My mother died last month at the age of 93. She had a full and happy life (from what I can tell), but for the past fifteen years, she battled with dementia, which robbed her of her short-term memories. Shortly after she began leaving lit the stove in her apartment, we moved her to a memory-care nursing home.
She didn’t have Alzheimer’s, despite people frequently characterizing her illness as such. She had a more generalized dementia. Mom forgot what she had for lunch five minutes after eating, but she remembered us children.
She always enjoyed getting out for trips in the car, but eventually, these excursions began to confuse her because she would not remember where (or why) we were going.
Mom never became angry or abusive, though she began to exhaust herself packing her clothes and waiting for her parents to come pick her up. I think she was going back to the time when she took leave of her job in Chicago for a month-long journey to her hometown before she and my father were wed in 1948.
I lived about 1000 miles away from her and visited about twice a year. I will always remember two summer visits, because, contrasted with each other, they revealed to me how dementia was slowly trimming away my mother’s memories.
One early summer visit, I nosed my car into a parking space at her home. We had just gone out for a drive. In front of us, the branches of a flowering bush sagged under the weight of large white blossoms.
“Look at those hydrangeas,” Mom said.
She had always been an avid gardener, a hobby she got from her father, who tended a large flower garden. Mom’s efforts had always been more modest, but she taught my sister and me the names of many plants, birds and animals frequently found in her garden.
Mom would also take blossoms from her garden and press them in books and magazines. When they had dried, she would put the flattened flowers on cardstock to send as notes to friends and family. In the card shown above Mom preserves the small blue flower called “Forget-Me-Not.”
The next year, we again went on an excursion, perhaps to get her favorite meal, barbeque ribs. I forget the trip but remember the return.
We pulled into my favorite parking space. The bush was heavily laden with blooms.
Mom was silent for a moment as I turned off the car.
“I used to know what those were called,” she said.
“They’re hydrangeas, Mom.”
“Oh, you’re so smart,” she added playfully. Her quick praise was an easy way to move on from what must have been an ever-growing anxiety over her memory problems.
Memories, like the plants in my mother’s garden, need to be tended. They need to be pared back so they can blossom anew. They need watering and weeding. Like fragile blossoms, they need to be preserved between the pages of a book ... or on the blockchain … so we can send them to friends and family.
