Alef: The NEXT Conversation

To Mom With Love

By Ruth Bregman

My mom, Margie, was in her forties when I was born, very unusual for those times. So she was much older than all of my friends’ mothers. I clearly remember when she began to be forgetful. It happened shortly after my father died – they had adored each other and she just couldn’t deal well with living alone.

The forgetfulness started when she was in her late eighties. At first it was an occasional lapse, but gradually became more pronounced. Finally, my mom’s doctor made it a reality. He diagnosed her with dementia, probably Alzheimer’s.

I was forced to face the truth and deal with the many problems that followed. Almost immediately, she began a long stay in the hospital due to a serious lapse of memory, her decreasing ability to deal well with reality, occasional hallucinations, and her need to begin medication and to have it regulated properly. But when the time came for her to leave the hospital, I had to argue with the hospital social work staff and administrators who insisted that she belonged in a nursing home. I refused because I knew she wouldn’t do well in a nursing home, and I had also promised my dad never to allow that to happen.

I won that fight and was able to take her back to her apartment on the Lower East Side, but it meant hiring 24-hour aides to “ensure her safety.” My mom adjusted to the aides, and had a complete personality change which often comes with this disease. She became extremely attached to me and also more demonstrative as the dementia increased. This was not what I’d been accustomed to growing up, and proved to require a big adjustment on my part. However, it also proved to be an unexpectedly positive change. It was actually very nice to be hugged and kissed whenever I came over to visit.

Watching over her was a big responsibility. I had to check up on her and the aides every day at first, gradually cutting back to three to four times per week, and eventually (at the insistence of my friends) two to three times per week. Before I realized what was happening, my life consisted of full-time work, telephone calls to mom twice a day, and visits to her, which seemed to make her happy. Then there were trips to the cleaners, laundry to be done, grocery shopping, picking up prescriptions and distributing them in weekly dose containers, and all the other tasks that needed to be taken care of for her.

Mom’s health deteriorated with time, and after three more years at home she passed away in her own apartment. It was not unexpected, but still a shock. The funeral was small, with only the rabbi, family, and her aides (who had grown to love her) attending. In her nineties, when she died, she didn’t have many friends who were still alive and well enough to come to the graveside burial.

It took over two months for me to stop picking up the telephone to call my mom to say hello. And it took almost as long for me to feel comfortable planning outings with my friends and family after being unavailable for such a lengthy time. But it always made me feel gratified to have done the best I could for my mom in her final years, and to have been able to fulfill my promise to my dad not to put her into a nursing home. Maybe best of all, I had been the recipient of her outpouring of warmth and love over her last few years.

Finally, although it’s become much more common nowadays than it was when I was born, it makes me smile to think about the negative feelings many people have regarding “older people” who have babies and never live long enough to see them grow up. Boy, did my mom prove that theory wrong! She was able to see her only daughter and her two grandchildren become productive and happy adults.

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