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Monday, May 09, 2005
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Mother's day...
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As expected, Mother's day tends to prompt all sorts of thoughts about ones mom. We of course went over to visit what little remains of my Mother at the nursing home where she now lives. As any one who knows us or regularly reads the nonsense that we post here knows, my Mother is a victim of Alzheimer's disease, a most cruel condition that causes your body to long outlive your mind. It is an indescribably difficult thing to watch happen. My mother is able to do some simple things for herself, but most of the person I knew as my Mother is gone. She can communicate only with difficulty now, and most of what she says is a sort of gibberish, and is seldom connected in any way with reality. She has little or no ability to recall the order in which things occur and seems pretty much unaware of the passage of time, though at this point I consider that something of a merciful blessing. But now even the old memories are vanishing. It is curious to me that of the little bits of my mother that remain, among them is a bit of her sense of humor. It was always a bit wacky, and she would always laugh in that hearty way that makes you laugh too, even if you missed the joke. And while it is impossible to sum up anything substantial about a person with a short anecdote, for some reason I thought today of a time before Sue and I were married that we came into my parents house after school. Though she had left for work, my mother had left a huge (probably 2' long) stuffed green frog on the kitchen table. Pinned to the frog was a little torn off piece of notepaper that read: "Sue, please take me home. Nobody here loves me. Love, Baby Frog." A proverbial child of immigrants, she was not well educated. She spent the first 3 years of school completely confused, as she spoke no english. No ESL or bilingual ed in those days, and speaking anything but Greek in the home was forbidden. She later left school somewhere around the middle of the 8th or 9th grade in order to work so that her brother could attend college. (He was the first and only of her family to do so, and despite being poor and un-connected he managed to earn a full scholarship and graduate with high honors from Harvard. He was killed over France when the heavy bomber, on which he was filling in for someone else as navigator, was shot down.) But in spite of her lack of education, or perhaps because of it, she never came across as ignorant or foolish. She had that sort of street smarts that I suppose you develop when you have nothing else and have no choice but to inhabit reality. It was the sort of thing I never fully noticed nor appreciated until a day or two after my father died, when a relative came by our house to express their condolences and asked my Mother how she was holding up. "I'm OK," she calmly said, "Lots of people have far worse." I snapped a few pictures while we were visiting yesterday. I rather like this one, because in spite of the fact that none of us really knew what it was my mother found so funny, she had everyone laughing anyhow. This snapshot is a bit harder for me to take, because I dislike the detached look on her face as it seems to highlight the fact that a person who escaped poverty, survived losing family members to war, disease and old age, survived a year and a half in a TB sanitorium, Legionnaires disease, a near fatal bout with blood sepsis and so much more, and still managed to be so full of life, is visited by such a rotten end. Worst of all, I dislike the knowledge that although she is surrounded here by her grandchildren, the people that she loved so unconditionally that it nearly defies description, they are mostly just strangers to her now. |
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| thus voiced The A, Mistah @ 7:00 PM | |
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