The Power of Photos

     After my sister and I pried our mentally failing parents from their life-long home, moving them to a senior community, at the end of 2006, I started shoveling out the remainders of six decades of marriage and family. I had to be ruthless. The memories of these items had been lost to the disease--dissolved from my parents' minds, like sugar-cubes dissolving in Mom's hot cup of tea. I knew the items had intrinsic sweetness, but I couldn't connect the dots to find the meaning. Every day after work, as I stopped at the house––emptied of people, but filled with debris––I had to remind myself, Things are only things. Keeping things won't keep Mom and Dad, while I mourned the loss of my parents who were still living.

    Quickly sorted family photos––images turing from black and white to color as time moved forward––any having people, places, or situations I remembered, were rare items spared certain death in the garbage.

     We all have blurred memories of our past, but still photos rotate the camera lens of our lives into focus, showing clear details, reviving lost memories.

Annette, Ibby, me, Ed...who was taking the picture?

     Our eyes look to the left in this picture. Mom's pasted smile, and Dad's readiness to spring to action, make me imagine my sister may have been beckoning the dog, 'Midnight,' to creep into the picture. My mother's hand on Ann's elbow looks to have stilled my sister's gesturing. I fidgeted, my five-year-old attention span––gone.

     In those days, taking a picture in front of the television was like posing in front of a fireplace in today's world. The Philco in the background played three channels through a blizzard of black and white static. 

    Midnight merited his own picture.

     In this photo Annette and I stand on the spindle staircase Mom had stripped and refinished when they'd moved into the old house, then grumbled about dusting. She'd tell Annette and me to put socks on our hands and run them up and down the spindles. We'd soon lose interest and she'd have to finish the job.

     In the early 1960's, Santa delivered the baby doll I'd dreamed of. Annette received a transistor radio––the latest technology––sized like a large handbag. I don't think her allowance covered the cost of the eight D batteries required every few days. She slept with it playing under her pillow, even though Mom and Dad thought she'd turned it off. 

Fast forward half a century––Ed and Ibby––typical pose––typical smiles. 

     Minutes, days, months, and years chink forward, but the memory evoked by a photo transports us, timemachine-like, reeling backward through our own history. It's good to look back, to remember. Memories help us move forward with targeted intent, realizing how quickly time passes. 

     This Christmas, my family will gather around Mom's old dining room table. If you saw this table, you'd probably think it should have been put in the trash, or hauled to the garage and used for a work bench long ago. It's cracked and creaky, stained and gouged, held up by a four by four post in the center, but it's the place our family gathered every Christmas for my entire life. Sitting around it makes me think of Mom's homemade meatballs the size of tennis balls, soaking in her made-from-the-garden spaghetti sauce, and the many games of Uno and Monopoly played after dinner, while munching on her pies and cookies as the table was being cleared. Our world stopped to take time to be together around that dilapidated table. 

     This year I'll spread the old photos out with the new, in the middle of Mom's table, hoping to conjure conversation of the past, pass on tradition and memories, and build new ones by snapping the unposed and unsuspecting. Hopefully, some of these artifacts make the cut when my belongings are sorted, determining the trash from treasure, at my life's end.

     I'll miss you, Annette, and all far away family members, at Christmastime this year.

Christmas blessings to all reading Alzheimer's Daughter. Take some pictures and make some memories.

   

Christmas Memories

No question, the holidays make us think about Christmas times from the past.

I could write about recent unpleasant Christmas memories, such as Christmas 2006, the year my sister, Annette, and I forcibly moved our parents out of their home, and into a senior living facility––or Christmas 2008, when we had to move them to a dementia unit, leaving them behind locked security doors. Both situations are guilt-laden and still bring up nausea. So my mind cycles backward, like rewinding one of the early mechanical digital clocks where the numbers actually flipped on tabs so quickly you couldn’t distinguish individual digits as the clock was reset.

This ‘flashbacking’ was prompted by a conversation I had yesterday when speaking with a friend, comparing tales of Christmas times from our own childhood. This friend told me she believed in Santa until she was––as she put it–– ‘married.’ I’m sure she was kidding, or her husband might have wondered about her sanity. But the conversation took me back to childhood memories of my family Christmases in the 1950’s and 60’s.

