Love and Memory

If A Tree Falls in the Alzheimer’s Unit and Nobody Remembers, Did it Really Happen?

A Saturday Out

I was reluctant to take an entire Saturday away from home, especially since Claire and Arthur were out of town. But I really wanted to attend this seminar. So I engaged caregivers for the whole day, laid out breakfast, lunch and dinner provisions for Mom, and left early.

When I come home, Samaria (pronounced sah mah RE uh)*, Mom’s Samoan caregiver, is beaming. “I put her in the wheelchair and took her all around the house. She sat on the porch for three hours, listening to the birds and feeling the breeze on her face. I could tell she was so happy she was almost crying.” Samaria likes to get Mom up: she thinks that Mom will get pneumonia if she spends so much time on her back.

Mom has been saying every day for weeks that she wants to “get out of here.” Her sole focus is on getting out of bed and going someplace…. else.

I hurry to Mom’s room to hear her tell about it. “How are you?” I ask.

“I’m okay,” she responds dully.

“What did you do today?” I hint, eyes sparkling.

“I was just lying here all day.”

Looking back rationally, I see now that I should not have been surprised that she did not remember The Glorious Afternoon on the Porch. But it hurts.

We try so hard, I think. Why do we try so hard to make her life nice when she won’t even remember it an hour later?

Later that night Mom insists on feeding herself her own ice cream. She is blind in one eye and her hands are unsteady. The drug-impregnated meltage drips onto her bony ribcage. A chunk of solid ice cream plops onto her shirt. Impatient and disgusted, I take the bowl back. I grab the chunk before it can melt further, and spoon the remaining medicine/dessert into her mouth swiftly and expertly.

“How did that happen?” asks Mom. “How did I make such a mess? I didn’t do that,” she insists as I wipe her face, hands and shirt with a wet washcloth.

I decide not to engage, but skillfully, if somewhat crisply, help her brush her teeth. I change her diaper, turn her, cover her with blankets. I hug her and tell her I love her. She sneers, “Yeah, I could tell all evening.”

I lie in the dark and wonder How can I succeed at this?

A Sunday Out

The following morning I am glad to go to church. There is a guest speaker, an evangelist in a Muslim area of West Africa. Obim* tells of his family’s deep roots in Islam, his curiosity about somebody named Jesus, and his recurrent boyhood visions of a Jesus who kept reaching out to him.

Obim tells his audience how he finally went to the home of someone he knew was a Christian, to ask about these visions. He found the man’s wife, who did not speak his language. When he asked her about Jesus, she understood him in her language, and when she explained, he heard her in his language. This miraculous bilingual conversation resulted in his conversion.

The conversion resulted in his father’s decision to kill him. And when Obim’s mother, for the only time in her life, stood up to her husband, saying, “If you kill him, you will have to kill me first,” Obim’s father relented. “I will not kill you,” he declared. “But you will be in our house as a slave. You are no longer my son.”

The audience is spellbound, and I am teary-eyed. My situation is nothing compared to that of my brother in Christ.

Obim tells us how he labored as a slave in his own house for five years. He did not eat at the family table, but did all the work, under the cloud of his father’s disapproval.

One day, he says, he came home from church and found the family, even his father, in tears. Obim’s father said, “I was wrong. You do not have to be a slave any more.”

I am sitting in church, remembering Jesus asking, “Will you do this for Me?” I had said yes. But I forgot the for Me part.

Obim, my brother, you have humbled and encouraged me. I see the Spirit of Christ in you. You remind me of Peter’s words:

“To sum up, all of you be harmonious, sympathetic, brotherly, kindhearted, and humble in spirit; not returning evil for evil or insult for insult, but giving a blessing instead; for you were called for the very purpose that you might inherit a blessing.”

At home, doing laundry, I notice that Mom’s shirts are mottled brown where food has dropped on them. I get out the stain remover and start spraying and scrubbing. This time I am doing it for Jesus. I am blessed, and will inherit a blessing.