Winter Stars by Dave Iverson

Author:Dave Iverson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: eldercare;aging parents;family caregiver;life lessons;caring;mothers;sons;caregiving;relationships;Parkinson’s;dementia;geriatric care
Publisher: Light Messages Publishing
Published: 2021-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

13

The Two Adelaides

Early one morning in the fall of her 101st year, I found my mom sitting alone in the kitchen. She was wearing her favorite maroon bathrobe, and her walker was perched beside her, angled out into the room. She was uncharacteristically quiet, offering no greeting or comment on the day’s news.

She turned toward me, and without preamble, said:

I think there are two Adelaides. There’s the good Adelaide—

the one who’s pretty and smart and knows how to do things.

And there’s the bad Adelaide—

the one who’s ugly and stupid and can’t do anything.

I’m not sure which one is here right now, but I think it’s the bad Adelaide.

I remember taking a deep breath and closing my eyes for a moment, and saying to myself, “Well, here we are.”

I don’t remember anything else about that morning, including whether my mom and I talked after she made that pronouncement. I think we must have, but I don’t know. I just remember having this sense of arrival—that the steady, inexorable drift I’d noticed over the past few years had settled.

Early in my time as a caregiver, I’d talked with my mom’s physician about the first subtle softening of her razor-sharp memory.

“Adelaide probably just has what we call age-appropriate dementia,” the doctor said.

And I remember thinking, Well, don’t we all?

But now, not only had we arrived somewhere very different, my mom had announced the arrival herself.

z

One of the revealing parts of living with someone with dementia is learning what it means and what it doesn’t—that cognitive loss and stunning perceptiveness can live side by side. In my mom’s case, it seemed to be a state that opened the door to both revelation and darkening fear.

On the morning my mom told me about the two Adelaides, she was still a long way from losing her ability to communicate. Indeed, in that moment, she’d used language to describe her reality with searing incisiveness. And even as memory faded, she could still sharply and matter-of-factly articulate her point of view.

One morning, she summed up her perspective on daily life by saying, “I’m an ordinary person, it seems to me. I don’t understand why people find it hard to take care of me.”

What was striking, and what was new, was how eloquently artful her statements sometimes became. She’d never been a poetic person, which was why it had been so startling when a few years before, she’d stared at a blank computer screen and said, “It’s like looking into a dark river and not being able to see the fish.”

And now more of those observations were starting to unfold—statements both keenly insightful and strikingly beautiful.

z

I feel like the sun surrounded by clouds.

The sun understands me. It’s trying to poke through the gray.

—Adelaide Iverson, age 102

z

Even as dementia diminished her, my mom’s distinguishing characteristics persisted, including her interest in the world around her. Yet because her closeup vision was getting worse, her daily portal to that world, The New York Times, was going dark. It was difficult to imagine my mom without a newspaper in her hands, so I continued the subscription anyway.

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