Shades of My Mother by Nancy Townsley
“she is still alive, in the eating and breathing sense”
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When Mom was healthy, for much of the time I was a child, a teenager and finally, a grownup with kids of my own, she made ground-beef casseroles and chocolate fudge cakes and a flank steak recipe my father loved. She did the washing and ironing, kept a meticulously-detailed checklist of the pills they each were supposed to take every day and went on rides with him in their 1970 convertible Volkswagen bug, a powder-blue job with a license plate holder bearing the words “Super Mom.” Around 2004, when she began to forget more than a few small things—she’d start a sentence and trail off in the middle, unable to remember what she’d intended to say—her embarrassment and frustration made everything harder. Dad would try to fill in the blanks for her. Sometimes she’d get mad and shut him out for days, or say she didn’t love him anymore. My father became older and more bent over. Later on she came down with Pick’s disease, a cousin of Alzheimer’s that causes aphasia, a disorder of the part of the brain that controls speech and language, and she fairly quickly fell nearly silent. Since then my father has coveted every monosyllabic intonation of her former self: a giggle, a sigh, a “yes,” a “no.”
I drive to my mother’s care center with my husband every Thursday and find it ironic that I see her more often now than I did when she could still speak and move and reason. It’s been three years since her incarceration and she is still alive, in the eating and breathing sense anyway, with who knows what going through her shrinking, snow-white-capped head. I hope she is free of the fears and anxieties that gripped her for most of her adult life. She’s 82 now, a thin shadow of the person she used to be. She is—as she used to say of some of her patients when she worked as an intensive-care nurse years ago—an invalid. It’s hard to tell, impossible really, to discern what’s occurring in her mind, even when I stare intently into her dark brown eyes after my father exclaims, “Isn’t she pretty?”—more as a statement than a question because he has been in love with her since they were in high school in Algona, Iowa, and their families lived two streets over from each other.
His daily life’s rhythm is dictated by hers now, a complete role reversal from all the years she spent moving across the country and even to Puerto Rico with him while he was a pilot in the U.S. Navy between the Korean and Vietnam wars. Wearing sleeveless rayon dresses, high heels and Jackie O-style sunglasses, my mother would proudly stand inside cavernous squadron hangars, my sisters and me wiggling in our folding chairs beside her, whenever our father received a promotion. He was a commander when he retired from the military. I thought they were pretty happy then—and now, even in her silence and his sorrow, they seem to be again.
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My mother never wanted it to end this way, that she’d inherit “This Thing,” as she called it, the trouble that befell her father in his later years, the ailment that took his mind and most of his memories and mixed them all up in a confusing emotional stew of bitterness and anger and fear. But it is her fate, and perhaps her salvation. The other night I sat with her and held her hand, with its blue-veined paper-thin skin, and kept it from trembling while she wept and looked at me with her brown pleading eyes, a frail octogenarian’s version of the ones my father became lost in more than fifty years ago. I saw so many things: the teenaged mid-western beauty queen who shucked corn in 100-degree summer heat and once climbed to the top of a building just to get a better suntan in a single rebellious outburst over a lifetime of stolid obedience. The young military wife who followed her officer husband to duty stations near and far, three small girls in tow, hosting cocktail parties and teasing her hair and smoking menthol cigarettes and proclaiming Tuesday her “ironing day” and always, always looking for herself amid all the noise.
The anxious involved mother who sometimes was overwhelmed, who took us to horse shows and ballet lessons and dental appointments, who bought us matching car coats and mixed up identical glasses of Tang, trying to make sure everything was equal. The doting grandmother who sewed pinafores and read books and braided hair for the first members of the coming-up generation who are now mostly grown and off on their own adventures, whose pictures are pinned to the bulletin board in the stark room she shares at the care home with Marilyn, who also cannot think or speak much at all and who drools when she falls asleep and her head nods forward.
My mother, who used to dance the Charleston in the living room and introduce me to women my age in her congregation because she thought we might become friends. My mom, who had such distinctive, part-cursive, part-printed handwriting and who loved to laugh and still does, but who now barely resembles the woman I have known since 1957, the year I was born and the year in which the motto “In God We Trust” started appearing on U.S. currency.
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Every day now, twice a day, my father gets in his car and drives ten miles each way to sit by my mother’s bedside and give her sips of water, smooth her silky hair, kiss her unmoving lips. “Isn’t she pretty?” he says, and means it. I don’t know if he still prays, but when I do, in more of a feeble meditation than anything else, I petition the keeper of the universe to free my mother from her demons. I like to think that even as she continues to decline, the perpetually half-empty glass of her life will become half full of all the things she missed out on before: breath, calm, kaleidoscopic color.
Alzheimer’s is a torturous, unforgiving disease that somehow paradoxically imbued her waning life with the peace and tranquility that were so elusive to her in earlier years. Some call it The Long Goodbye. My mother lost her ability to tell me how she felt about where she was going after dementia started steering her down a dimly lit, one-way road. Sometimes she smiles, and that’s nice. It helps me to think she’s been heading home the whole time.
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Nancy Townsley is a marathon runner and managing editor of two newspapers in western Washington County, Oregon. She grew up as a Navy brat and rode horses around the island of Puerto Rico before moving to the Pacific Northwest in 1973. Her work has appeared in Brave On The Page: Oregon Writers on Craft and the Creative Life (Forest Avenue Press), and at Runner's World, Role Reboot, and BLEED, a literary blog by Jaded Ibis Productions. She lives, runs and writes in St. Helens, Oregon.