The Wounded in Our Midst

Full Granaries “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” ― Søren Kierkegaard There was day I was watching my mother as she carried on with one of her theatrical monologues, and it occurred to me that I could no longer remember how she sounded before this phase in her dementia, or how it felt to hold a normal conversation with her. I gazed at her, wondering what it would feel like to hear her talk and laugh or call out my name like she used to. As I continued to watch her, a deep yearning welled up inside me. I missed her and I desperately wanted to experience her the way I once did. Her animated whispers and characters seemed to have permanently taken over, and I had grown accustomed to her new sound. At that very moment, I regretted that we didn’t have any recording that captured the sweetness in her old sound that I could play over and over until it was imprinted in my mind again. This desperate feeling had me rummaging through old photos in hopes of triggering an emotion or something that would bring her back to me. At the turn of every page she was captured laughing with abandon, dressed in platform heels and short dresses in her youth where she seemed to not have a care in the world, radiating with a beautiful glow during both of her pregnancies with my late sister and I. There we were again, caught in her cuddles and lost in her love. I absorbed it all, her very essence depicted in each turn. For a moment, I found her. Victor Frankl in his book Man’s Search for Meaning talks about the irreversibility of our lives. He says that in the past there is nothing irretrievably lost; instead it’s irrevocably stored and treasured. This statement really had an impact on how I dealt with my mother’s transformation. While detained at the concentration camps, he realized that his survival would be determined by the role he assigned to his past. As a caregiver, it can be difficult to watch your loved one lose their identity and someone you knew very well slowly becomes something of an enigma, a shadow of their former self, almost a stranger and the only link to who they once were is their physical features. Reality plays its part very well by painting a grim picture, one that is full of loss and the only way to avoid getting caught in a vortex of sorrow is to be willing to see the life in the person and accept it how it presents itself. Experiencing someone in one way and being required to experience and accept them in a totally different way is no small feat. One has to battle the dejection that comes with this reality, and sometimes it might even seem easier to escape by choosing to live in reverie, intoxicating yourself with memories of who your loved one used to be and the things they used to do. In the beginning I took account of all that my mother was no longer be able to do, like dressing herself, reading and writing, distinguishing between what was real and what was not or night from day. It was heartbreaking to watch her slowly get erased and at the same time try to get know this person who was there and yet not fully there. Thanks to Victor Frankl, I knew I had to be willing to change my perspective if I was to survive the experience and avoid being trapped in the past. When you are able to draw strength from the past and not get lost in it then you are able to move forward. Looking through her past with this mindset, all I saw now was evidence of a life well lived, not of one wasting away. We the children, for one, are evidence of her role in creation, and looking even deeper, there were more displays of her contribution to life, creation, and society through her career and roles as a wife, a mother, a mentor, a friend, a sibling, a daughter; through her choices, the many lives she impacted and enriched; and so much more. Remembering now became my role—remembering all the small details of how she liked her meals, how she liked to dress, the songs she loved to sing and listen to, what she loved to do. This was all that was required of me in her new chapter, ensuring that aspects of who she once was lived on through my actions towards her, enriching a life that had enriched me. Growing up I used to watch my mother do her makeup before she left for work, and this particular ritual was like a religion to her. The times where she ran late and forgot to wear her lipstick, she would dash back to the house to apply it the minute she became aware of it. Interestingly, when her memory began to fade this was one of the last things to go, and when she finally forgot, I always made sure I did it for her whenever she’d let me, because somehow this seemingly inconsequential detail was a big part of who she was. Very early on my mother’s physician told me that she was perfectly happy in her new world, and that I was the one who had to work on accepting and adjusting to it. Our lives are made up of many chapters, and just like all the rest, an illness is another chapter in a life. For some it may be the final one, while for others like my mother, it may be a totally new experience. The past is a testament to accomplishments, lessons, and triumphs, and we can only continue to add to. The present is where we determine what gets framed into the past. I had found my mother in the pictures, but feeling and emotion that I was craving was fleeting. I have had to accept that she had changed, but she is right here with me waiting for me to make more memories with her, of which I would be the sole custodian.