My family attended church every Sunday. Christmas Eve Candlelight service was the most mystical of the year––with the exception of the year a friend’s screams as well as the smell of melting hair filled the sanctuary when her long locks brushed through her lit candle during Silent Night.

With church and faith as our focus, Santa just wasn’t. Ed and Ibby didn’t exclude “Santy,” as my dad called him, but Santa and church were kept separate.

Digging through old pictures, I found one of Annette and me on Christmas morning. There were few presents––the most exciting being the cardboard Corner Store Dad had assembled the night before. I felt like big stuff, because Mom let me put real Jello, BandAids, Corn Flakes, and canned goods on the shelves.

 I played with that store for years, begging Annette––seven years older––to play with me. This picture was snapped one of the times she gave in.

Our tree was decorated with ornaments we’d made at school, and silver tinsel, hung one tiny strand at a time. Annette and I usually gave Mom and Dad something we’d made at school. Mom treasured these trinkets, stashing them away for what she thought was forever. Those items resurrected, yellowed and stiff with age, to be put to final rest in the trash during my cleanout of their home.

Ed and Ibby didn’t exchange presents. They needed none, as they had each other. However, I do remember, after I was old enough to drive to the mall to Christmas shop with friends, Dad would sneak me $10, asking me to buy Chantilly cologne or dusting powder for Mom. I’ll always remember the light pink box with the white lace. Even now, when I see it in a store, I spritz the sample on my wrist, taking in my mother’s sweet, old-fashioned scent.

Long into my young adulthood, however, the Santa/Christ disconnect persisted for me. Church and Santa seemed opposite, yet connected in some way I couldn’t figure out.

When I had my own children, Santa played a role in our holiday. We decorated the house with Santa images, but Mom’s hand-me-down nativity took center stage under the tree. My children played with Mary and Joseph as though they were Barbie and Ken with a baby. I took the kids to see Santa, and my husband read The Night Before Christmas, but we never pushed literal belief in the man in the red suit.

At that time, we lived in a little cape cod house. Bedroom space was upstairs in a finished attic with steeply pitched ceilings and rough pine slats for flooring. One Christmas Eve, when our son was about age three, and our daughter seven, they sat at the bottom of the stairway behind the door that was appeared closed, but had been opened just enough for a peeking crack. As my husband and I carried presents hidden under the bed to the tree––our daughter whispered, “See, it’s Mom and Dad. There’s no Santa” to her younger brother. Wow, an older sibling can really burst your bubble.

It may have been that Christmas that I bought this small statue called the ‘Kneeling Santa’ for my mom for Christmas.

It’s one of the few things I kept from the cleanout, displaying it year round on my bookshelf.

That statue allowed me to let Santa and my faith cohabitate. I explained to my children that God gave us the gift of his son. We celebrate that birthday on Christmas, by giving gifts to those we love. Santa gives gifts to children to honor the child God gave to us.

The bitter conflict between faith and secular commercialism, was now resolved in my mind by this little statue.

I could go to lament the overindulgence of material things, and the grumpiness seeping out of us as we try to find the perfect gift and stretch our budgets to the point of a balloon ready to pop, but, you can breathe a sigh of relief––I won’t. Instead, I’ll just remember the simplicity of giving something from the heart, maybe a hug, homemade cookies, or a thank you, to those we love, and those in need, at this time of year.

Thank you for visiting Alzheimer’s Daughter. Blessings to you all, whatever your faith may be. Jean 

Hands

Hands tell the short story of a life.

In early 2010 my sister, Ann, was coming for a visit after our mother had fallen, breaking a hip. Mom was failing fast.

My niece had found a beautiful picture of multigenerational hands online and sent it to us, spurring us to try to duplicate the photo. We arrived at the dementia unit––I with my camera in hand.

In this picture, Dad’s creased and rough hands wear his class ring from 1939, and a Masonic ring. He always did love a bit of bling, but in his defense, one must actively wear all of these possessions in a locked dementia unit, or they end up missing, found on other people’s hands.

The ring you see my dad putting on my mother’s crooked fingers matches one on his hand. These were bands bought for their 25^th wedding anniversary, 40 years earlier. 

