All things must pass away, but they haven’t yet.

Here we are, the last day of August, what I think is supposed to be one of those “dog days of summer” (although I’m not really sure what that means, so don’t quote me on it), the sun is shining, laundry is hanging, some truck down the street is beeping (someone make it stop!) and I am thinking about my mother. Again.

She called this morning as I was hanging out the wash, which gave me the excuse that I would call her back in half an hour. There are about five minutes left in that reprieve.

She opened by asking me where I lived, and when I told her, she realized that I couldn’t help her. What did she want? She wants to move. She is unhappy in the retirement home, feeling like a prisoner, bored, useless. There are three unerased messages on our answering machine from her that came in this weekend while we were out, and all three are depressing. In one she asks me to call my father and ask him to get in touch with her because she wants to move and can’t seem to raise any family members. These pleas for rescue break my heart.

I asked her just now if Little Princess had been to see her the evening before. She told me she would go see her grandmother for supper, and I hope she did, but my mother couldn’t tell me. She had forgotten. It does no good to remind her that she does things, that she has friends, that she doesn’t need to worry about not having money in her purse or food in her fridge because all her needs are provided for. She forgets everything as soon as she hears it and as soon as it happens. Yesterday I had to remind her again that her parents had both passed away in 1967, that she had been with them during their expirations, and had held her father’s hand as he breathed out his last. That she remembered once I said it.

I am not the first person to watch a loved one dwindle in this way, nor will I be the last. There is a woman on campus, the principal’s secretary, whose mother died from Alzheimer’s, who has offered her shoulder any time I need it. I appreciate that. Maybe I should take advantage of it.

In the meantime, I suffer with this three-fold agony that is caused by one basic fact: I love my mother. Knowing that she is bored, upset, aware of her loss upsets me because I love her. Not being able to do anything about it causes me to feel great pain and guilt, because I am not with her at least trying to alleviate her own suffering. Worst of all, I see my mother slipping away from me, knowing that someday she will die and really be gone and I will miss her.

My brother mentioned when he was here that the Buddhist explanation for sorrow is our attachment to earthly things, including people. This may be true, but the opposite, detachment, seems rather callous to me, especially in this situation when empathy is all I can give my mom.

It will end, I know, and that will be hardest of all.

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