The Long Visit (1/13/23 Draft)

If anyone deserved to be classified among the “greatest generation,” it was my mother.

My mother and I didn’t get along from the time I was 15 until I got pregnant at the age of 34. It’s still a mystery to me why we had so many fights, not just the normal “do-what-I-say/don’t-tell-me-what-to-do” kind, but the kind where you exchange nasty remarks and, once, slaps in the face.

I wasn’t rebellious like my younger sisters and never got into serious trouble as they all three did. Overall, I was obedient and dependable. I did well in school, worked afternoons and weekends to earn pocket money, babysat, drove my sisters back and forth and never asked for special favors. It wasn’t that I didn’t do what my mother wanted, but that I didn’t do it how she wanted, or for the reasons she wanted, or with the proper acknowledgment of her role in any success.

So, it was somewhat ironic that in 1983 my mother moved to our small town in Eastern Washington State and lived there, never more than 2 miles from our home, for the last 30 years of her life.

By then, she had been a widow for 6 years, and the scoliosis that would eventually take 4 inches off her height and leave her with debilitating back pain had already forced her into early retirement. It wasn’t her idea to move from Louisiana, where she had lived her entire life, but rather a “family decision.”

She had just had both knees replaced and couldn’t take care of herself.

My younger sisters either had families or problems of their own, as well as no interest in caring for an aging, handicapped parent. “Take her with you to Walla Walla,” my uncle told me.

And come to Walla Walla she did, along with her furniture and other belongings that made it clear she wasn’t just planning on a visit.

So how did we manage to get along for most of the next 30 years given our early history?

For her, there was the allure of having a grandchild she could see every day, a son-in-law who appreciated her zany personality, and a daughter (me) more than willing to accept free baby-sitting.

I was tired of the fights, and I felt sorry for this pretty, accomplished, mid 60-year-old woman whom everybody admired, except her children. I started to see her more as an “interesting person” than as the “mother” with whom I’d had a difficult past. Almost everyone who came in contact with her thought she was an “interesting person.”

After finishing medical school at the beginning of World War II at 23, she completed a brutal anesthesia residency at New Orlean s’s Charity Hospital that sometimes forced her to go three days without sleep. “Think of those boys from your class overseas, all risking their lives. You have no right to complain,” the head resident told her.

When we were old enough to understand, we heard stories of her late-night ambulance rides through the French Quarter to treat drug overdoses or knifed prostitutes. After marriage and the birth of her four daughters, she continued working in partnership with her surgeon husband, my father. Even if she had wanted to stop working, her gratitude for her education and sense of responsibility would have kept her from doing so. Work didn’t prevent her from cooking dinner every night, caring for her parents as well as her husband and children, and participating in our education and extra-curricular activities. She drove us to school every morning and picked us up at 3 in the afternoon. She was den mother of our Brownie troops and, later, chaperone at school parties.

Her years in Walla Walla made up for the retirement she had planned to enjoy with my father, plans cut short by a lethal heart attack when he was only 67 and she, 58.

She didn’t have the chance to experience the travels she had dreamed of, but in Walla Walla she did have lots of leisure time for coffee and lunch. She made new friends, many of whom were younger than I was. She was invited to serve on the advisory board of the local hospital and speak to high-school American history classes about life during the Great Depression. She took cooking classes, got involved in local politics and the stock market, joined the YMCA.

We saw her at least twice a week for dinner, usually at our house, and I talked to her every morning and evening if I wasn’t traveling. I began to enjoy my time with her, especially our Thursday trips to the grocery store, which ended with an ice-cream treat. My daughter and her friends loved spending time at her apartment, where they were regaled with coffee, ice cream smoothies and tales of my mom’s multiple boyfriends during her youth.

Like life, this story doesn’t have a happy ending. In 2005, my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. A classic case, as a psychiatrist friend explained to me, complete with paranoia, confusion, and loss of cognitive functions. I should have recognized the symptoms earlier, but my mom had always made senseless remarks and told crazy stories. It wasn’t until I realized she couldn’t read anymore that I accepted what was obvious to her doctors.

I’ll skip the stories of the family conflicts that arose over my mother’s care as well as accounts of the medical complications that made it difficult to find the right nursing home for her. There’s no justification for painting myself as particularly devoted or self-sacrificial. Most children face the same situations sooner or later, even if their parents don’t have dementia.

Two unexpected situations allowed me to get closer to my mother in the seven years between her diagnosis with Alzheimer’s and her death. The first, about three years into her illness, occurred when she could no longer speak English and reverted to the Louisiana French she had heard in her early years from her parents. According to her caregivers, this recovery of a childhood language wasn’t unusual in Alzheimer’s, but it did require that I, a French teacher, spend more time in the nursing home to facilitate communication. What I found odd -- extremely odd -- was that my mother’s French, both her accent and vocabulary, had improved. In my 20s, when I was selecting a college major, she once told me that I had chosen French because of her. Now, I began to think, the influence had been mutual.

The second situation involved my mother’s teeth. Her caregivers did an excellent job of keeping her clean. She never once had a bed sore or even an unattended dirty diaper, and the food served in the nursing home was nutritionally well-balanced. But her teeth were starting to decay because she would not hold her mouth open long enough for the aides or the dental hygienist to do a proper job. At the dentist’s suggestion, I took charge of the cleaning and flossing every other day after feeding mom lunch. It wasn’t unpleasant like changing a diaper would have been, and I found her grunts of contentment reassuring. Dental care had always been a big deal in my house. We never missed our 6-month dental check-ups. We all wore braces. As a result, I’ve had far fewer dental problems than most of my friends. Maybe my mother was right on that score.

The doctors who treated my mother told me that Alzheimer’s itself doesn’t cause suffering, either physical or psychological. But how can they know? Just as the existence of heaven can’t be proven because no one has come back from the dead to verify it, no Alzheimer’s patient has yet been cured and able to describe what the disease does to the mind. I do know, for certain, that after my mother lost the ability to talk, she would still feel. In 2010, my daughter gave birth to her first daughter, whom she named June Cornelia after my mother. I’ll never forget my mom’s reaction when they placed the baby in her rigid arms. She cried. She knew what she was holding and probably even recognized her granddaughter’s voice.

When she died in March 2012, I did exactly what she had indicated in her will. We sent her corpse to Oregon Health Science University for brain removal and autopsy. Once her body was back in Walla Walla, it was cremated, and the ashes hoed into our rose garden. The church was full for her funeral mass, not only with all eight of her grandchildren, one great-grandchild, and the nursing home staff that had surrounded her during her final hours, but with the friends she had made in her almost 30 years in Walla Walla, some coming from as far away as Idaho. During the luncheon that followed mass, I heard many women pay tribute to my mother. The rancher’s wife who had learned Cajun cooking from her; the librarian encouraged by my mother to pursue an advanced degree in computer studies; two young women who had become doctors following her example. My mother had influenced many more women than I had realized. Maybe that’s all she had ever wanted.

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