to Santa Rosa for Dad to visit the VA clinic for checkup.
It was a charming day in so many ways. Dad and I had a couple hours
to just chat and catch up on news stories we are following, politics
and the war in Iraq, troubles with the mayor of San Francisco (many
should be happy he is merely a straight drunk), the missing rains of
winter, how is Mom really doing, that sort of thing.
I introduced them both to Baja Fresh for lunch and it was a great
introduction. Mother just absolutely wolfed down here taco salad
while she spoke of the joy of being able to eat what ever she wanted
and never get fat in this life. She was still eating after Dad and I
finished our grilled veggie burrito's and it was good to see her
smiling and happy. Eternally confused but happy.
While Dad was with the doctor Mom and I took the Pathfinder to a car
wash to rinse off the leftover muck from last weekend in the snow at
Shasta. After the crew vacuumed the car they sent it through the
washing machine without a driver and the whole concept was pretty
amazing to mother. There was our car all clean and dripping on the
other side and she thought we had a brand new car, oh that life were
that simple.
Later I wished I had a tape recorder to record her thinking as she
gathered her thoughts as we talked. The mostly painless confusion
that she goes through is interesting and not nearly as fear inducing
in me as it was a few months ago. As we visited I asked her to tell
me about the different places she had lived in her life. She jumped
in her memory all the way back to Lodi, which is the area she was in
as a child, and only as a child. As I mentioned each major home of
her life, Champion Lane, La Vida Mission, Castle Valley, Fort Bragg,
Cirby Creek, now Clearlake Oaks, she would have a brief memory
connected to the name of the local and then drift off into pointless
wandering words and many started and never finished sentences. It did
not seem to pain her to not have the memory, instead the memory would
flash across her mind, she would acknowledge it, and then it was
gone. It is so fascinating and it almost makes me want to go become
an neurologist to try to learn more about the mind and the electro/
chemical connections that are severed by Alzheimer's.
While it is clear from the research that the physical brain of the
patient is reducing in size, holes are appearing in the tissue,
plaques are forming in the tissue that seem to break the electrical
paths, what we see as humans and family is the loss of the "mind"
that non-physical portion of who we are. And that is the loss that
hurts. To lose the mind is to reduce the "being human" . To lose the
mind is to lose the largest thing that holds us up as the "higher
race". To lose the mind is to lose our sentient "sense of self" that
is missing in greater and lesser degrees in all other creations.
Linda asked me how the day went. I can honestly say, it was the
finest day with Mom and Dad that I have had in many months. The fact
that she walked the aisles of Costco in her bedroom slippers (it is
all she will wear without a fight), the fact that she had to slip
into our home bathroom to remind her friend in the mirror they were
leaving, the fact that she had to slip back to that mirror over and
over and we could not get her into the car easily since she was
missing someone, it did not take away from the joy of the day. (And,
smile if you want, I promised her, when she got to her house her
friend would be there waiting for her!)
It was a different kind of hurt today.
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