GUARD DUTY. Sydney rests at the foot of Mom, who is sleeping in the quiet of her home. It’s a humble mother-in-law’s suite attached to the home of her daughter and son-in-law. They are Mom’s caregivers. Sydney is the gentle-hearted guard dog, a job she takes seriously.
THE FAMILY IS TENSE now that Mom isn’t always there when she speaks.
I could tell you what it’s like to engage someone else speaking from inside Mom’s 89-year-old body.
But it would be dishonorable, I think.
Mom is blind from recent strokes and suffering with a brain corroded by dementia.
We’re at a turning point now, trying to understand the honorable thing to do.
My daughter and I flew 800 miles from Kansas City to visit Mom in Ohio a few weeks ago. My sister and her husband are caring for her in the home Mom helped them build. The Ohio part of my family has been on the job of caring for Mom for about two years. Day and night.
You can tell.
It’s hard to get a good night’s sleep when you’ve linked your phone to a motion detector that alerts you to someone else’s movements in the darkness all night long.
And what must it be like when a daughter is away at work, with her retired husband left to care for a very private mother-in-law who sometimes needs the kind of help she would never want to ask of anyone?
It’s all so obvious that even I can see it from 800 miles away, here in flat Kansas City.
Call the cavalry
We need the cavalry. Or 911. Or Granny to rise from the dead and tell us what to do.
Caregivers need some care themselves. Mom needs people around her.
I’m told Mom is different when my family comes to visit—when we fill the room with chatting, laughter, and music. She’s more herself. Yet on her best days, I’m still missing Mom.
I sat alone with her a few weeks ago. We talked and sang off key together for a couple of hours. Bill Gaither would have been humiliated and yet proud.
Then there was a stretch of quiet. I wondered what to say next, to keep the conversation going and her memory stimulated.
She looked out the window but couldn’t see the birds singing in the tree. She couldn’t see the window or the wall.
I said, “What are you thinking about right now, Mom?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
I wondered how she could not know, as she sits there in the darkness with no distraction.
I said, “Mom, is there a lot of silence in your life?” She paused, then nodded and whispered, “Yes.”
“Mom, is the silence hard?”
Long, long pause.
I wondered if she was trying to think of an upbeat response. Because she often did that. But not this time. She just whispered, “It’s tough.”
Is it honorable to place Mom somewhere surrounded by people who need each other? Or is it honorable to keep her as we wear out?
These are conversations going on now, while Mom sits in the living room she paid to have built and says, “I want to go home.”
My finest moment I owe to Mom
Mom was asleep when we left a few weeks ago, so there was no real goodbye. She was tired the night before and was thinking more about bed than anything else. That goodbye wasn’t quite a goodbye.
But I’ll remember the goodbye from last autumn.
I wrapped my arms around Mom, wondering if she really knew who I was or if she was just being polite again.
Then she whispered into my ear words that I think came from the mom buried deep within:
“My heart goes with you.”
I gave no thought about what to say. Thought didn’t have the time.
I simply and instantly whispered into her ear,
“I take your heart with me. I leave my heart with you.”
I have never said anything that beautiful in my life. And I doubt I will ever do better.
Wherever she will be in whatever home of hers is best for her, my heart will be with her. And though she might not remember it, I will take her heart with me wherever I go.
It’s my honor
I have wondered where the honor is in times of great stress and confusion and guilt.
Perhaps it is always where the heart is. If not, it is where the heart wants to be.
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