WTF?
1:26 p.m.
I arrived at my mom’s house around 8:00 p.m. on Friday, after having had a pretty uneventful day of traveling. My son and I rode together as far as the Montreal terminus where we had pizza and coke for lunch, and then caught our respective buses (him to Ottawa, me to Toronto). Parting from him was pretty difficult, knowing I won’t see him again until his reading week. However, the rest of the trip was routine.
My mom answered the doorbell and said, “I thought you weren’t coming until tomorrow!” I had told her many times when I was arriving, but she is extremely forgetful, so I wasn’t surprised about this. The weird part, though, was that she had told Frank, her “boarder”, to pick up certain foodstuffs on his way home from work because I was coming that night, and then she promptly forgot that this was the case. Even though I told her repeatedly that I had eaten on the bus (I packed myself a more-than sufficient supper), she asked me at least four times if I wanted something to eat or if I was hungry. We finally settled for tea and I had a nice visit with her and Frank (who is a bit of an idiot, but I think he’s honest, and that’s really another story).
Earlier that afternoon she had been to see the geriatric psychologist who asked her questions and did some simple testing to find out the state of her memory. Apparently she had seen him three months earlier and had no recollection of it. She could not tell me anything about her appointment that day because, apart from the fact that it had happened and what it had been for, she’d forgotten all other salient details.
My mother used to be involved in music. As a youngster, she took piano lessons to an advanced level, and after she retired she took up the recorder, taking lessons with a private teacher and playing in ensembles. She had quite a collection of instruments, and I asked her if she was ready to part with them. She could not remember what a recorder was, nor even that it was a musical instrument, and didn’t remember ever playing one or even hearing one being played. I figured this was a sign that she was ready to part with them, having given me her sheet music years ago.
The next day, Saturday, was spent going through her desk drawers. I found things that had been hanging around since before my dad died. At one point my brother who lives in Israel telephoned, so I took off my reading glasses and laid them on the desk, taking the phone after my mother was done. When I went back, my glasses had vanished and I never found them again. Luckily I had another pair in my purse, but this case of the evaporating reading glasses became a theme for the rest of the weekend.
While looking for the envelope containing my mother’s 2003 income tax return, I found her collection of recorders. She immediately knew them for what they were, whereas the night before she had had no recollection of them at all. Sadly, she had given the tenor away years ago, but I took a soprano, sopranino and alto home, leaving her a soprano which she will probably never play.
For lunch I cooked up a box of felafel mix that Frank had purchased the day before. My mother, who had been a very fine cook, experimenting with many different cuisines and somewhat of an expert when it came to Middle Eastern food, swore she had never tasted nor heard of felafel before. Even the flavour didn’t ring any bells as she ate it.
After lunch we went for a walk around the block and returned home where we went through her treasures. She told me she had been considering for quite a while now giving me her mother’s jewellery. These are rather ancient rings and brooches which my grandfather was unable to unload when he sold his watchmaking business before my mother was born. Many of them are in need of repair, missing stones and clasps, and all are dated. It will cost more to bring the collection up to wearability than it is probably worth, but for sentimental reasons I might refurbish a few pieces. My mother wanted to give it to me rather than my sister-in-law getting it. She also gave me a load of costume jewellery that she wore at one time, mostly stuff with rhinestones which will look very pretty onstage.
In the evening I took off with an old friend, someone whom I met when I was at camp when I was 10, and who also knows my brothers. Age wise he is between the two of them and always looked upon me as a kid sister. We caught up on 35 years’ worth of gossip over strong coffee (I had two lattès--big mistake as they kept me up for many hours) and would have continued into the wee hours if the place hadn’t started turning off its lights at midnight.
On Sunday my mother and I went through the bathroom medicine cabinets, throwing out things that had expired years ago, cleaning and tidying. Just around noontime she suddenly became very dizzy and had to lie down. She ate and drank a bit, then had a nap, after which she felt much refreshed. I also took the opportunity to catch up on lost sleep from the night before. Sometime during this, she asked me if I could make bread in her bread machine. There were two problems: a) The manual she had was for a different breadmaker, and b) there were no kneading paddles in the pan. She had no idea at first what I was talking about when I told her of this difficulty, and then we looked for them all over the kitchen, but found them not. They had evaporated, just as my reading glasses had done.
