Talking to Strangers

My mother strongly believed that people shouldn’t feel alone in church. Nothing preoccupied her thoughts more than noticing someone sitting by themselves and would usually invite solo-attendees to sit with our family if they wanted.

She was always ready to shake people’s hands and talk to them after the service.    She asked who they were, where they were from, and what they liked to do, taking interest in what they said by really listening.  She was quite possibly the church’s best one-woman welcoming committee.

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 Shortly after my mother’s diagnosis, my parents move to a new town and join a new church.  They are very slow at meeting fellow members. Whereas a few years earlier my mother played in the bell choir and my father was president of the men's group, now they sit in the balcony and leave right after service, swallowed by the impersonal nature of the larger congregation and the limitations of my mother’s disease.

The town holds an annual heritage festival in the summer, and during that weekend, the church sells slices of pie to visitors.  My parents sign up to help, and since I happen to be visiting the day they volunteer, I go along.

When we arrive for duty, my father is sent across the room to the ice cream station, and a disheveled woman covered in fruit pieces tells my mother that she will be helping organize pies.  She asks my mother her name and checks it off a list from her pocket. 

I pipe up to say that we would be working together.  

The woman looks over the top of her glasses at me for a moment, then turns to my mother and explains that one person could watch pies and one could wipe down tables as pies were moved off of them.  She then rattles off the process of moving pies from the storage tables to the cutting station, and then putting the slices on the servers’ table.  

She pauses to get a verbal note of understanding from my mother, but none come as my mother stares at her rhubarb- and cherry-stained apron. 

“We got it,” I put in quickly.  The woman glances expectantly at my mother for a few seconds more, then goes back to coordinating other volunteers.  

We move pies around the basement for a while but are not allowed to cut them.  This is done by another woman volunteer who tells my mother which flavors to bring over and where to set them.  

My mother nods but does not move whenever the woman speaks.  Instead, she looks at me and I repeat the instructions softly and search the pastries in the queue.  She follows, I hand her the correct pie, and then I tell her to take it to the woman with the knife and spatula.  My mother does this correctly most of the time, but when she misplaces a pie, I grab it and take it myself.  

The woman looks to be in her forties, and she only addresses my mother.  The way she talks to her seems to indicate that if she just keeps pressing, my mother will eventually start behaving “normally.”  The woman speaks to her like an adult (which is fine; I would be offended if she spoke to her like a child), but when she sees that the instructions are not getting through, she does not attempt to rephrase or explain things differently.    

Over the course of two hours, my mother never leaves my side, nor does she speak to anyone except me.  And yet, several ladies come and go in the stations around us, and each of them speak to my mother by repeating themselves louder when they see she is not comprehending.  At that point, they usually busy themselves elsewhere.  

My mother and I become the abnormalities—the woman who doesn’t respond and the daughter who is the invisible voice—that the church ladies do not know how to react to.  

This bothers me because I cannot understand how women (roughly the same age as my mother) have trouble socializing with someone new and slightly “different.”  They do not need to know that she has Alzheimer’s, but they see something unsettling about her and move in the opposite direction.  

Little do I realize, but over the next year I will encounter this behavior again and again—women my mother’s age who do not know how to interact with her.   

Though she used to be a very social person, my mother now worries so much about not finding the right words that she will not speak to strangers at all. When I am with her, I give answers for questions she does not know or cannot verbalize, but I go unnoticed as women wait for my mother to give them answers that will never come.   

Only when someone new speaks to both of us will she contribute a few words.  Women walking the aisles at the grocery store, selling clothes at local department stores, and waiting for the hairdresser address her directly, get no answer, and move on—almost completely ignoring any conversation I try to volunteer.  When encountering people like this, I feel like we have both lost our voices.