the impossibility of fetching my brother’s family portrait from the sideboard in the next room and pointing Joan out to her, but of course she there are no such easy referents for the blind. Somewhere in her closet lies a bin of family photos going back two generations, but none of them are labeled, and as Mom is the last surviving member of her family, there is no one left to identify the group of Englishmen in top hats and tails posing stiffly in front of the ancestral home in…wherever that is.

I regret now not taping her family stories while she still retained them. I can feel a huge chunk of my own past, my own formative years listening to family history and absorbing the implied life lessons and family identity, slipping away as I lose the source that could once have verified the details of my childhood recall – and ensured that I passed on the stories correctly to my own children. I see my children do something and I wonder if I did that or was like that when I was young, but there is no one left to ask.

Most of all, it saddens me that my Mom will never be able to see Kasia, or hold her, or know my second daughter as anything other than a passing wail. Tigana looks nothing like the toddler my Mom met before she went blind, and my daughters’ memories of my Mom will be of a shrunken arthritic shell, too fragile to hug, rather than the dynamic, inventive, principled woman who raised me.

Still, the visit was important to my Mom, even if it only existed in a brief, momentary ‘now’ that was forgotten soon after I left. I imagine her complaining to my brother that I haven’t been to visit for a long time, and that he’ll tell her again that I was just up last week, and that I’m coming again, this time with the family, at Easter. But that’s probably an exaggeration; she probably knows that I’ve been and that I love her. And that’s maybe enough.