A Hallmark Thanksgiving it wasn’t.
Here’s how it was going to go in my head: My new home, which mom’s been asking to see, was decorated for the holidays. For the first time ever, I cooked a turkey ~ something that mom always did (ok – I’ll admit I put on rubber gloves to stick my hand in it to get the gizzards out, and then promptly threw them away). The music was on, and I sent Nate to the facility to get mom. I had dinner timed perfectly so that she would not need to use the bathroom while here for two hours (my bathroom is not equipped, and it takes two people to help her). I had instructed the aides at the facility to toilet her right before Nate came, so I was sure she would not need to go at my house. I was going to give her a tour of my home, then we would have a lovely meal together.
I don’t know what the opposite of Hallmark is, but here’s what actually happened: It literally took five minutes to get her out of the car. She kept yelling “I can’t!!” I’m dying!” My son has the patience of Job, and he kept reassuring her on the 20-minute walk from the garage into the house. He had his arm around her waist, and was holding her hand, and yet she persisted with the fear of falling. We finally sat her at the table. No tour. No hugs for us. Just copious amounts of anxiety. “Everybody hates me. Did you see the new baby? Someone had a baby. I have no money. I have nothing. No one likes me.” Non-stop commentary. I gave her a plate of food, and we began to eat. After about ten minutes, she said “I have to pee-pee.” I tried distracting her, but she persisted and asked to go back to her room. The body keeps score. She was in my home for less than 20 minutes and never asked for a tour or said anything about it. And I don’t care about that for me, I just know she’s been telling me how excited she was to see it. The reality of living with constant anxiety trumps everything else. It’s crippling her. But she doesn’t have the mental capacity to see it for what it is, or to correct it. I think we’re now past the point of being able to go out on field trips; she’s most comfortable in her own space. So, Christmas will be at the facility and not here. It breaks my heart ~ again, not because I need the Hallmark Christmas with her, but because she is slipping away.
I highly recommend the movie Shawshank Redemption – it’s about prisoners who are paroled after decades behind bars. When they get out, they don’t always know how to deal with their new-found freedom (which speaks volumes about the lack of rehabilitation that actually happens in our penal system, but that’s another conversation…). Often the freed prisoners would reoffend so they could go back to jail. To those of us who have never been locked in a physical prison, or even a spiritual or emotional one, that doesn’t make sense. Isn’t freedom better? Actually, the familiar is almost always better. Even if the familiar is a ten-foot square room behind bars. There is comfort in the familiar. We know it. Our bodies know it. We understand it. We gravitate back to it. I think the facility mom is in has become home, and she is more comfortable there with the aides who care for her, than she is in my new home. At the end of the day, that is a good thing, even though I wish it was different. Alzheimer’s keeps her mind locked in a prison that neither of us understand, and one that she, unfortunately, will never be paroled from.
About a month ago, I received a call from a home care agency letting me know that mom’s doctor ordered physical therapy for her, and they needed my permission to see her. I said “I am fine with you seeing her – no problem. But my question is, what do you hope mom gets out of it? Because 5 minutes after you leave her room, she won’t remember you were even there.” The answer: muscle memory. Even if her brain won’t remember how to get up out of a chair, they are hoping her muscles will remember what to do when she starts to stand up. The mind/body connection is fascinating to me. Thank God for muscle memory when we touch something hot, and our hand knows instinctively to pull away without us having to think about it. Or when we’re driving, and we realize we haven’t been paying attention the last 10 seconds and don’t know how we didn’t end up in an accident. Muscle memory.
There is a great book called The Body Keeps the Score, about how trauma is stored in our physical body, even if the psyche doesn’t remember it. Kids who experience trauma at a very early age may not have conscious memories of the event, but they will often display behaviors of trauma. This is seen a lot in foster and adopted children. The trauma of being taken away from a birth parent may play out in behaviors, even if the child was placed in a loving family. The body always keeps score. Lian suffered severe trauma as an infant before I got her. I look back at raising her and think: how many times did I medicate or discipline a behavior that was just an expression of the trauma she had experienced but couldn’t express. The answer: a lot. And I ‘m not saying that discipline and medication are bad; they are often necessary. But sometimes it’s easier to start there instead of dealing with trauma. Fight, Flight, or Freeze. The body keeps score. Once again, the challenge with the Alzheimer’s, is that the body is keeping score, but the brain cannot engage in the work to correct that. The result for mom: constant, crippling anxiety, with no relief in sight, this side of heaven. My only hope is that as she continues to decline, at some point she will be past the point of understanding what the anxiety is doing, and maybe, just maybe, she will experience peace.
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