#dmentia

[msdmentia-blog]

Just Sayin: Lost

I am lost in a little world of my own... but its ok the people know me there.. (First FB Post March 2010)

[ztigma]

thrash/speed/heavy

CHECH THIS OUT , IT IS JUST KILLER!!!!

[takingcareofmom-blog]

Taking Care of Mom 3

After the birthday party, when everyone else had gone home except me and my husband and the boys, I started on what I swore I would not leave her house without doing: I cleaned up her bedroom.

My mother's house was usually messy, littered with mail, bills and solicitations and magazines. Plus books. Piles of books everywhere. She had cleaned up for the party.

But her bedroom was especially bad. It was not her original bedroom from when my father was still alive; that one was a large converted garage, spacious, perhaps chilly, with many mirrors on the closet doors.

She had moved into this old bedroom of mine in the front of the house. When was it? Perhaps after my sister started staying with her on and off. Two years before she died of cancer.

But Mom never moved back into her old bedroom. It was cozy in her little bedroom, she told me. The bathroom was right there and her TV worked okay.

The room had become a nest. Tiny pieces of paper lay everywhere: paper towels torn in half and left to languish, paper napkins on the bed, crumpled tissues on the floor, pieces of the New York Times, pages torn from magazines. Uneven ledges of junk mail, carefully perused, cascaded over the yellowing cotton quilt.

Then there was the mouse shit. Droppings seeding the quilt's starburst pattern, sprinkled over the white pieces of paper on the floor, gathered in piles in the bumpy green carpet.

The sheets were gray. The pillow cases were gray. There were droppings in the bed.

"Yes," she said, shaking her head. The mice just ran all over the place.

Piles of books sloped crazily on every surface: paperback mysteries, art books, photography books, classics from her younger years like Joyce and Conrad and Virginia Woolf. 

Over and under the books were clothes: underwear, socks, sweaters -- many sweaters -- black coats, black pants, shoes she didn't wear any more. Shoes and boots boiled out of the closet, making it unapproachable. Voluminous hills of clothing, interspersed with more books, magazines, and junk mail, filled the three-quarters of the bed she didn't sleep in.

The heavy dresser drawers were filled with old photos, cameras, framed pictures, books, ceramic bowls. Not clothes.

By the time I was finished, my back was killing me and I was sweating all over. But it was clean.

Over and over, she thanked me. But I knew she was wishing I had just left her alone. She always does that. She says the right thing, she means the right thing, but in her heart, she just wants to be left alone.

She is no different from old mothers and fathers everywhere. They just want to be left alone where they feel comfortable. In the place they know, filled with the familiarity that the blind must have to move with confidence.

She no longer moves with confidence. In my home, she wanders like a ghost.

Don't put me in a home, she always says. When she was 70, she joined the Hemlock Society.

Don't be ridiculous, she always says. I can still drive just fine.