Songs from a Spiral Tree

Several years ago my mother moved into the Alzheimer’s wing of an assisted living home.  That process was heartbreaking for all of us, but we’d arrived at the point where she could no longer be left alone at all.  We were actually long past that point, but sometimes you have to go there: to the land of close calls and crossed fingers.  It’s hard to let go of the belief that one’s home is the best of all possible places as we age, even though I knew that was no longer true for my mother.  She could no longer figure out how to use the telephone or most of the appliances, yet she remembered that she had once used them easily, so she kept trying.  Confusing the cordless phone for the television remote, she once dialed 911 while trying to change the channel.

So we moved her to an assisted living facility about five miles away.  Seeing her bereft of her memory and abilities was hard enough, and seeing her in this state in a strange place was harder.  But we all survived, and I can see now that my mother lived a richer final year there than she would have at home.  One of the reasons for that was the social life at the assisted living home: the relationships between staff and residents and among the residents themselves.

I hadn’t expected this to happen, but her friends there came to mean a lot to me, too.  One of the first and most special was Millie, a woman of about the same age as my mother.  My mother’s name was also Millie, so she was often called Amelia–which she didn’t like–in order to distinguish her from her friend.  But because they were drawn to each other by temperment and circumstance people called them “the two Millies.”

They were both tall, sweet-natured women.  When I arrived for a visit I would often find them sitting together at a table in the bright central area of the wing, sometimes with several other women, sometimes alone.  Millie was more articulate than my mother, which led me to guess that her dementia might not be Alzheimer’s but Vascular.  One day I arrived to find my mother newly permed.  “Doesn’t she look lovely?” Millie said. “She looks just like a girl.”  My mother beamed.

I often visited about an hour before dinnertime, in order to have a built-in exit. It was easier to say good-bye as my mother was moving on to another activity than it was to leave her alone in her room.  At the end of one of my visits the aide stopped by to let us know that dinner was on its way–preparations began well before the cart arrived in order to make bathroom visits and to convince reluctant residents that it was indeed 5 o’clock.  As we walked to the dining area my mother detoured into Milllie’s room, and they came out hand-in-hand.  “I couldn’t forget her,” my mother told me.

In another lovely coincidence we discovered that they shared a birthday, having been born a year apart on the same day.  I confirmed this with Millie’s son, who was a frequent visitor.  We often chatted with him and his wife when our paths crossed.  I remember passing him one day as he was arriving and I was leaving.  “They’re in my mother’s room,” I said.

Millie’s abilities declined after an illness sometime in the fall, and she moved to the skilled nursing unit across the hall.  Her son would bring her back to visit her friends on my mother’s unit, but it just wasn’t the same without her.  A big part of the loss was the impossibility of discussing it with my mother.  “Do you ever see Millie?” I once asked her.  She looked at me blankly.  “Who?” she said.

Change happens literally overnight in this kind of situation.  A virus or a simple fall is the difference between life and death, and so it was the case with my mother.  She was normally quite healthy and did not require a lot of assistance with her daily routine, but one day she fell when getting out of bed.  This was the beginning of the end, as they say.  Two hospitalizations later, we moved her into the skilled nursing unit where Millie was, but my mother was too far gone to resume any friendships.  Millie herself looked good and was moving around very well.  She sometimes sat with us during the two weeks my mother spent on that unit.

Hospice was now a large part of my mother’s fading life, and soon she no longer got out of bed.  I ran into Millie’s son and daughter-in-law a couple of days before my mother died.  They both hugged me and I saw tears in their eyes.

I write all this after seeing Millie’s obituary in the newspaper this past week.  She died on Mother’s Day, which is both sad and wonderful.  She was one of those completely unexpected bright spots in a situation I’d thought we would have to merely endure.  She and my mother reminded me of the rich lives we can have despite dementia and its privations.  Rest in peace, Millie.