Denial
As with any tragedy, denial plays a role in dealing with the situation. For my family, denial has been exercised in many forms over the last five years. One of the most prominent ways has been through striving to keep up the appearance of normalcy. Clinging to the way life was before my mother’s mental decline is a natural stage of grief, but—spurred on by my family’s genetic stubbornness—it has been the hardest to move on from.
An observation from last summer:
As I sit and stare outside, I wander off in my own mind. The lawn, green from my father’s ritual mowing, watering, and fertilizing, shows uncharacteristic patches of thinning blades. The grassy smell wafts through the open window, and if I close my eyes I can pretend that I’m sitting in the living room of my family’s old home.* I can believe that this new house, filled with furniture and decorations from the former residence and town, has always been home. And if I concentrate a bit more, I can pretend that my mother, sitting in the cushioned chair across the room from me, does not have early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease.
She sits, reading a coffee table book of odd and historic newspaper photos. Her fingers guide her eyes along the lines of sentences fit in small boxes at the pages’ corners. She whispers the words as they appear in front of her, sometimes stumbling over names and easy ones, sometimes breezing right through four-syllable nouns. This book seems to be a good read as the photographs tell most of the story, and plot lines do not carry over from one page to the next.
As I watch, I remember the countless hours and books she read to my sisters and me as children, and the worn-out library card she used to borrow romance and mystery novels to read during sporadic moments she had to herself. I will project these memories onto her now, hoping that some information from the book is able to be stored in her mind. This is just like how I fool myself into believing that she goes straight to the “Living” section of the World Herald every day to complete the crossword instead of reading the comics. Yes, I can imagine that she is just leaving the boxes empty to complete later, and not because she can no longer write anything but the first three letters of her name. I will justify the dusty Upwords game with this kind of rationalizing, too: our family hasn’t touched it for three years because everyone’s been too busy for game tournaments, and not because my mother can no longer win.
*A few months after my mother’s diagnosis, my parents moved from our beloved family home to a new town 100 miles away.
An observation from last summer:
As I sit and stare outside, I wander off in my own mind. The lawn, green from my father’s ritual mowing, watering, and fertilizing, shows uncharacteristic patches of thinning blades. The grassy smell wafts through the open window, and if I close my eyes I can pretend that I’m sitting in the living room of my family’s old home.* I can believe that this new house, filled with furniture and decorations from the former residence and town, has always been home. And if I concentrate a bit more, I can pretend that my mother, sitting in the cushioned chair across the room from me, does not have early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease.
She sits, reading a coffee table book of odd and historic newspaper photos. Her fingers guide her eyes along the lines of sentences fit in small boxes at the pages’ corners. She whispers the words as they appear in front of her, sometimes stumbling over names and easy ones, sometimes breezing right through four-syllable nouns. This book seems to be a good read as the photographs tell most of the story, and plot lines do not carry over from one page to the next.
As I watch, I remember the countless hours and books she read to my sisters and me as children, and the worn-out library card she used to borrow romance and mystery novels to read during sporadic moments she had to herself. I will project these memories onto her now, hoping that some information from the book is able to be stored in her mind. This is just like how I fool myself into believing that she goes straight to the “Living” section of the World Herald every day to complete the crossword instead of reading the comics. Yes, I can imagine that she is just leaving the boxes empty to complete later, and not because she can no longer write anything but the first three letters of her name. I will justify the dusty Upwords game with this kind of rationalizing, too: our family hasn’t touched it for three years because everyone’s been too busy for game tournaments, and not because my mother can no longer win.
*A few months after my mother’s diagnosis, my parents moved from our beloved family home to a new town 100 miles away.
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