Dad’s personal papers filled filing cabinets and drawers and shelves and box upon box: study notes and drafts of his book Process of Atonement; correspondence; mission papers; journals and memoirs; travel brochures for family vacations; investment and bank statements; tax returns; and much more. As I emptied hanging file folders to shred no-longer-needed papers, I removed the clear plastic label tags and dropped them in an empty desk drawer for later use.  That later use came several days later as I began to create new files for life insurance papers, home and auto insurance papers, pension and health insurance papers, family history records, and others.  But when I pulled open the drawer with the clear tags, I found the drawer empty.  “Mom,” I called out.  “Where are all the file folder tags?”  She looked confused and said nothing.  I retrieved a tag from an active file drawer, and asked her where all the tags I had saved might be, if she knew.  Her confusion turned to embarrassment as she confessed to not knowing what they were so she threw them away.  Why would you do that? I thought.  “Please don’t throw things away just because you don’t know what they are.  Please ask me first.”  She whispered an Okay.  Scraping the dinner dishes into the kitchen trash bin later that day, I found several new clean vacuum filters in the trash.  “Mom.  Why are these new vacuum filters in the garbage can, if you know?”  She had really wanted to clean out the hall closet, she said, [and I hadn’t done it fast enough for her compulsion,] and she didn’t know what they were, she said, so she threw them away, she said.  I told her what they were and put them back in the now-empty closet.

(Image by gugacurado from Pixabay.)

Mom has never been one to chew with her mouth open, and she certainly taught me as a little boy the same principle of social and eating etiquette. But she must love, or be absolutely oblivious to, the crunching smacking sounds of certain foods.  Her routine breakfast includes a bowl of dry honey nut Cheerios with milk on the side in a glass.  With each fingers-full of Cheerios, the first five quick delighted chews are with the lips parted and the full crunching reverberating through the downstairs.  At least that how it seems to me.  After breakfast comes the Mentos Pure Fresh peppermint gum, chewed with wet delighted smacks.  Over the course of months, I have spent hours composing messages of gentle and not-so-gentle confrontation.  Could you please chew with your mouth closed?!  An obviously rude question destined for failure and offense.  Your chewing is pretty loud.  Still too direct.   The right message and the right delivery are important to an old person whose dementia takes the form of anxiety and sweetness and deference and wanting always to be good.  The casual candor I might otherwise employ could really hurt my mother’s fragile feelings.  Finally, I landed upon the perfectly balanced approach, I thought, with the benign observation, I can tell you’re really enjoying your gum.  She looked slightly embarrassed, but not ashamed or belittled, and responded that she was, she guessed, and that she was chewing a little loud, she guessed, and she would try to remember not to smack.  I’m sure she had not noticed her crunching and smacking before, other than within her own skull, because she hasn’t been able to hear life’s smaller sounds.  With her new hearing aids, she likely will be more aware.

Arriving downstairs at 9:00 a.m., Mom turns on the front foyer chandelier then hand surfs the walls on her way to her chair, switching on every ceiling light and desk lamp as she goes. It is as if she finds herself in a long dark hallway, flipping on lights a section at a time as she goes so that she can find her way to the next section and eventually her destination.  She seems oblivious to the unseen lights left on behind her—they have served their purpose and now simply to not exist in her consciousness.  Eventually her surfing surface ends and she settles heavily in her rocking recliner, encompassed by five burning desk lamps and 25 blazing recessed spot lights.  The brightness screams at me but seems to soothe her.  I much prefer the softness of natural window light, which we have in abundance, and enjoy shadow over direct beam.  On the days I am home, I routinely turn each light off as I follow her throughout the house (except those light she needs in her immediate vicinity).  Watching television becomes painful to my tired eyes as the room’s intense glare hits me from many directions and reflects off the dim screen.  Some days I just cannot endure the light, and inform Mom I need to turn some lights off and dim others down.  She relents.  I have urged her to turn the lights off in the unoccupied rooms, to save on the pricey power bill, and to practice a bit of conservation.  (We are recyclers, after all.)  But it is her house, and she pays the power bill.  One hallway lamp in particular I turn off as I pass by and she turns on as she passes by, and back and forth.  I quickly tire of the power struggle and let her win the game.  The light, she says, helps her see her needlepoint work.  And the brightness seems to help her feel cheery and less alone.  The brightness provides some physical compensation for the emotional isolation which is her new daily routine.  Just shy of 10:00 p.m., she reverses her routine, turning nobs and flipping off switches as she makes her nighttime circuit toward the chair lift and the upstairs and sleeping in the dark, buried head to toe under her blankets.