I'll Be Seeing You by Elizabeth Berg

Author:Elizabeth Berg [Berg, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

MAY 1, 2011

At last spring is out in full force. Blossoms abound, nearly painful in their beauty. People are out: joggers, walkers, young mothers pushing baby strollers. I call my mother for an honest discussion, aimed at asking her what she really wants. When I was there, she said in front of my father and me that she accepted the fact that she couldn’t go home.

“Well, we should sell the house, then,” my father said, and she said, “Not yet.” I think her plan is to go back there when her husband dies or is put someplace, and she has talked about him being put someplace where the VA would pay for it, and this enrages my sister and me. But. We hold only one piece to a gigantic puzzle.

“You can go back,” I told my mother yesterday. “With or without Dad. But you have to realize that you’ll have the same problems regarding how to take care of yourself there. Say it’s winter, and icy, and you need to take the trash out to the alley.”

“Well, I had begun just leaving the trash on the porch and Jeff would take it out,” she said.

My nephew lives a good distance away from my mother. He helps a great deal, but he also works at more than one job. Sometimes three.

My mother told me that when she thinks of home, she remembers it as a serene place.

“It wasn’t so serene when you left,” I said. “You were miserable.”

What isn’t said is that a lot of that misery was from my father losing it. If she were there alone…I don’t know, I tell her. She can decide. If she wants to move back, she can move back. Right now, we just have to take this one day at a time.

She mentions that my father won’t do much, not today, not yesterday. His breathing is rapid when he sleeps—does that mean anything? His feet and now his legs are swollen. When I was there, I saw that the nurse had told my mom to switch to frozen vegetables rather than canned, to reduce the sodium in them. “Are you cutting back on his salt?” I ask, and she makes some sort of vague response that means not really. She says it’s cold in the apartment, and that she had put a blanket over his feet.

“Is he depressed?” I ask. My sister told me that my mother had told my father he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

“But why did she tell him?” I asked Vicki.

“She said he asked, but I don’t believe her,” she said.

Now my mother tells me that my dad saw the book about Alzheimer’s that the doctor gave her and asked if he had that. “But I just told him he had memory loss,” she says, and I don’t believe her either. I think she wants him to know.

I think his lethargy today has to do with him giving up. His depression is fueled by the knowledge that he has Alzheimer’s and that things will only get worse.

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