About my mother

What’s going on in there?

This is my mom. Her name is Marti. She’s 67 years old, and she has stage 6 (out of 7) dementia, or Alzheimer’s. We don’t know which, and it doesn’t really matter. She’s fading fast. At this point, she doesn’t know her own name, and she hallucinates, talking to people who aren’t there. She’s still at home with my dad, Bob. We don’t know how long that’ll last. Mostly, we can laugh about her strange antics. Every once in awhile, it’s really fucking sad. But not that often, strangely. You just get through it. Sometimes I look at that long, white forehead and wonder what the hell is going on in there. I imagine that her brain is shrinking and hardening like a sponge left on the side of the sink.

Good times

Luckily, she got to meet Victor and have the experience of being a grandmother before she started to really fade out. (He’s the only grandchild on either side of the family.) This is the first time she met Victor, in fall 2005, when he was a couple months old. She came to visit us in Finland for his baptism. This is them in the airport when we picked her up. My dad had urged her to come on this trip because I think he knew she wasn’t going to be able to travel much longer. It was a good trip. This trip was the first time I noticed her forgetfulness. She and Victor have been on opposing developmental trajectories ever since he was born. It feels weirdly altruistic, or something. Like she’s giving him her mental faculties. I don’t know. You try to make sense of these things, and you can’t, so you make shit up to make yourself feel better.

 

[Update 2015: Mom died in Jan. 2012. Check out my new blog, babetheblueox.com to read more about that.]