Marjorie
Bonney, mid-1950s
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When
she was still able to use a telephone, my mother would call me every April 1st
to remind me that April Fool’s Day was her mother’s birth date, and that
her mother had been nobody’s fool.
In
recent years, as dementia overtook her, my mother imagined that her mother and
brother, both long dead, were living on the same hall as her at the nursing
home.
She
would insist that I go next door and check on my grandmother or go see the
administrator to make sure a room was being prepared for my uncle. I learned
early on not to argue with such requests, and instead merely wandered around in
the hall out of her sight for a little while until she forgot why I’d left
the room.
It
is only fitting, then, that after having ducked any number of humane opportunities
to die and avoid further suffering and confusion, my mother waited until last
night, the same day as her mother’s birth date, to die.
Marjorie
Jones, c.1921
My
mother was a formidable person. She patterned herself after her mother, who was
left single with three children to raise after her husband took his life during
the Great Depression. My mother didn’t face the same challenges that her mother
faced. She was also the youngest of the three children and forever demanded the
attention and adoration that a youngest child can sometimes expect. Still, she was,
to put it lightly, very strong willed, and this didn’t always make her easy to
be around.
The
upside of my mother’s late-in-life journey with dementia, though, was that it erased
her hardest edges. She forgot her grudges and couldn’t remember any new ones. My
sister once jokingly asked, “Who took away our mother and left that sweet
little old lady in her place?”
In
the last year or so, there wasn’t much my mother could control. The one thing
she could command people to do was to arrange the curtains in her room. (I
always felt sorry for her roommate, who got no say in this matter.) No matter
whether you found them open or closed or blowing gently in a spring breeze,
she’d have you pull them back and forth endlessly until they were “just
right.” And then she’d have you move
them again.
I
used to think it was the curtains. Then I realized it was that the curtains
were the one thing over which she could still have dominion.
I
thought it was just family, too, that she’d order around like that. But as
various members of the nursing home staff stopped by her room yesterday to pay
their respects, almost all had a story to tell about how she gotten them all hot
and bothered trying to get those damned curtains “just right.”
I
must confess that they were far more patient with her than I was. I’m just
happy that my grandmother and uncle didn’t actually make it to this nursing
home. I’m sure my mother would have had me go to their rooms to adjust their
curtains, too, and I just didn’t have that much patience in me.
Marjorie
Jones, c. late 1930s
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