On Pluto (20 page)

My mom was a mirror, preparing me as only a mother could to see through her lens into infinity and pass the baton. The day after I was released from Cape Cod Hospital after the bike accident, she arrived early in the morning at my house in Brewster
with bandages and rubbing alcohol in hand. In her altered state, she was rushing over to stop the bleeding. I was covered in hospital bandages with more than 20 stitches to the face and hands, all washed up, and yet, she insisted on cleaning the wounds. Her signals were confused. She was still my mother, knew it, and proceeded to clean the bandages with rubbing alcohol. I let her, realizing she was living in the moment, and at that moment, so was I. She was my mother, even in her Alzheimer's, and I desperately wanted to be her son.

I hope my children, as this disease progresses, will allow me to be their father. It is vital for those with Alzheimer's to connect with the past, the long-term memories and relationships. The short term is a flash.

Parallel universes between my mother and me collided after my accident. We were over the handlebars, and together could see into infinity.

****

But one must squint to see into infinity, stretching the mind. The word, with mathematical definition, has derivation in the Latin word
infinitas,
meaning “unbounded,” a noun with roots in the ancient Greek word
apeiros
, which translates to endless. In my mother's final years, I had endless conversations with her, including regular Sunday night
tête-à-têtes
at the dinner table with my folks in Eastham beside a large picture window overlooking a patch of scrub oak and pine, bent from winter winds into forms that stretch the imagination. The curved oak table with sturdy legs and high-back Queen Anne chairs forced one to sit upright. Bought at a discount home improvement center, it still had the emotive feel of a medieval round table, not because it resembled an antique, but because a Prodigal Son now had occasion for final wisdom from his parents. I cherish those moments, some of them painful, all of them imbedded in my soul.

Dad, as usual, drove the conversation with pounding, penetrating
queries, challenging me on politics, sports, religion, sibling rivalries, and just about any other subject one is not supposed to talk about in public. Mom was quick, as she could, on rebuttal. It kept her mind challenged and active. She deflected my dad's barbs like a veteran hockey goalie, which were meant more to make her think than overreact.

My cerebral training early on was served up in Rye at the family dinner table, a relic today. All ten of us were seated on Brookdale Place on Sundays around a thick plank of mahogany. We were akin to knights in shining armor; only our swords were stainless steel, barely sharp enough to cut the overcooked beef, and our breastplates were paper napkins slung from the collar. Still, we were a force. My folks would query us, like a pop quiz, about our lives, our friends, attitudes, beliefs, and trouble on the horizon, just to get inside our pointy little heads. I thought of the exercise, at the time, as a holy inquest, but as I grew older, I enjoyed the banter. It brought us all together. But there were exceptions. Like the time when my older sister Maureen called me out in high school, lobbed a grenade under the table, for my dating on the sly a well-endowed, exceptionally attractive coed several years older than I was.

“So, Greg, why don't you tell us about it?” said Maureen, the self-appointed “Mother Superior” of the family.

Dad dropped his fork. Mom glowered at me. And I stared intently at Maureen in an attempt to burn her retinas, but they were blocks of ice.

“So, what's this all about?” Dad asked.

The sizzling meatloaf before me that I had so coveted had all the appeal now of a pair of worn sneakers after a sweaty basketball drill.

“Oh,” I said lamely, “We just went to the movies together. I think it was the
Ten Commandments
.”

“Yeah,” Maureen interjected between mouthfuls of mashed potatoes, “Thou shalt not sin!”

“That's enough,” Dad declared, shutting down the discourse.

I wasn't sure if he was disgusted or proud of me.

Mom nodded in a way that said firmly:
Greg, you can do better
.

The look alone served to bring me up short, but those words have become a mantra throughout my life. I still envision my mother urging me on. In the moment, the exchange that day was discomforting, yet enlightening. Looking back, such wordplay reinforces the family dinner table as a forum for in-your-face instruction, edification, and for unforgettable family bonding.

Such illumination continued decades later at the more intimate dinner table on the Cape. Observing my mom's frontal assault on Alzheimer's, the wisdom was abundantly enriching. Perspective has a way of cutting through a disease. Every Sunday at twilight after leaving Willy's Gym in Orleans, I drove alone to Eastham for introspection with my parents. The drive was a timeline of sorts, passing Town Cove to the starboard where schooners once delivered their consignment from the Old World; Salt Pond, a brackish estuary, rich with shellfish, that empties into the Atlantic; Evergreen Cemetery where the markers date back to the time of the Pilgrims, and where my parents eventually would rest; and across from the cemetery, Arnold's Lobster and Clam Bar, a family favorite where the sweet, salty aroma of fresh seafood off the dock wafts across the tombstones. Arnold's, formerly Betty's Beach Box, is run by a childhood friend and Pilgrim descendent, Nate Nickerson, a.k.a. Nathan Atwood Nickerson III, whose
Mayflower
forbearers settled the Cape. Arnold's was my mother's favorite eating hole; she always enjoyed talking with Nicky. Since birth, he has known the difference between a steamer and a quahog, and probably could pronounce the word
in utero.

Such distinction was lost in time on my mother. A quahog, to her, could have been a kitchen utensil—a knife or something sharp to stick into an electrical socket, as she often tried. We
had to hide the knives. One day, she noticed the kitchen paper towel rack was empty; starring at the exposed cardboard tube, she knew it should be covered with something white, so she laid pieces of bread over the tube as if hanging out clothes to dry. The slide continued with both parents. The dinner table reinforced their decline. At times, my mother served my dad coffee grinds on toast. He never let on in front of me, nor did he want to embrace the stony reality. That bothered me and my siblings terribly. In retrospect, I believe he was trying to protect my mother from reality, as he began his own fearful, slow slide into dementia himself, complicated by the throes of circulation disease and prostate cancer. It was a shit show.

