All Quiet on the Western Front

Too quiet, perhaps, for my two faithful readers. It's not just the fact that I am back at work, scrambling to stay afloat in a sea of new faces, standards, routines, behavior management techniques, and what have you. I continue to struggle to want to say ANYTHING about "the house" and what happened there.

The house is on the market and I've looked at the photos of a house that is repaired, freshly painted, all spruced up looking shiny and new, and...empty. Every room, empty. The basement, empty. Weird, weird, weird.

Mom continues to live on, such as it is, in a dream world filled only with worrying the seams and hems of her bed clothes, all the while listing to her left side. You can't get her to sit up straight. Haven't been able to for years. I joke with my students about being "lumps" and "potatoes" when they are totally spacy but Mom really is both. I'll never forget the first day at the nursing home, in the "dining room," trying to feed her. She was slumped down in her chair and I was trying to get her to sit up. I got behind her and put my hands under her arms to pull her up, as I was saying, "Sit up, Mom." Instead, she sunk down lower, confused and stubborn.

Of course, there was also the time we were all together in a community room, having Christmas dinner. Jeckle was giving Mom some Poppycock, which she kept dribbling onto the table. Finally, Jeckle had had enough messiness and she picked up a piece and flicked it across the room. Mom's head whipped around and she looked at Jeckle wide-eyed and startled and said, clear as a bell, "Why, I never expected that from you!"

It's weird, looking back and thinking about when she first started showing signs of Alzheimer's. It was really quite a long time ago, but it wasn't until things had reached a crisis point that anyone other than me was willing to really accept what was happening. The really sucky thing is, Mom always had a bad memory and she worried a lot about getting Alzheimer's. I would try to make light of her fears by saying, "Mom, how would we even know?" Ha ha.

Jeckle and I do take some comfort in the fact that Mom no longer has to take care of the men in her life, that she is completely carefree. It just seems a shitty and unfair way to get to that point.