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I wrote this article just a few months before my mother died, in 1992. I wanted to share it here.

Mother

This Mother's Day, for the first time in my life, I did not at least talk to my mother. I also did not send her a card. I suppose I should have at least sent a card, but doing so would have been only to ease my conscience this year, and not for any pleasure she might have gotten from being remembered. She would not even have realized why she received the card or who had sent it, even if she had been told. so I decided not to send one, and I did not try to call her. Nor did I try to visist her, although I probably will, in another week or so.

It no longer seems to matter much to her, however, whether I visit her or not. This, too, I do for myself-and perhaps for my siblings-instead of for her. She no longer knows who I am and sometimes hardly realizes I am in the room, even when I do visit. All of us have experienced this, although she has seemed to recognize several of us, at least briefly, during the last month or so. For a few minutes, at our last visit, she knew Lynn and me as her son and daughter, and she recognized Sister and Bennett each when they first went into her room, at separate times, about a week after our visit. (Of course, later in each of their visits, she did not know either of them!) So now we all visit her to assure ourselves that she is being cared for, and for our own peace of mind, and not for her pleasure, because we can never be sure if she will know us at all, even briefly. And we always leave with the knowledge that she may not live long enough for us to visit her again. So, each time we go to see her, we understand that we may never have another opportunity to do so.

It has become harder to make these visits, also, in the last year or so. As her mind has deteriorated, it has been accompanied by a corresponding deterioration of her health. The once robust figure of our mother has become almost a skeleton, held together by huge folds of flesh. She has become progressively weaker as the disease that she has fallen prey to eats away at her mind and body. Since she can no longer walk without someone nearby to keep her from falling, she spends most of her time in her rolling easy chair or in her bed. This, of course, encourages her body to become even weaker than it already is.

The deterioration of her mind has forced her to submit to further indignities: unable to go to the bathroom alone, she has felt shame when she could no longer wait for someone to take her; because she might hurt herself unknowingly, she has to have her hands tied down, and she cannot even scratch her nose when it itches. Her private life is now largely public, and the only time the door of her room remains closed is during the time she is being bathed, changed, or moved from bed to chair and back. The cumulative effect, for us, of all these changes has been to make her appear as less the mother we have known and loved all these years and more as some strange, sad woman that we feel bound to in some way.

For all these reasons, I felt saddened on this, the first Mother's Day since it became necessary to put her in the nursing home. And I have had to face the fact that she may not live until next Mother's Day. This knowledge added to my sadness, as did the realization that this year will be the first Father's Day that my earthly father will not be alive for me to celebrate with. Neither day will ever again mean quite as much to me as they once did. At some future date, both may once again hold some of the same joy they have in the past, but the hope of such being the case is hard to grasp right now.

Learn more about this author, Barbara A. Black.
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