We're talking about Mum, a recurring topic
in most of our infrequent conversations. I fiddle
with the receiver to position it so her voice
delivers a clearer message as she struggles with
that message, short of breath. We've long since
exhausted our takes on our mother's suitability
as a parental role model and through our emotion
starved childhood knew we'd raise our own with
empathy, open emotion and loving guidance.
Did it help? Do our own children now that we're
so old think more kindly of us than we do of our
mother? Questions we bat back and forth. Now when
we speak of our mother it's to recall little events --
things we remember about her. She is the younger
daughter, the one who changed our mother's soiled
diapers in her dementia. I'm the older one who rarely visited.
Each of us us thought the other had it easier from our
constantly haranguing mother until one day we finally
opened it all up and spoke for hours. She can't do that anymore.
Talking exhausts her. Walking exhausts her. She is
approaching her 81st year. Our mother died at 84 of
frontal-lobe dementia. I feel badly for my little sister
who sent her older sister a birthday card for her 85th
birthday, arriving just around the corner of time before
she too, four years later is in the final throes of dementia.
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