Before my Mom moved out of her house, she was sitting at her dining room table one morning, talking to my sister. My sister was the only one who lived close and she or her husband tried to get out there every day. It was fairly early in the disease, but it was also in the first year after Dad died. Mom started telling her she was worried about her memory loss and she started to cry and tell her how scared she was all of the time. I went to visit her one weekend and the visit went just fine. When I got ready to go, I had my stuff packed in the car and was headed out the door and she asked me if I really had to go. I told her I did and that I had to get back to work. She started crying and told me how lonely she was out there every day. That was the hardest drive I ever had to make. I cried the four and a half hours back home. Of all of the nasty things this disease was doing to her, scaring her was the worst for me. Especially, since she was alone. That was the hardest for me to deal with.
Last month Mom found a coffee cup she liked in a catalogue and asked me to send for it for her. It says “Courage” on it. She loves it and keeps saying how much she would like to have a whole set. I have a ton of coffee cups and that cup is always there for her. She uses it for her coffee every day. I tell her that and ask why she needs a whole set.
“So I can take them home with me.”
“You are home, Mom,” I said.
She was showing this cup to my sister when she came to visit last week. Again, she mentioned that she’d like to have several more. My sister agreed that it was a nice cup.
The next morning, I came downstairs and my sister and Mom were having coffee and Mom was drinking out of a different cup. I looked in the cabinet and didn’t see her Courage cup anywhere.
“Mom, where’s your coffee cup?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve looked everywhere.”
When Mom got in the shower I told my sister to follow me into Mom’s room. I told her I knew that cup was in there somewhere. I checked the dresser drawers and Kendra looked around the bedside table. Sure, enough, she found it. Mom had wrapped it up in two different hats she wears, the cup wrapped in one hat and then those wrapped in another hat. Who knows what her reason was. I told my sister maybe she was afraid you’d leave with it, or maybe she thought if she lost it, I’d go ahead and get her another one. I put it back out on the counter and when she finished her shower she was drinking from it again.
A few days later, she and I were doing the morning dishes and she mentioned having more of those cups and I asked her, as I dried her favorite cup, “do you feel like you need extra courage, Mom?”
She said, “no….not so much anymore.”
I guess I’ll get her three more for Mother’s Day.
No comments:
Post a Comment