After supper that night, my mother expressed an interest in playing cards, so I decided I would see if she really had forgotten to play cribbage. I retaught her the game, and as we played, it came back to her. Since her vision sucks, I pegged the points and she actually beat me by a small margin. This was followed by a game of gin rummy, where she devastated me with a score of 100 to 16, knocking on almost every hand and only ginning on the last one. Her only difficulty was with dealing: sometimes she dealt more than one card because she couldn’t see what she was doing.
Early on Monday morning my mother’s cleaning lady came. She didn’t find my glasses either. My mom and I took the subway downtown to Sears to see if we could find the missing parts for the bread machine. As far as I was concerned, this was a waste of a morning and subway fare. Since I had purchased it by catalogue, we went first to the catalogue counter where I was told that I needed to get in touch with the parts department. The nice clerk tried to connect me from the desk phone, but I was on hold for so long that I decided I would rather call from the comfort of home instead; so my mother and I made the tedious trip back on the subway. I spent 50 minutes on the telephone, 35 of them on hold, first finding out from the parts department that I had to call the machine’s manufacturer, and then finally ordering a pair of kneading paddles (billed to me, shipped to my mother) and getting the URL for the website where I could print off the correct manual.
That afternoon was more pleasant. I met the former diarylander known as tcklyrpharsn. We both bitched about our mothers, caught up on gossip, and hugged goodbye. I returned to my mom’s in time for supper, which she made (tuna patties and microwaved sweet potato).
It was after supper that all the really weird stuff started to happen. She suggested a game of cards, so I got the deck, shuffled, and dealt for gin. My mother asked what we were playing, and I told her. She said, “I’ve never played that game before.” I said, “But we just played last night and you whomped me!” She had totally forgotten. I thought to myself, Okay, we have a problem, but we can deal with this. So we played an open hand, as though I were teaching her how to play the game from scratch. Almost immediately afterwards, she forgot what we had just done. Then I asked her if she remembered what we had done that day. Suddenly, her mind was totally blank. She had forgotten everything. She didn’t even know when I had arrived, and asked me how I had come, if I were alone, and where I had stayed the previous night. Everything was gone.
So I started asking her questions about her past life, where she had worked for instance. Blank. She remembered people, like my husband and children, but very little else. I asked her if she knew who Frank was. She answered, “Vaguely.” I was ready to telephone my brother at this point, but she asked me not to. You see, I had decided earlier that instead of wasting a day traveling, I would take the overnight bus and arrive home at noon. My departure time was quickly approaching, and I was torn, wanting to get back to my own family, and not wanting to leave her alone. So I told her I would email my brother when I got home. I haven’t done that yet. This diary entry is actually preparatory to it, a way for me to sort out the weekend and what happened.
I then recapped the whole weekend for her, starting with my arrival Friday night and every waking minute we had spent together, including what we had eaten for meals, up to the present. She said that little bits of it made sense, but there was no continuity. As freaked out as I was, she must have been equally if not more upset. I don’t know how we managed to remain calm through all of this.
The turning point was when Frank arrived home. He had started a new job that day, driving bus for one of the seniors’s homes in town, which meant learning how to operate the wheelchair lift, helping passengers in and out with walkers, canes and without, and getting used to the route. He was pretty tired and hungry and full of his own news. I told him my mother was having this episode and I was really worried, and he just laughed, saying he knew what a great actress she was, that she was pulling our leg, and so on. I wanted to deck him. He just wouldn’t take me seriously. Anyway, I let it go, got him talking about his day and experiences, and the yelling stopped (I was the one yelling), and my mother seemed to rally, acting much more normal.
Just before I left, she asked me if she could take one last look at her mother’s jewellery. She hadn’t forgotten that, but then, she’d been thinking about it for a while before I came. I left her a note on her kitchen table, writ large and black, to call her doctor in the morning to get this thing checked out. She promised she would.
After I returned home, I called to find out what had happened. She was very glad to hear from me, sounded like her old self, and said she hadn’t called her doctor because it was a pain to find the number. I reminded her that she had the number programmed into her telephone; all she had to do was hit the appropriate button. She had totally forgotten. She promised me she would call after we hung up. I can only hope she did so.
In the meantime, this shows to me that the situation is seriously disintegrating. Apart from informing my brothers, I really don’t know what else to do.
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