This story is not a fiction of the author, but a heartfelt account, told in a letter from one woman. She shares her painful experience of watching an inexorable illness slowly take away her mother, a once elegant literature teacher, turning her into a stranger. It is a testament to the long journey of accepting irreversible changes and profound loss that began with strange, at first glance, misunderstandings.
My mother had been in surgery for the second week: she had broken her leg badly. I couldn’t understand what had happened. Growing more and more irritated, the head of the department told me that she was walking the corridors, clinging to all the doctors, screaming, demanding to be cured of imaginary illnesses. Patients were complaining. At whom? At my mother, a literature teacher and one of the most delicate women in the world? Deciding that it was a misunderstanding, I didn’t test the doctors’ patience and took her home.
One night she woke up at three o'clock and said: I smell something. In order not to argue, I walked through the rooms, went out into the stairwell, went up the stairs from the bottom, and when I returned home, I opened the balcony door (to air it out) and was stunned: fire engines were driving into our quiet courtyard. She called 01 and reported a fire! “Someone here has been cleaning your boots with shoe polish from the bottom of his heart!” – said the firefighter, entering our apartment. Fortunately, nothing happened.
I convinced myself that she was just getting old. However, these were the first signs of illness, but I ignored them, convincingly justifying her strange behavior. I thought that in the hospital she was given too many medications under the drip or some combination of medications that she was taking was unsuccessful…
About a year later (my mother was already 70 years old) she broke her leg again, and it didn't heal properly, but she categorically refused surgery. She lay at home, and I earned money as a caregiver. Gradually, I managed to convince her to start using a walker, and for the summer I moved her to the dacha.
An unexpected difficulty arose: one after another, the caregivers refused to work. They could not stand the fact that their ward was going to vote in the middle of the night, so that she would be taken home. Or she demanded to immediately walk to her city apartment because she had received a “radio list” from her daughter, that is, from me. After all these stories, I was finally able to admit: something was wrong.
Every day her behavior changed. It became difficult for her to find words, she lost her orientation and could ask me for something, thinking that I was 14 years old and we were now in the village at my grandmother's. She began to get angry: “you don't feed me well”, “I'm hot (cold) all the time”, “no one talks to me”. She developed an irresistible craving for cats: I have an allergy, and she demanded that we get a cat. A bright red cat settled in the dacha, as soon as I entered the house, tears started flowing.
The cat must have sensed that I didn't like him, and in retaliation, he urinated in the middle of the hallway and on all the shoes. But my mother didn't notice any of this.
At the time, I was making money, employers were planning layoffs, I had to work a lot, and I never had time to think about what was really going on. I convinced myself that she was just getting older and I didn't like the way it was happening, but I didn't realize how irreversible what had happened to her was.
Sometimes my mother would have hunger pangs, apparently something was wrong with her sugar, although the doctors couldn't find diabetes. She would stop eating: she would eat for days and get offended when she looked at someone else's plate. She would eat everything from her own plate, and then rush to mine like a frog after a mosquito and grab a piece with her fork.
And before she was a person with a broad soul, she fed everyone, treated my friends and hers… Before, we watched TV together and discussed the programs with pleasure, and now, although she lived with the TV on, she didn't understand anything, didn't remember anything and couldn't retell a single plot. At the same time, she remembered her childhood perfectly. Her stories were repeated and were colorful and detailed.
When new people came to visit us, they didn't believe me when I warned them that she was crazy. They thought I was making it up.
My mother couldn't remember where I worked. But she remembered in detail everything that concerned her husband, my father, who had died 10 years earlier. Once at work during lunch I overheard a telephone conversation between a colleague and her mother. From the lines it was clear that the conversation interested her, that the person on the other end was giving good advice and providing support. And I suddenly clearly understood that I couldn't call my mother, that I was completely alone…
She used to worry too much about my life, she was sometimes unfair, but she knew how to plan clearly, it was she who insisted that I enter the university, and then helped me get a job. We were together, I always had my best friend next to me, who understood and supported me. And all this collapsed. We switched roles, now I felt like I had an old daughter.
For a long time I didn't believe the doctors, that no pills would return her consciousness to its previous state. I invited gerontologists, but they waved their hands. Once she tore a pillow, the whole room was covered with feathers. “Mandragora came,” she explained, “and threw the feathers away.” I wanted so much to believe that she was playing, pretending, because in her current life in retirement, she, a recognized beauty and the soul of the company, lacked emotions. So she was inventing to attract attention. But it was already clear that this was not a game.
I read a lot about age-related changes and understood that it was no one's fault. She's just like that now, and I have to accept it. She used to take care of me, now it's my turn. I even liked to hug her and squeeze her when I came home from work, she was small, plump, warm, and sometimes she fought back with her little hands, like a child who was tired of being hugged.
She lived in a separate room, and the nurse and I would get her ready for bed and leave her, but sometimes she would wake up in the middle of the night, get up, and walk around the house. It was even cozy to listen to her stomping…
But gradually her condition became worse: when she woke up, she was scared, did not understand where she was, and began to scream, calling me by name. The neighbors threatened to sue me for callousness.
The nurses stopped coping, refused to let me go at night, so I had to give up my personal life. My mother and I had always meant a lot to each other, this affection had been nurtured by all my previous lives, and so I could not move or put her in some institution to distract myself from the horror of the changes that were happening to her.
But I couldn't bear to see my loved one, once brilliant and surrounded by friends, slowly turn into another woman, a stranger to me. It was insulting for her and scary for me: something similar could happen to me. I easily told my friends about her oddities, it even turned out funny, but I couldn't convey to anyone the despair with which I experienced all the new changes in my mother. I was losing her – my beloved, my dear. The one who was always there and who was so proud of me. And no one could share this sadness with me.
It's been a year since she's been gone. Now it seems to me that caring for her wasn't a burden on me. Gradually I forget my despair, my fear for her and myself. Only deep sadness remains in my memory.
