I dream about my Mom two or three times a week. Every once in a while it’s her pre-Alzheimers, and we chat about things like we used to sometimes do. Mostly she’s how she is now, and I’m trying to keep her safe and happy.
In one dream, I found her the perfect place to live, except that you could see into the empty garage from every part of the house. Where’s my car, she’d ask over and over. Why did you take my car? We had finally gotten past her asking that over and over in real life, and now she was doing it in a dream.
She gets into these obsessive loops about things. A family friend died during the lockdown. Marilyn. There were no services, no gatherings, and my mother was so confused and distraught. She called the funeral home multiple times a day. She called Marilyn’s ex-husband over and over until he called me, worried. I considered staging our own mini-memorial, but then she forgot all about it. I let it slide.
I don’t remind her of the painful things she’s forgotten. When she met my boyfriend, I brought up that she had found her birth mother, born in Ireland, and that had kicked off her great passion for Irish culture. Mom started telling him about the search, and then said, “but she had already died by the time I found her.”
This isn’t true at all. Her birth mother was very much alive. Catherine. My mother called her on the phone, told her who she was. Catherine hung up on her.
It was one of the most painful experiences of my mother’s life. There are times when I plunge into aching sadness when I think about it happening to her. I am deeply grateful that she doesn’t remember going through that anymore.
She never believes me when I say she has Alzheimers. Once, in exasperation, I explained to her that you can see on MRIs that parts of her brain are gone. “Oh, that’s just the bad memories I got rid of,” she said. It’s lovely that it’s sort of true.