A Caregiver Never Sleeps

I wake up in the middle of the night, listening for something, but I am not sure what I expect to hear. Am I listening for the breathing of the oxygen concentrator? Am I listening for her to call my name? Am I listening for footsteps echoing down the hall? Am I listening for voice when she wakes up from a dream calling her parents or husband's name? Am I listening for her scream when she falls out of bed?

I sit up so that I can hear better, but I hear only the refrigerator or the neighbor's dog barking. I get out of bed and walk down the hall to her room, I stand in the door looking at the empty space where the hospital bed used to be. She died thirteen months ago and her mortal remains are buried in a wooden coffin beneath a rose colored granite stone. I am still listening for the voice that Alzheimer's silenced.

I stare at the empty room for a few more minutes and then turn around to go back to bed. I feel the cold from the tile floor rising through my bare feet. I look down, I laugh because I forgot to put on my slippers when I came to check on Mama. I begin to cry because she is no longer here and I am checking on a ghost. Then I begin to wonder who I am crying for; am I crying for Mama or am I crying for myself. Am I crying for the years that she suffered from the slow deterioration of her memory? Why am I crying?

I try to remember the precise moment when I realized something was wrong. Was it the day she tried to unstop the kitchen sink with the bathroom plunger? All my life, I remember her having a plumber helper for the bathroom and a different one for the kitchen sink. She never used the one in the bathroom for the kitchen sink, yet that day she did because she could not find the one for the kitchen or forgot where it was kept. It was so out of the ordinary for her that it bordered on the bizarre, but this was not the only odd or perhaps I should say weird thing she did.

Then there was the dream. She dreamed that a little girl came out from under her bed and ran into her closet. She came into the living room and ask me to come help find the little girl. I escorted Mom back into the bedroom and we looked for the girl, but could not find her. I suggest it was a dream; however, Mom refused to accept that suggestion and insisted that a little girl was in the house. She would not go back to bed and I could not convince her there was no little girl in her room or in the house. Finally, I said it was probably the ghost that haunts this house and not to worry because the little girl ghost meant no harm. She accepted that explanation and went back to bed.

At the time, I took each odd action as a separate event and it was only later that I connected them. All of them were indications that something was wrong with my mother, but it was only after the diagnosis that I realized they were all indications that something was wrong with her brain. The Alzheimer's not only took her memory, but it prevented her from telling the difference between reality and a dream. It took away her memory and personality a little bit each day or month, until in the end the only one she remembered was me. However, to this day I am still not sure whether she thought I was her daughter or her mother.