"Love in the Land of Dementia"

Excerpt from Love in the Land of Dementia

“There’s my man,” my mother says to the nurse, beaming at my father. He has been out of the room for five minutes, but mom greets him as if it has been days.

Shyly, my father comes up to her, takes her hand. They look at each other. 

“Fifty two years married,” my father tells the nurse, as she adjusts the IV. She looks at both of them and shakes her head. “And still in love,” she marvels. She adjusts her blond ponytail, pulls the stethoscope out of her pocket. and leans to listen to mom’s heart.

“Your main man, huh?” she says to mom.

Mom smiles, making a noise that’s right out of  a Donald Duck cartoon. Mom picks up a corner of her hospital gown and tugs at it. She pleats it into little sections and tugs again. “Well you so and so,” she says to the gown. “If you aren’t going to cooperate, you can’t come with me.”

I hand a blanket to mom. “Here,” I say. She stares into the blanket like there’s a child cradled inside. “What a sweet baby,” she says. “I love you baby.”

I look at Dad and he shrugs. 

Maybe this is the lesson we are all to learn eventually. In the end, only love remains. 

With Mom’s advancing Alzheimer’s, much has been lost. Rising up and sitting down are complicated events of gymnastic proportion. All foodstuffs are foreign substances. Dressing, conversing, bathing, teeth brushing -- all the events of everyday life are neatly erased from Mom’s scope. 

But when my Dad walks in, for a moment she remembers this is her husband. For those seconds, happiness floods her.

“I wish I had a relationship like you two have,” the evening nurse says wistfully. She’s a thin vigorous brunette from Dubuque, Iowa. She’s already been through two husbands, she tells us as she wraps the blood pressure cuff around mom’s arm. “Neither one of them was worth the polish on my toenails,” she says.

My parents don’t have the perfect romance. Most of the time, mom doesn’t know Dad’s there. Most of the time, he has to stand right in front of her to talk. Most of the time she’s her own entertainment center, bouncing off his words but not truly interacting with him.

But when he first enters the room, whether he’s been gone overnight or for five minutes, light fills her face. Her eyes are luminous and her silvery hair seems to glow. The distracted, anxious look leaves her face and there’s an angel purity to her expression. For that moment, she is present and she is filled with only love. 

All who see this look--the med tech, the certified nurse aide, the registered nurse, the lab tech, the transportation aide, the social worker – all look with awe and envy. They coo and sigh. “Ahhh,” they murmur, “that is the way it is supposed to be.” 

Even the doctor looks up from his clipboard, as if there’s been an alien sighting. When he continues his charting, I wonder if he will write, “Patient exhibits symptoms of deep dementia and signs of true love.” I wonder what the links between these two conditions are.

When my mother was just about my age, she used to say. “I want you to kill me if I ever have to go into a nursing home. I want to just die if I lose my mind.”

According to her diagnosis, my mother has officially “lost her mind.” She came to the hospital from a nursing home. The “worst” as she then envisioned it, has happened.

This disease is devastating and a huge sadness for all of us. Many times our hearts are torn open and apart by the living loss of this great woman. But her greatness remains in this simple gift she shows us: when all the ordinary things are gone, the spirit can still remain. Love doesn’t necessarily conquer all or anything, but it can outlast the rational parts of life.

Tomorrow, everything could change. Tomorrow my dad could walk in and mom might not ever look up from her pleating, plucking and picking. She might stare at him like she sometimes stares at me, knowing he’s a nice person, but not knowing just who he is.

But we no longer think of tomorrow. We are enjoying the fact that mom laughs, even if it’s at a bowl of vanilla pudding. We are thrilled with the fact that she talks, even if she’s addressing invisible children in language that makes Pig Latin seem scholarly. 

And we are awed by the fact that she loves.

“So where’s your husband?” the nurse aide says, as she organizes mom’s dinner tray.

Mom doesn’t answer: she examines the pink plastic arm bracelet on her left wrist.

“Let’s scoot up in the bed,” the aide says. Mom doesn’t move. She fiddles with the plastic, pulling at it.

Then Dad walks into the room. He stops in front of the bed. Mom stops fiddling. She looks at him and smiles. “My husband,” she says in an awestruck voice. “My husband’s here,” she says to the nurse and to me.

“That’s right,” Dad says. I hear the joy and anguish in his voice. I hear the depth of his grief and the strength of his love.

One hundred percent of the proceeds of the book "Love in the Land of Dementia" are going to Alzheimer’s research and programs. Using the book as a catalyst, Deborah and her partner Ron Zoglin have raised more than $70,000.00.

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