When Mom and Dad died, Ann took Mom’s anniversary ring. I took Dad’s. His fits the middle finger on my right hand perfectly. When I’m brushing my teeth in the morning, the glint of the gold winks at me, reminding me of my parents’ love for each other, and my bond with my sister.

Yesterday, while babysitting my seven-month-old granddaughter, she rolled from her back to her stomach in her quest to explore her little world of the blanket on the living room floor. As I lay with her, playing, cooing, and peek-a-booing, she was mesmerized by Dad’s ring on my hand. She pulled my finger, examining every angle of the ring, as though she was a scientific researcher, pulling it closer to her face, closer to her eyes, then to her nose, finally trying like the dickens to slip my finger in her mouth to taste test.

I looked at her little, brand-new hands––her fingers about one-fifth the size of my own. Hers, fresh and plump––mine, crinkled and ruddy. I was struck by the presence of my parents, their essence felt through that small piece of metal that had wound around their fingers for decades.

At birth a baby reflexively grasps the hand of their parent. That baby grows to a child who holds their parents’ hands to be taught, to be protected. Over the next half century, the roles reverse as slowly as it takes wrinkles to form, eyesight to fade, and joints to wear out. If a parent lives long enough to become frail, that parent comes to hold their child’s hand for strength and safety. At death, the child grasps their parent’s hand, thanking them for life. Just like the never-ending circle of a ring, joy comes in holding the hands of future generations.  

Happy 93rd Birthday, Dad

Today would have been my Dad's 93^rd birthday. He died one year and eight months ago of Alzheimer’s.

My dad was a Depression Era kid and a WWII veteran.

When I was a growing up, my memories of Dad are scant. He was a driven businessman, working from before sun-up to after sundown, arriving home late for dinners, attending American Legion or Masonic meetings. When he was home, his time was spent working in the garden, completing home repairs, or watching the news.

Throughout my childhood, teenage years, and adulthood, I knew him as a hard-working father. However, I can honestly say, I never knew the heart of my dad until Alzheimer’s disease ravaged him to the point that he didn’t know himself.

As Dad lost his mind, I found the man who was my father.

I saw him as an unshakingly devoted husband to my mom. I remember him kissing her, as though they were honeymooners, leaning over the arm of her reclining wheelchair, as everyone else in the room knew she was dying. With a grin on his face, he repeated his mantra, “We’ve been so lucky––we’re so happy.”

I came to appreciate his joy in life as I walked toward him one day in the locked dementia unit, looking him in the eye and smiling. His face brightened––he was so excited he nearly wiggled out of his skin. We approached each other and he took my hand, bubbling, “It’s so wonderful to see you. This is the best day of my life! Now who are you?”

I witnessed his deep, yet innocent child-like faith, as I entered his room, on his last birthday, his 91^st. He turned to face me, extended his right hand to shake mine, saying, “Hello, I’m Ed.” I told him I knew who he was, because he was my father, and I was his daughter. He replied, “Really?” He asked me, “Where are my parents and that woman I admired?” I told him they awaited his arrival in heaven. He turned to the window and waved at the clouds.

I was overwhelmed at his graciousness and peacefulness as his feverish hands gripped mine tightly, whispering his last words to me, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” as I sat by his bed before he died.

The professional man, his goals, the career he’d built, all was gone, like ashes blown away in the morning after fire dies. The deeply buried embers, the man who was left at the end, the man dying of Alzheimer’s––that’s the man I carry in my heart as Dad.

Thanksgiving

On Thanksgiving Day, I remember, with gratitude, the way I was raised by Ed and Ibby.

Excerpt from Chapter Two of ALZHEIMER'S DAUGHTER:

Each night at bedtime Mom would tuck me in, hold my hand and kneel beside my bed to pray for family, friends, and the state of our nation. We’d say things like, “God, please cure Aunt Jenny’s pneumonia, heal Mr. Smith from his heart attack, and guide Khrushchev.” I didn’t know who Khrushchev was, nor comprehend much about the Cold War, but I knew the U.S. was at odds with the Soviet Union.

 Without fail, hours after Mom prayed with me, I’d hear my parents kneeling––Mom on her side of the bed, and Dad on his––murmuring prayers to thank God for their blessings.

