Counting Deer

At the end of every shift, without fail, my mother's caregivers send pictures of their notes. They detail what she has eaten, how much, her mood, meds taken, the quality of her pain, sleep, bowel movements... all the things.

Sometimes, they send photos or little videos to illustrate. I used to find it grating--I didn't want to see her on the (very slow) hoof with her walker down the driveway, determined to elude a caregiver but unsure where to go. I didn't want to see the secretly filmed tirade of her accusing the caregiver of stealing from her. Who am I kidding? I still don't, even though she is less combative. I don't really want to see the shows that she puts on to please caregivers and blow me kisses through the camera, or say a few words in Gaelic, or move her feet and shoulders in a little Scottish dance pattern. I do a tiny groan under my breath if I get a notification of an image that includes her, and I steel myself before I click to open it.

Other times, the photos are of the place: the heart-stoppingly glorious view, whether a sunset or a snowy ridgeline. Or of animals--one of the cats being goofy, or a coyote efficiently trotting by in the snow. I love those photos.

Today her caregiver, Iz., sent a brief text accompanied by some photos that offered animals AND views--Score! The photos were of rather unfussed mule deer, with a portentious, looming cloudscape above.

It was the text that broke me, really. Along with the photos, he sent this message:

“ Good morning, this family came to visit yesterday in the evening, Anne was excited but she didn’t remember what kind of animal they are. She enjoyed counting them again and again.”

I read it. I read it again. And the tears just rolled down my cheeks.

I remember the woman she was, the one she still struggles to be. She exulted in her sharp wit, her intelligence, her MENSA membership, her joy in rigorous debate and argumentation--which tipped over sometimes from joy into sheer bloody-mindedness.

And here she is, counting like a toddler, unable to remember the name of these things, or the fact that she just counted them. I know to my bones how she would hate seeing who she is now. I know that the part of her self that remains, the self that is made up of conscious memory and processing in the brain, hates it. I know it terrifies her when she glimpses the loss, and she turns this into anger at everyone around her because it is at least that is something that makes her feel alive and in power.

Then again, my heart swells at the notion of this tiny old lady, feeling that simple pleasure. I am so grateful that she can be in her memory palace: the little house that my grandmother built (and died in), where my mother first met (and fell for) my Dad, where she feels safe, where the sky is huge and the air is clear, where the ravens play on the air currents, and various small and large mammals patrol to forage or scavenge or hunt. I am glad that she can feel the delight she felt, marvelling at these lovely creatures.

There is so much more, roiling around beneath these two feelings. I feel a grief, watching her fade away. A grief for my loss, as well as hers. Our relationship had become almost unbearably difficult, and yet that relationship is part of me. The being with whom I have had to battle tooth and nail until only months ago for my own individuation. The being who was so cruel to the love of my life, to my half siblings, to employees and past friends, to me.... that person is almost all gone because of her dementia. Which in a way is good.

And yet.

Over the years, I have had to work at giving up my yearning for that being to SEE me, to recognize me and my life, to acknowlege and approve of my choices, to concede that she wasn't right and I was. (I feel sheepish writing that, but it's true).

I give it up, over and over, and the yearning slowly, quietly seeps back in, like water through a miniscule crack in a ship's hull. And I have to pump out the yearning, giving it up again. This is a practice that I may have to exercise for my whole life. And between therapy and AA, I have the chops for that practice.

This one vignette somehow drove it home, in a single, sharp blow. That person is gone. There will never be that moment for which I yearn-and-renounce. I always know it, consciously, and yet the wind was knocked out of me by one little text.

What does her disappearance mean for me, for my identity? I guess that is what I have to explore in that practice.

For the first part of my life I was her accessory and accomplice, and she was the sun around whom my world revolved. Then the relationship changed, and she became my foil, the enemy whose "darkness," at some level, allowed me to see my own "light." My identity, of course, is made up--at least partly--by my struggles against her unrelanting demands for total fealty.

And those struggles are pretty much over, faded right along with her mind.

Whatever hopes I held, for reconciliation, for acknowledgement, for amends, for the "zero-sum" win that I know is a mirage. . . . They are wisps, becoming more and more slight as I go through the cycles of yearn-renounce-yearn-renounce. But right in this moment, I can feel them, held tightly by my little-girl self to her chest, with her heart hammering inside. The little one longing to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be cherished for who she actually is and not punished for what she "is supposed to have been," by her own mother.

I have to let them go, because they are my near enemies, those wisps of yearning. I have to pry the little girl's hands off them, and hold her, and tell her that she is a good daughter, that those ideas only cause her suffering, and that she can rest now, because I can see her and love her.

What other feelings? I wonder about the future, whether I will also end up sitting out there alone waiting to die in that house, like my mother and grandmother before me. Will I be serene at the end of my life, or will I nurse my grievances and lurk in my losses as my mother has? Will Nuala get a photo of me counting deer while losing marbles? Will she be there with me in a way that I can't for my mother? Will she have this weird complicated grief? It is a dangerous thing, future tripping, but I give myself over to it for a few moments.

I consider, and I name, all the feelings welling up in my heart as the tears well up in my eyes: grief, sorrow, relief, tenderness, fear, love, hope, wonder, wistfulness, that particular feeling that doesn't even have a name in English, saudade. . .

ALL of them.

I feel them all. For me, for my little girl self. I feel them for my daughter and her future self. And yes, I feel them for my mother and her little girl self: the self to whom she is returning as her mind erodes, the little girl who is so entranced as she counts the grazing deer, over and over again.