It was midnight as I rinsed out the glasses I'd brought upstairs from the basement guest room. I'd had enough and we were packing to leave in the middle of the night. Hours earlier, another attempt to have a decent, honest conversation with my Mom had culminated in one of her most hurtful statements and exits to date. Rising from her chair she'd glared at me, strode defiantly to the bathroom a few feet away, her smoker's bathroom, and she'd slammed the door screaming, "Go to hell, Sherry!" That was it. I wasn't going to hell, but I certainly was leaving. Our vacation visit was just going to be cut short. My Dad had been nowhere during her tirade, but then he stepped out of the darkness into the kitchen, "If you leave now, you'll never come back." I don't know if he thought I would choose to never come back or she would never allow it. I don't know but, something he said held me there. We didn't leave that night.
Many, many painful leavings have taken place since that July night twenty years ago in Polson, Montana. Dad died suddenly and Mom sold his vineyard taking leave of his dream, of our dream. Her dementia decline became evident and we all began the long, painful process of her leaving her own life. Incident after incident and her inability to cooperate left me with no moral choice but to legally initiate the process of making her leave her own home and fiercely protected independence.
On the day of this terrible task, over two years ago, she was so out of her mind that at first she didn't recognize me when she opened her front door. Then, she spent the next hours slamming me over and over with, "You bitch!" as I explained that the Court had given me the authority to have her move because she was no longer safe by herself. This time though, unlike eighteen years earlier, it didn't matter what she said and I didn't consider leaving. It took hours and hours, but she finally conceded and agreed to leave with the paramedics. I took refuge on the stairs far from her front door as they wheeled her out secured on the gurney. I knew it was the last time in her life that she'd ever leave through a door that belonged to her. It's hard to find the right words to describe her leaving that day. Terrible. Frightening. Numbing. Sad. Overwhelming. Guilty.
Over the next three months I spent days and days going through her private and personal things before selling her condo. After moving her with everything she'd need, much was left behind ~ family pictures, cards from loved ones and friends sent over the decades, calendars charting things done and not done, notes to herself further convincing me that she was now in the necessary environment, jewelry,dishes, files, computer, furniture, clothes, large framed prints, vases, pottery, knick-knacks, statues, financial records, receipts for everything back to 1955 when they married. The history of our family was sorted into piles to save, recycle, donate, trash, sell, and shred.
One of my parents was dead and the other one was demented and I was sorting their life. I felt like an invader, a trespasser of the worst kind.
I forced myself to call the shredding company to meet me in the hotel parking lot. Fifty pounds of paper, fifty pounds gone in minutes. Fifty pounds of memories shredded. I had no choice and I hated it. But, I had to handle it. I couldn't leave.
So, when we drove her from Kalispell through Polson this past April to move her close us in Oregon, I watched her carefully through the rear view mirror. She turned and looked up the road to the vineyard because she recognized something. She never turned her head towards the condo on the lake where she'd lived alone for ten years. She has no memory whatsoever of those ten years.
As we were leaving that little town where she lived for two decades, I asked if she wanted to stop and see anything. "No." I ran it through my head - not the vineyard, not the condo, not Dad's grave, nothing. We drove in silence. My heart memory recorded the moment we ascended out of the Flathead Valley for the last time with her as our passenger. I wanted so badly to say I was sorry, but she wouldn't have understood.
The same woman who slammed the door, told me to go to hell, and called me a bitch now holds my hand each time I leave her lovely assisted living apartment. She remembers nothing of the turmoil and distress so indelibly imprinted on my memory. She says I Love You and Please Don't Forget Me.
Dementia unravels a mind, resets a heart, and never leaves. Neither will I.