As My Parents Age by Cynthia Ruchti

Author:Cynthia Ruchti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Worthy Publishing
Published: 2017-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

Creator God,

For whom inventing worms that make silk

And bee regurgitation that becomes sweet honey

And foxgloves that

Provide medicine

That regulates

A human heartbeat

Were no great challenge,

Feed me ideas

Daily

For how I can make a difference

In my parents’ lives.

CHAPTER TWENTY

When My Parent Loses Who I Am

The four saddest words:

“She doesn’t remember me.”

Our parents’ aging can start small . . . or catastrophically. I lingered over two separate but equally sobering social-media posts the other day. One said, “Three of the saddest words I’ve ever written: my mother was.” The writer had returned from the funeral that necessitated the verb change from “my mother is” to “my mother was.”

The second post sounded similar, initially. “My four saddest words: She doesn’t remember me.”

As our parents age, we can find reasons to laugh together over forgetting a phone number or a shirt put on backward or mismatched shoes or having to walk more slowly “so Dad can keep up.” But when aging is twisted and distorted by dementia, we’re hollowed by the impenetrable wall it erects. How can a parent/child relationship do anything but crumble when dementia gets in the way? How can a mother forget her own child?

We expect the connection between a parent and child to be a loving one that does not end. But for too many of us, dementia gets in the way of parental love. It can even steal our parents’ or grandparents’ recognition of who we are and that we mattered to them.

What drives us to want to correct what a dementia patient gets “wrong”? Our incessant, relentless need to be right? Our underlying belief that if we choose the perfect word picture or repeat our point often enough, we’ll break through the hardened cement that keeps the wall in place?

It’s been proven futile. Our intellect knows it’s futile. Yet we persist. Especially when the memory that’s missing is who we are, our identity.

“If I tell the right story or remind her of an experience we shared together or ground her in reality, she’ll remember who I am to her.”

“If I find that one elusive piece to his mental puzzle, it’ll come flooding back to him that I’m his son. He’s my father. We’ve been each other’s best friend for forty years.”

But our efforts result in frustration, not breakthroughs.

Could God be calling us to step onto their playground for a while rather than drag them into the so-called real world? Our real world is a game for which they’ve lost the pieces, the rule book, and all the history of past wins and losses.

Imagine being invited to participate in a game where the instructions are in a foreign language, a language everyone in the room knows except for you. Imagine being chided for missing your turn when you didn’t even know the game had started. Picture how overwhelmed and lost you would feel when everyone else acted as if the game were a matter of life and death.

We find it no great leap to sit at a small table with a grandchild,

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