Growing up in the old house, I’d hear groaning and clanging from the furnace, imagining a monster lurking in the shallow, mousey basement. That contraption heated the whole house through a three-by-five foot register in the dining room floor, next to the staircase Mom grumbled about dusting while she put Dad’s old socks on both hands, running them up and down the spindles. On cold mornings I’d scoot down the stairs on my rump, and sit on the warm register, letting heat ooze into my goose-pimply skin, calming my chattering teeth until the metal became so hot I had to move or burn my backside.

Mom’s voice roused me from my warm trances as she hollered, “Jean, get moving, we’ve got to go through your flash cards before you leave for school.”

As Dad knotted his necktie, and Mom straightened it, she’d ask him, “What do you want for dinner tonight?”

He’d kiss her goodbye then chuckle, “Whatever you can spare.”

Then he opened the oak front door with the oval glass, a cold draft sneaking in, before it creaked closed behind him. Eating my breakfast of Alpha Bits, my knees curled underneath me at the kitchen table, I’d hear Mom murmur, “Your dad wouldn’t complain if I served him mud.” I’d watch out the window as my father with his long, quick strides began the quarter-mile walk to work.

I never remember Dad driving to work, even in the dead of winter, because we lived so close. Our used brown 1950s Ford Fairlane rarely left the detached garage, because we rarely left town. In those days, Dad never would have bought a new car. He said, “A car takes us from point A to point B. We need nothing fancy.”

After Dad, Ann, and I vacated the house, Ibby’s focus became a meat and potatoes evening meal. Most nights we even had homemade dessert contributing to her plumpness. Her teeth suffered from her stash of Milky Ways, Snickers, and Three Musketeers. When she was in her early forties she decided she wanted straight teeth and a pretty smile. So the dentist pulled her upper and lower molars, gave the sore gums a couple of days to begin to heal, then pulled the remaining front teeth, socking the dentures into her raw mouth. To work through the throbbing, she’d walk to the mirror and smile brightly. The image of her straight white teeth beaming back––her only anesthetic.

Between meal prep, Ibby washed clothes in the wringer washer. Wearing housedresses belted with a fitted bodice––June Cleaver-like, without the pearls––she carried laundry to a sagging clothesline. Dad’s pants and shirts, our skirts, blouses, sheets, and underwear along with Mom’s bras fluttered in June, and flapped so hard some came loose––landing in the neighbor’s yard––in the angry gray freeze of February.

Rivertown from 1950 to1960 likened to “Mayberry.” Opie––in his striped tee shirts, jeans, and shorn hair could have been one of my classmates. My most vivid school memory is of Friday, the 22^nd of November in 1963. My third grade classmates and I covered our heads with our lunch boxes and ran for our lives, risking glances at the sky––hearts pounding, bobby socks and Mary Janes flying––searching for imagined Soviet planes, which we feared could bomb us. That night Mom, Dad, Ann and I huddled around the black and white Philco, as Walter Cronkite told the nation John F. Kennedy had not only been shot, but was dead. Tears seeped down our cheeks as Jackie Kennedy, in her blood stained dress, having removed her pillbox hat, stood beside Lyndon Johnson as he was sworn in.

Most days after school, kids chased each other, running through connecting backyards––playing good guys against bad guys––never knowing in whose yard we’d end up. Ibby, even though she was fiercely overprotective, never worried. She knew I’d be back to eat supper. We listened for our moms to holler “Dinnertime!” almost yodel-like. Understanding when first and middle names––‘Jean Louise’––were yelled we’d better run home fast because dinner was getting cold.

The only exception to our heavy meals occurred at end-of-summer harvest. Dad, because he was so practical, planted the vegetable garden in the spring. Mom, wearing her seersucker pedal-pusher pants, picked and prepared the vegetables, but allowed herself the beauty of her flower garden. It was not as practical as Ed’s garden. It didn’t produce food, but did give her joy––often a single rose in a bud vase decorated our diner table.

My mouth waters, and I can almost feel the sticky sweat on my neck remembering the steamy heat of the old house, with the ever so slight movement of air through the white, Priscilla curtains as we’d begin supper by spreading a thick coating of butter on a piece of Wonder bread, then rub the buttered bread on to an ear of sweet corn. After gnawing the rows off the cob, and licking the butter off my hands, the piece of warm bread was a bonus. The year I had a gaping hole in my mouth from having lost all four of my front teeth––top and bottom––mom took pity on me and cut the kernels off the cob. Harvest meals were rounded out with peppered green beans seasoned with bacon drippings saved from Dad’s breakfasts of bacon and eggs, and tomatoes––still warm from the garden––topping cottage cheese sprinkled with sugar.