At first, none of us saw the warning signs of Alzheimer's. We were all numb to it: my mother's memory loss, challenges in planning and with problem solving, difficulty completing familiar tasks, confusion with time and place, trouble understanding visual images, problems finding the right words, inability to retrace steps, poor judgment, withdrawal, swings in mood and personality, and finally, intense rage.

In the fall of 2007, reality was sinking in. At the dinner table, my parents and I talked more intensely about family, politics, and life; we talked about religion, eschatology, about God, a genderless definition of all-love, and about facing the Almighty one day. I told them several times that something wasn't right in my head. Dad dismissed it, but Mom always tried to instill courage in me.

“You must have courage, she counseled. “Never give in!”

In the final months, our dinner table discussions centered around topics we had never entertained before. End-of-life stuff. My father, now in a wheelchair with little use of his legs, waxed on about the genius of Roosevelt Democrats, the need to care for the disadvantaged, the moral obligation to pursue a passion in life that made the world just a bit better, and he probed knotty questions about what happens to you when you die. A rock-ribbed
Catholic, who had lost both his parents in childhood, he feared death, and like many of us, wasn't quite sure of what awaited him on the other side. He was deathly afraid.

Mom seemed to embrace it.

Many years ago, I had a dream about death, one of what was to be several. In the dream, my father had passed away. He was in Heaven. No longer confined to a wheelchair, he was sprinting like a high school tailback, with jet-black hair combed straight back. I told my parents about it over the dinner table on September 16, 2007. I remember the day.

“Was I running to Mom?” Dad asked.

“No,” I said. “You were running to your parents.”

He paused.

“Was Mom there?” he asked.

“No,” I said, knowing the implications of the response. “She hadn't left yet.”

“Not my time!” Mom evoked with confidence.

And it wasn't. My father was to die first on January 5, 2008, my brother Tim's birthday. Mom died four months later on May 21; she was buried on my sister Lauren's birthday. So much for birthdays.

In that moment, collectively, we were well into the stages of grief: shock; denial and isolation; anger; bargaining; depression; testing; acceptance; and hope. We hadn't turned the corner yet on hope.

The dictionary defines hope as desire with anticipation; scripture describes it as faith in a seed form. All of us were in need of watering. Mom knew her time, but always held her tongue. Liberal in some ways, conservative in others, walking lockstep with traditional spiritual values, she often said she regretted not speaking her mind on more occasions. It was a sad commentary, given her diminishing state of intellect. Sadly, women a generation ago were to be seen, but not heard. They carried babies, cared for children, and were the fabric that held families together
like glue. Imagine what we all could have learned had we listened more.

I listened too late, learning far more from my mother's assail on death than from her wisdom and duty to family. I whiffed at that. In contrast to the culture today of self-indulgence, the mothers in the Greatest Generation were selfless in devotion, not out of diffidence, but in maternal instinct—a promise of love, beyond the capacity of most men. Even in Alzheimer's, the love persisted.

My mother in her bruising 15- to 20-year progression of Alzheimer's, refused to lie down. She carried us at times, like a soldier in Patton's army, when she wasn't quite sure what planet she was on. I watched in awe, as did my sisters and brothers. Mom's role had changed, and would change again. Yet, none of us wanted to concede the obvious: our mother was slowly sliding off the face of the Earth, pulled into the metaphorical orbits of Pluto and Sedna.

The nursing of my father took its toll on Mom's health. Her memory continued to fade, like cedar shingles bleached by the sun; her rage intensified; she didn't recognize family members and friends at times; she wandered and drifted; she was scared. But she cared, as best she could, for my father and for the rest of us. The ancient Greeks called it
Agape
, the purest form of unconditional love, far purer than
Eros
(physical passion),
Philia
(brotherly love), and
Storge
(affection). Mom wanted to hold to her role as wife and mother, but roles were changing. She was fighting demons, forever pushing back against monsters in the shadows.

In 2007, my dad was back in Cape Cod Hospital for a second, life-threatening circulation bypass surgery, and she stood with him again against all odds. It was her final stand. She was about done. Over lunch at a restaurant on Hyannis Harbor, walking distance from the hospital, she took my wife, Mary Catherine, aside in an emotional breakdown, and within my
earshot, she growled with venom,
“I hate him. I hate him. I hate him. I just haaaaate him!”

She wasn't referring to my father, but venting rage against me, perceived in the moment as the surrogate husband. She was reluctant to confront my father in his suffering, dutiful to the end. The elephant was under the tent. It consumed the space, and it just blew me away.

The tent flaps opened wide and led to Epoch nursing home in Brewster where my father was sent for rehabilitation, and Mom followed because she could no longer safely be alone and because she wanted to be with Dad. They were side-by-side in separate beds in an antiseptic, sterile first-floor room. It was difficult to tell which one was the patient. Mom was somnolent, and when she spoke, made little sense—a chilling contrast of a little child, then a raging adult. The brain wasn't firing. Signals were crossed. The scene was an awakening, a cold shower, for the siblings who had visited; they were appalled at Mom's plummet. Dad was ever distrustful, fearing in his advancing paranoia that we were attempting to commit him to the nursing home. The irony was that Mom needed to be cared for far more than he; she was out of sorts to the point of insentience, yet laser sharp with long-term memory about the particulars of her life and family. The following day when the devoted Epoch staff took her by the hand to the library filled with four walls of books, they asked her what she wanted to read. The nurses told me later that she scanned the shelves for 15 minutes, and then pulled out two books.

“I think I'll read these,” she finally said, not grasping the title or author.

The books she chose were
Secrets in the Sand
and
A Guide to Nature on Cape Cod and the Islands
—two books of mine published many years ago, and two books that she had kept in her living room in Eastham.