Wish It Were Different

About a year and a half ago, or maybe it was a hundred years -- it seems like that some days -- I left the house to walk in the early morning, trying desperately to shed the pain I felt after talking to my mother on the phone.

She hadn't yet been diagnosed as having Alzheimer's disease, but I knew that something bad was happening to her. A few months before, I'd made a commitment to call her on the phone every day to keep tabs on her. With each passing day she vomited into my ear such bitterness and hateful memories that I would come away from each encounter shaking, feeling battered to the heart. I heard things about her life that I should never have been told; I would rather have gone to my grave without knowing the secret feelings she harbored.

Anyway, on that morning, a hundred years ago, I walked and walked, and cried, and prayed, because there was just nothing else I could do. After a while I turned to head home, and there in the sky was a rainbow, which the Bible tells us is God's promise to never again destroy the world in a flood. I really felt that the rainbow, for me, was a promise from God that eventually, everything would turn out all right.

I remember that rainbow every day, just about.

I remembered it last night when I got a call from the Pennsylvania State Police, asking me to please call my mother and "reassure" her. She'd called 9-1-1 to complain that she couldn't get her caregiver to leave the house. I explained to the trooper that she has Alzheimer's and doesn't understand that she must have 24-hour care. He was understanding, but I could imagine him rolling his eyes at the ceiling in exasperation.

So I called Mom's house, and she answered the phone, even though it was after 11pm her time, and she should have been in bed. I tried to "reassure" her, and she reacted just as I knew she would, with invective and curses, threats to cut me out of her will, loud and angry demands to be given a competency exam, and just plain old mean ass shit-talk. Nothing I could say made any difference in her anger. Finally I just gave up, and as she shouted, just said over and over again, "I love you, Mom," hoping that somewhere in that ravaged mind the woman I admired so when I was growing up would hear my words.

She hung up on me in her fury, and after a few minutes I called back and asked to speak to her caregiver, which she let me do, to my surprise. I had a long chat with the caregiver, a pleasant chat; the woman is surely earning a place in heaven putting up with this aggressive, nasty stage of Alzheimer's.

I'm trying to keep the rainbow foremost in my mind.