Chapter 5

Mom is Funny



Mom’s love poems to Dad were sentimental but also humorous: “In this progressive, modern age/When Open Marriage is the rage,/When jealousy’s a deadly sin/Possessiveness just isn’t in./I fear it simply is your fate/To have a wife who’s out of date,/Sometimes generous to a fault,/In this respect I call a halt!/I want you to myself, I find/I guess I’m just the selfish kind.”

Mom loved to laugh, especially at herself. But Alzheimer’s has no ability to see or poke fun at itself—two of Mom’s most quintessential gifts.

“You know, I grew up here,” Mom confided one day as I settled in for my twice-weekly home visit.

Dad sat forward, instantly alert, frowning. “No, honey. You grew up in New York.”

And we were off and running.

My family had been living here in the Bay Area since moving from New York when I was nine years old. I was now in my 60s.

“No, I grew up here,” said Mom, her tone calm and reasonable but slightly mystified. “That’s why everything looks so familiar.” Mom’s features were relaxed, her gaze slightly confused and vacant, so different from the expressive, tense and decisive demeanor of mother I’d grown up with. She’d greeted me by name today, as she sometimes did, but too politely, as though she knew me from somewhere yet couldn’t quite place me.

“Everything looks familiar because you’ve lived here 38 years,” said Dad. We knew that Mom’s memory was all scrambled up with huge chunks missing altogether, like holes in Swiss cheese, but Dad somehow thought that logic would work. It would be years before he resigned himself to the fact that he could not convince Mom of anything, or teach her anything, or expect her to remember anything. But until that stage of acceptance, he treated her as though she were an oversized, stubborn child who would learn things if he was persistent and instructive.

“No,” said Mom. “I remember that lamp…and that picture…and that rug…from growing up here.”

“You grew up in Brooklyn.”

“Of course, in my early years.” Mom was airily dismissive, a longtime personality trait that was incongruous enough, in this new persona, to be amusing. “But when I was a teenager I lived here.”

“No, you lived in New York. You and I moved here long after we were married.”

“We’re married? I didn’t know that.”

“Who did you think I was?”

“My -- boyfriend?”

Dad sagged. There was a pause. Mom, oblivious to his mood as she was to everybody’s moods these days, looked around again. “Everything looks so familiar. I grew up here, you know. Of course, I haven’t looked in the other rooms yet. I don’t know if I’ll recognize them.”

“You will because you’ve lived here 38 years!”

“Well, I grew up here.”

“No, you didn’t, and I can prove it! I have our marriage license. And I have the deed to this house—with someone else’s name on it as the seller!” He leaped up, snatched the documents from the fireplace mantel, where he now kept them handy, brandished them triumphantly. “What do you say to that?”

“I know what I remember.”

“Do you think these documents are lies?”

“No, but for some reason you can’t believe what I know to be true.”

“I can prove you’re wrong.”

“If my friends from childhood were here, they’d tell you.”

“Aha! And why aren’t they here? Because they’re in New York!” crowed Dad. “Now do you believe me?”

“I believe what’s in my memory.”

“Your memory is flawed! You have Alzheimer’s!” Dad was shouting by now. He’d told me never to mention Alzheimer’s to Mom, that it would upset her. But she merely shrugged.

“It’s not important that you believe me,” she said. She looked around again. “It’s all so familiar. Of course that’s because I grew up in this house. That rug was my stepmother’s rug. It all looks so familiar. Isn’t that funny?”

It was indeed funny, and although Dad slumped, exhausted, I couldn’t help but laugh. There’s funny ha-ha and there’s funny-weird and then there’s something in between, you could call it funny-sad or funny-awful, and it induces the kind of quiet, helpless, rueful laughter that, in those five or so middle years of Mom’s 12-year-long illness, often replaced tears of pity or frustration for me.

My mother and I had often laughed together. The corniest, silliest jokes, the dumbest comic strips, the most inane TV shows, anyone or anything meant to amuse, there was Mom, ready to guffaw. And just as much as she loved to laugh, she loved to make others laugh. She had a particularly Jewish sense of humor, wry and self-deprecating, that was still present through the earliest, pre-diagnosis stages of Alzheimer’s. “I have a really good forgettery!” she’d say back then, cheerfully, knock-knocking on her head, as she tried to remember where she’d put her glasses. Or, searching for the butter dish, “I ought to have my head examined!” But now, arguing in nonsensical loops with Dad, she could no longer perceive the human comedy.

Still, I laughed. This was before Dad broke his hip and was permanently bedridden. Before there were round-the-clock caregivers. Before there was hospice and morphine and diapers. Back when Mom still walked and talked and argued, tiny and bent over. Back when she first began refusing to wear her dentures—although sometimes she tried to eat them--so that the lower half of her face had a caved-in, witchy look. Before she forgot everyone and everything. In those middle years of my mother’s dementia, my emotions varied. Driving down the highway to see her, I often cried, thinking of how unfairly life had treated her—that it should come to this, that the final years of my witty, compassionate mother should be so degraded. Yet once I was there, I’d sometimes raise my voice when she stubbornly refused to put on a pair of socks. On doctor visits, I’d be impatient when she wouldn’t follow instructions: “Mom, the doctor told you three times to sit on this table.” But it was best for both of us when I laughed. Her oddball behavior and her calm and yet completely irrational thought processes were all so wonderfully, theatrically absurd. She once sat before me, solemnly cupped my hands together and dipped her own hands in to pretend-wash her face, over and over again, almost ritualistically. At such times she was like an addled mime, or a character in a play by Samuel Beckett, negotiating an internal universe with its own irrefutable logic. Through it all, whatever my responses happened to be, Mom--once the most empathetic and emotional of human beings, deeply affected by both the horror and the hilarity of life--now seemed to regard my feelings with detached bemusement. Whether I cried or laughed or yelled made no difference to her.

Much worse was to come, of course, and eventually there was no more chuckling in my parents’ house. For a while, though, the cosmic joke was this: inadvertently, effortlessly, and after a lifetime of purposefully making others laugh, my mother was, as she’d have put it, “a scream.”