I’m worried my mother is slowly going through dementia.
She’s always funny and lively in her seventies. But she’s forgetting things. Small pieces: a recipe, an object, habits she was used to have on the regular and now don’t.
As a lovable child, I stand here concerned observing tinychanges in her behaviour. The way she laughs – I always loved her laugh: it’s so loud, unfiltered, honest, infectious – is becoming childlike; she’s more insecure, keeping on second-guessing herself and asking me for opinions or confirmations; she’s repetitive in the beatiful stories of her life and her days she tells me; she’s more moody and prone to a petty irritability.
As a person who cares for his loved ones, I’m desperately trying to course-correct, changing my behaviours, focusing more on her, giving her what she apparently is not able to give herself anymore the way she did in the past. All the while pushing for arranging medical visits and confirm or deny and learn and understand and hoping that whatever THIS is, it will be stoppable. Or that we will be able to slow down the process, just a bit, because I’m not ready.
As a man in my fourties, I keep on asking myself practical trivial questions, going places, drawing scenarios: how her life will change, how my life will change, how I should handle everything in the best way possible for her and not succumb myself to her potential illness. Living my life and let her live her best life because goddammit, she deserves it.
As a son living 4 hours away from her mother, I’m angry at a World that doesn’t irrationally rally around her and an extended family that mostly leaves her alone. After all the things she did for the others, how come nobody pays back? Isn’t anyone noticing? Doesn’t anybody else really care? It’s infuriating: we live in a Society built on the backs of our elders, yet when they age we push them aside and just let them wither. And I’m angry at myself, because I’m just doing the most but I’m not doing enough.
I’m all these persons and feelings together, clashing each other in a cacophony of warning signs and all I’d like to do is going back in time and be a toddler and crawl inside her hug and feel safe, feel safe, but I can’t: it’s her time to feel safe and mine to hug, mine to embrace Life the way it is because the cycle never stos.
And I love her so much. It’s so unfair.