A slatted swing suspended by two chains from the ceiling of the wrap-around front porch was the only place to catch a breeze on still summer days. I’d swing my baby dolls, while my sister and her teenage girlfriends, holding their transistor radios to their ears, practiced dancing to Wah-Watusi and Twist and Shout from the previous week’s American Bandstand.

 Memories jerk through my mind, like the clicking sound of reel-to-reel movies, of sitting Indian-style on the warm sidewalk, cranking my skate key to clamp my roller-skates to my saddle shoes. The bottoms of my feet vibrated, and the skate key lobbed from a leather string around my neck as I raced to the store––navigating uneven slabs of sidewalk pushed out of place from ancient maple and oak tree roots––to spend my allowance of a nickel on creamy Fudgesicles or maple-filled Bun candies.

November Memories from 2006

November is Alzheimer's Awareness Month. Today, I reflect on a mid November day six years ago––the final day that my parents made their own decisions about their own lives.

Alzheimer's Daughter  Chapter One––Ordinary, Extraordinary Day

A nippy dawn woke eighty-six-year-old Ed, my father, on November 14, 2006. He turned to nuzzle his chin into Mom’s warm neck, but Ibby was already up and dressed. He heard her rattling around the kitchen laying out a breakfast of graham crackers and hot tea at the century-old dining table. Ed pulled on yesterday’s clothes that laid on the bedside chair overnight, splashed water on his face, and ran a dry toothbrush across his teeth.

After they ate, Ibby brushed crumbs from Ed’s lips, and held his red jacket from behind as he slowly slipped in one arm at a time. Ed helped Ibby snuggle into the blue, fuzzy cardigan she’d knitted thirty years ago, waiting as she fastened each white pearl button with her arthritic fingers.

Ed smooched Ibby saying, “I love you––see you for lunch.”

Fingertips against the wall to steady himself, he staggered down two cement steps to the attached garage, then pushed the control to open the overhead door. Ibby tottered along to his red Cadillac handing him his cane, reminding, “Don’t forget to use this.”

Ibby stood in the driveway of the small 1950’s brick, ranch home where they’d lived for forty years, waving while Ed backed out of the driveway without looking, and drove two blocks to work. His Caddy rolled through one stop sign, then through a red light before he parked crooked across two spaces. Ed entered his business of sixty years, smiling so brightly his eyes squinted, gave an enthusiastic, salute-like wave to his co-workers who were already busily working, bubbling, “Hello, everybody. Great day, isn’t it?” He continued polite niceties, but couldn’t remember names. Then he entered his office and settled in behind his walnut desk, opening The Wall Street Journal. He appeared to be busy, but glanced up frequently hoping to see familiar customers.

Back at home Ibby waved to her neighbors as they drove to work. Everyone knew everyone on Orchard Lane, their dead-end street. She struggled straightening her stooped spine to pour cracked corn and sunflower seeds into her bird feeder, and slowly hobbled to survey her bleak fall yard. She lingered, marveling at the glistening, frozen-dew encapsulating late-fall rosebuds. Frost soaked Ibby’s cloth shoes.

Shivers hastened her back into the warm house. She passed through the cluttered kitchen looking for a snack, peeking in the refrigerator packed with leftovers. Some were edible, others spoiled––but Ibby couldn’t tell the difference.

What works in memory care units?

Today I had the opportunity to begin to serve on a committee planning programing for a new locked memory care unit in Medina, Ohio.

Any family member who has had to place a loved one in a unit such as this due to dementia, Alzheimer's, or other cognitive impairment knows this decision is one of life's hardest.

Please give feedback through your comments about what would be important factors for you if you were looking for such a place for your loved one.

Also, if you have or had a family member living in a secure memory care unit, please comment specifically about good practices that work or worked with your loved ones,––what actions have you appreciated from staff, etc.

Feel free to forward a link to anyone who could cast light on this subject.

Thanks so much, friends, for your input.