Losing It

It has been a crazy, crazy few months here in illusion land. I am now dealing with my mom who is dealing with my Dad's Alzheimer's disease. When he was home, I tried to warn her to get involved with a support group, try to form a new regimen, but after 61 years together, she's finding it hard to reinvent herself. Recently he went into a nursing home after a mini stroke worsened his Alzheimer's disease. She demanded that they allow her to take his clothes home to wash them herself. I could understand this, she still wanted to feel as if she could do something for him.

Finally, after some weeks, she has decided that this task is too much for her, dragging his clothes back and forth, back and forth, when the nursing home sends them out to be laundered for you. I hope this is a sign that she is slowly beginning to pull away. If she can't I fear she'll be caught in the undertow.

She's very angry at him right now, probably for what she sees as him leaving her. I spend my time trying to cajole her from two states away. "Mom, walk to the corner and sit in the library. Find out what programs they're having. Borrow some books. Eat lunch out. Her answer is always the same. "No, I'm fine."

I fear for her. I put my fear in some poems to ease the ever increasing stress. I dread calling her, prefer hiding in my poetry. These poems are about what's been happening to our family over these past months.

What Passes

TV is what passes for conversation these days
constant/repetitive/mind-numbing
my husband, sitting across from me at the diningroom table
drones words,
Did I eat today? Did I eat today? Did I eat today?
a staticky annoyance between long silences

This is what passes for my marriage of sixty years

The children come in for Thanksgiving/Christmas/Easter/
he greets them
calling them by his siblings’ names
They don’t bother to contradict his misnomers,
having been taught the art of distance by him,
they measure his increasing frailty, dole out empathy to me

This is what passes for a good education

Later, when they’ve tucked themselves safely back into their own lives
after arming me with numbers for support groups and websites for services
to gird me against the impending . . .
I make a cup of tea, sit at the dining room table across from him

Some instinctual cue compels me to look up
and I catch him staring at me,
a question embedded in his face
after a moment, he says my name
and the puzzle melts into a half smile
he quietly repeats it to himself
before returning to his newspaper

I turn on the TV to pass the time
knowing that, these days, it’s more
much more than time,
that is passing



Distance

My sister is walking distance from her house
My brother even closer
I am two states away and
two days out of the hospital when
she spews into my phone
“Now when I need you, you’re not here!”
I manage to stay civil, my neck throbbing
She has the pinched nerve but
It’s my neck that’s aching
Out of empathy? Out of guilt?
I tell her I will call her tomorrow

I don’t

I know her anger is for him because
His mind is not always able to hold her
To give concrete form to her name, her face
After a lifetime together
He is moving away from her
Farther and farther each day

She was never a woman who made close friends
“With a husband and four kids,” she’d laugh
“Who has time for friends?”
Now all she has is time
All that time left
To ruminate, to blame everything
On distance



The Old Boy

My daughter Tracey and I walk down the long light-blue corridor
that ends in a baby-blue love seat on which
my mother and brother, the doctor, sit
My father is in a wheelchair facing them
his back to us
It’s the first time I’ve been to his nursing home
I don’t know if he’ll know me but
this isn’t the thing that’s kept me away
I’m afraid the picture I hold of him will be stolen
by the person sitting in the wheelchair, his back to us
the one swallowed up in all that blue

“Hey Poppie,” my daughter says
Greeting him with a kiss
She is thirty five, still has friends in New York
gets to the city more regularly
and so has been here before

I kiss his forehead, ask him how he’s doing
He says, “Okay.”
My mother asks him if he knows who I am
The question being more about
him calling her his mother’s name
once
when he first arrived here
After the transient ischemic attack
made the Alzheimer’s worse

Tracey goes off to find a chair
as I squeeze in between my mother and brother
facing dad
He looks in my face, says “This must be Tracey” but
I see the slight twinkle in his eyes as he finishes his reply with,
“No this is Carol”

I survey the gaunt figure in front of me,
ask, “Dad are you cold?”
because he keeps hunching his shoulders
up and down, up and down, up and down
“Involuntary action” my brother answers in that clinical
voice he’s been trained to—old school medicine
In that instant, I remember the gesture as
one my physical therapist taught me,
an exercise to help me reduce stress
“Draw your shoulders up and down like this,”
she’d said, showing me how, “it’s like you’re saying,
I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know”
I hear her sing-song voice in my head
find the thought disturbing in this context
and quickly erase it from my mind

My daughter returns from her search for a chair
Plunks down next to him and in that mischievous
way she’s no doubt inherited from him, says,
“So Poppie, you have any girlfriends here,
anybody creeping in your room late at night?”
His eyes light up so brightly, you can almost see the smile
spread across his face
He’s transformed for me in that moment
A forty-something year old man, standing in
the middle of the livingroom of our old house,
His knees bent forward, his upper torso leaning so far backwards
it makes his mackintosh touch the floor
He’s bouncing
his hands shoved deep into his pockets, he’s bouncing
Back from the doctor’s where he has just learned
my mother is pregnant with their fourth child, my sister, Dianne
He is smiling the same smile I almost see in his face now
His head tilted back, the rooster in him crowing to the ceiling,
“There’s life in the old boy yet”
I see him
bouncing in that old livingroom, laughing, laughing
“There’s life in the old boy yet”

This is the picture I hold onto, the one I wrench from the blue
and take with me, pressed close to my heart
a weapon
against an ever encroaching thief