Sorting Through Feelings

I spent a goodly portion of this day with my mother.

Or rather, with her disease and what little is left of my mother. She repeats the same four conversations over and over, which is understandable, given the traits of Alzheimers. What is hard to take -- as it always was, in sickness or in health with Ma -- is that she cannot shut up. Any silence is for her a mandate to fill the quietude with her own voice.

As I was growing up, she could never understand why I would go to my room and spend hours there, or take off for the woods and spend the whole day puttering about the creek and the honeysuckle thickets. As a visiting adult, I would go to bed early or go sit out on the cool back porch by myself, and she couldn't understand that, either. Now she has given up on understanding anything, and a visit with her is a nonstop barrage of her trying to place blame on someone for Jan's illness, spouting angrily complete fantasies about how good Jan had it at home, how having close friends is not a good idea because they will always betray you, or warped tellings of family history of how everyone wronged her all her life.

Today, sitting at her kitchen table, listening to her rattle on and on, I began to wonder if I had actually neglected my duty to the world by refusing to fight with her when I was young. It took her a full hour and a half to eat a small McDonald's cheeseburger, because she could not shut up long enough to swallow. An hour and a half of the same diatribes, over and over, her mouth half-full of chewed food. I knew that the disease has taken her over, and the simulacrum across from me is not really the person I knew from my birth, but I really wondered if things would be different now if I had stopped hiding from her wrath as a teen and gone head-to-head with her, screaming, "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! All you do is yap constantly about yourself! You can't shut up for one damn day, or one damn hour unless you're using silence to punish someone! Stop thinking about yourself and shut up and listen to someone else -- or just shut up and let the world rest in quiet for one damn minute!!!!"

Well, I probably would have ended up in a girls' school in Cresson, PA for the outburst, but I still wonder: if I had "taught" her that her self-centered constant rattle was unacceptable 40 years ago, might she not have learned to be still, and so be less of a nightmare for all and sundry now? 'Cause sure as shit, more people than me are being driven batty by her endless filibuster of fantasied wrongs now.

I don't know. I can't go back and change the past. But for the first time in my life, I can see a good reason for interpersonal conflicts. Maybe it's not a good idea to pussyfoot around and not tell people what their faults can do to others.

Visiting Jan in the hospital today, I read her two articles from National Geographic Magazine. She was alert (though unspeaking) through an article about the "Iceman" archeological find; the article on "Swarm Theory" only held her interest about halfway through. I could understand that -- she was awake almost all night resisting attempts to have an oxygen feed mask on her face. She was tired out.

The aversion to the oxygen feed mask I could also understand. I can't even accustom myself to a snorkeling mask. Drives me into a state of near panic. Maybe it's genetic. Okay, let's blame Mom.