May 18, 1997 -- Catching up: Embers, "How about that!" A Gloomy Day
One of the challenges in keeping up a Web page like this while caring for Mom is finding the time to do everything. Even though my contribution to the caring is miniscule, the demands of visits and overseeing Mom's financial affairs already cut into my limited spare time. When the work pressures are high -- as they have been lately -- the Web journal has to take third priority behind business and visits. So now I'll try a quick catch up -- and hope I'll be able to find more time for these entries during the weeks ahead. Here are some of the moments that stand out during the past few weeks.
I was flying into Seattle from Spokane a couple of weeks ago. As the plane was on its landing approach, I had a perfect view of Mercer Island from a few thousand feet in the air. I could even pick out the shopping area and the hillside where Mom lives. It was one of those serendipitous junctures between our two worlds. I am busy in what they call the "prime" of life. Far below on Mercer Island were the embers of Mom's conscious life.
As I have mentioned before, one of the best things I have discovered with Mom is the uses of videotape for providing shared moments of entertainment. A couple of years ago, she could watch a feature length film easily. Now it is hard for her to last more than about 30 minutes. So a while back I decided to try something more episodic with her -- the Ken Burns films on the Civil War.
It was risky, in that there was no reason to think that she could follow something intellectual like the Civil War if she had trouble with lighter fare. But I was delighted to see that she was quite caught up in the story -- watching with more attention than she had shown anything else in some time. The series runs about ten hours, but is divided into subsections of about ten minutes each. So we can watch just one segment, or as many as three or four, depending on Mom's interest.
I try to explain to myself why the series has worked so well, and I think there are two factors. On is that it is so well done -- excellent narrative, photos, voices, music, cinematography, organization. The other is that that world is somewhat familiar to Mom. She was born in 1912, 47 years after the end of the Civil War. So the people in her grandparents' generation had lived through the war. Her grandmother's brother, William Wheeler, was an artillery Captain who died in the war. (When Mom wanted attention in school as a young grade-schooler, she would cry and when the teacher asked her what was wrong, she would explain that her uncle had been killed in the war!)
The Civil War film provoked a comment from Mom -- very much a rarity these days. After a section on the battle of Shiloh the narrator, David McCullough, announces that this battle killed more men than Waterloo -- and that there would be about thirty (I don't remember the exact number) more battles with similar bloodshed before the end of the war. Mom was listening carefully.
"Well, how about that?!" she said.
This business of devoting time to helping an ailing parent can be draining. Usually I am able to go to Sunrise and visit Mom wearing an invisible suit of buoyancy -- casting greetings to staff and residents and sweeping Mom into some form of activity. Usually some comment from a staff member or some reaction from Mom helps buoy me up. But one day about a month ago all systems failed.
I had been working on our boat. Then I walked into Seattle, about five miles from the dock, to catch a bus home to Bellevue. (I would normally have been driving, but that's another story.) I was running low on time for all the work that I needed to do before hitting the sack, but I would not have a chance to visit Mom for a week.
When I got to Sunrise, I was feeling pretty gloomy. And things seemed pretty gloomy there. The residents on the third floor, all suffering from pretty acute dementia seemed loopier than usual. The one aid who was on the floor was working alone because someone else on the shift had been unable to come -- she was clearly distressed. And Mom was even fuzzier than usual. I tried to have a normal visit, but I might as well have been trying to relate to a mannequin. After an hour I had to go home.
I don't like to admit my darkest feelings -- in part because I hope that these pages may offer some encouragement to others in my position with a parent in Mom's position. But as I left Sunrise that night, I felt that this is too much. It is too hard to try to be superson with all the other things I have to do, and the superson business has just been going on too long. A year, two years -- fine. But in some fashion I have been shouldering some of the responsibility for Mom's care for more than six years....
Fortunately, I don't feel that way too often. But it is part of the mix.
OK. I got that off my chest. Now I'm going to have a nice visit with Mom.