‘When mom turned a stranger’
MEERA PRASAD
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To see a loved one become helpless can be a life-changing experience. A daughter’s tribute to a mother fighting a losing battle against Alzheimer’s Disease…
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I search through the rubble that’s her mind for a flash of recognition in her eyes or for the familiar smile…
Photo: K. Ananthan
A special relationship: Sustaining each other in good and bad times...
I have marvelled at my mother’s sixth sense. She almost always sensed it when I was distressed, as if she could read my mind. But that was when she was the deeply intuitive and capable person I have always known her to be. Before Alzheimer̵
7;s Disease preyed on her brain and systematically destroyed her mental faculties.
She was a home-maker at heart for whom home and the family took top priority. But there was the activist side to her as well when she took stands on issues, or expressed her viewpoint with an earthy sensibility. Our home was an open house and my parents the perfect hosts. I remember them playing arbiters and advisors to friends and the extended family. My mother was articulate and well-informed, and, for us in the family, she was our sounding board in life’s journey.
No more the same
But Alzheimer’s has changed all that in the last six years. Though physically present with us, she has atrophied mentally and has drifted far away to a space and time we cannot penetrate — to an unreal world where she has no identity and where we don’t belong.
As the disease progressed, every day brought in changes in her personality and behaviour — some alarming, others agonising to watch — but all so far removed from the person that she is. The doctors had prepared us for a time when her cognitive skills would get so eroded that she would fail to recognise even us, her family. But when that did happen and her mind just shut us out, it crushed us, to say the least. It was a moment of complete helplessness.
I am still grappling with the loss of that beautiful relationship which I have realised can never be matched. I miss the cosy chats that we revelled in, our heated arguments and the thousand times I would turn to her for her opinion on matters. Or the times when I would be her reference point on issues concerning my generation.
Today I am trying desperately to read her mind. As I sit by her bed and watch her stare vacantly at me, I search through the rubble that’s her mind for a flash of recognition in her eyes or for the familiar smile that now darts across her face and is gone in a split second. They speak a thousand words even though she no longer speaks. It is among life’s cruellest ironies I think that gestures like these that I took for granted all along have become so few and far between now.
What is heartbreaking, however, is to see the woman once always in charge, who could outmatch anyone with her quips and repartees, disintegrating into a pale shadow of her statuesque self. Confined to a wheelchair, gaunt, bent over and unable to express her needs, her basic functions are met by us. She lives in a state of blissful (we hope) ignorance.
When I feed her, bathe her, dress her up and tuck her into bed, making sure the diapers are fastened properly, I grieve over the role reversal of playing mother to her now. That is her prerogative I tell myself indignantly, my indignation tinged with sadness at the turn of events.
As she was
Memories race through my mind like snapshots. Of my mother’s quick decline after she lost her husband. It was testimony to 50 golden years of marriage and the inseparable bond they shared, in an age when marriages have become so brittle. I remember her pain and despair as her life was thrown into disarray with Alzheimer’s. Of her rock-solid presence in my life, nurturing, understanding, sometimes berating, and warning me of the pitfalls as I slipped into adulthood.
I picture her ready to reach out always. There was an aura of dignity about her. And she had the rare ability to laugh at her foibles even when we cracked jokes over her forgetful ways in the early days of Alzheimer’s before the gravity of the situation hit us.
Today she lies in bed shrunken and twisted, her mind blank. Yet she battles the disease with fortitude and no rancour and sets us an example. It has been a life-altering experience for me. I learn equanimity and draw inspiration from her faith every day as she withers away.
My mother is losing her long and lonely battle against Alzheimer’s. We tearfully cheer the feisty woman.
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