My little Mother comes shuffling through the house looking for me. I'm upstairs doing school and don't really want to mess with her but we stop what we are doing and I go see what she wants so she doesn't wake Emily. She's sitting at my dining room table when I get downstairs.
She needs a cookbook.
I ask her what she is wanting to cook.
She wants some cornbread.
This is a woman who has made cornbread 2 or 3 times a week for over 50 years and she can't remember how to make cornbread. She couldn't even find a cookbook to tell her how.
I wrote down my cornbread recipe for her and she happily went home to bake.
For some reason, that one thing made me sadder than anything that has happened in the last couple of years.
Most days she doesn't have a clue who I am. I am just the nice lady who lives close who helps her a lot. That's ok. I don't need to be anybody.
Some days she doesn't even know who she is.
But not knowing how to make cornbread????
And, if that's not enough to just scare the shit out of you about getting old...
I'm sitting at the computer reading news stories, thinking about the General who had the "gall" to express his personal opinion to the media - not that I agree with him but it is his opinion.
This thought went thru my head, something I've said to my kids a 100,000 times...
He is _______________ to his opinion. Just like that in my head, including the huge blank space where a word should have been. The word just would not come to me. A word that I know I know, that I've used hundreds of times. It just wouldn't come. I sat there staring at the computer screen a total blank, fear gripping my heart.
I finally had to go in and get the Thesaurus and find the word.
ENTITLED.
Well, of course.
It just scares the poopy out of me to think I'm going to wind up like my Mom, my kids being forced to put up with me or stick me in a nursing home.
God, old age is cruel beyond words.
3 comments:
Reminds me to make the most of the time I've got RIGHT NOW. We're not guaranteed tomorrow--or that our brains or bodies will work tomorrow.
It is truly one of the cruelest things in the human experience that we gain the love and appreciation for life just in time to watch our own slow decay and demise.
Alzheimers is a part of my father's family, His father had it, his sister has it, and he has it. My father was a brilliant man. A Chemist who made straight A's all through school, Kindergarten through College without ever taking a book home. His career was spent making up molecules to do things. (he hated it, but that's another story)
He had a razor sharp wit - the kind you can only have if you are smart.
The last time I saw him...he looked kind of 'empty', and one thing about him was just gone.
He wasn't funny anymore.
But ---I also know a married couple who are both in their 90's, both with a complete set of marbles and are living independently and even though things move a little slower now, they have THEIR lives.
It's a crap shoot.
I am living under the assumption that my end will be like my father, and I am making sure I live now. I don't put off one bit of happiness until tomorrow. Not One Bit.
I went through that with my mom in the last stage of her cancer. Her mind completely broke down. Even though her entire body had already broken down, it was the losing of her mind that got to me.
I forget words all the time, and I'm not sick or old! And I have an English degree! So don't feel too bad.
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