Member-only story
Death Visits Me (My Mom’s Alzheimer’s)
Death visits me daily.
He is not the unkind demon many make him out to be. He is gentle, seductive. He points out the subtleties that most people ignore.
My mother’s hands tremble as she picks up the tangerine. The tangerine has been sitting beside the half-eaten, peeled banana which still sits on the saucer. Each bite of the banana has been a call-response, a coaxing along the path of health and life. Now, Mom finishes peeling off the skin of the tangerine without my help. I complement her on her accomplishment. It is then that she looks to me for help. She is hungry but she does not know what to do with the juicy fruit she holds in her hand. She offers it to me in half-finished sentences. Some words are broken questions with no obvious or relatable subject. Others are subjects with no object. There is little gain in trying to figure out the actual words for what she is trying to say. Asking her gets me nowhere. Her mind is like a dismantled tool, the parts are there but the connections are frayed or broken.
I, prone to the uselessness of reasoning, remind and encourage Mom to eat the fruit. I mention her recent bout with constipation, and she offers monosyllabic agreement to the usefulness of fruit. But her agreement comes from a faraway place, a memory of what she used to believe, not what she agrees with now.
