Diapers and Depression

What's it like to spend time with an aging parent? Absurd, poignant, bewildering, and beautiful--it's a lot of things.

Photo by Andra C Taylor Jr on Unsplash

July 3, 2018, Tuesday

When I got to mom’s this rainy, humid afternoon Anita was not there. She had gone out to get something. She would be back soon. But mom had just dropped a load. I was in the right place at the wrong time. But that’s okay. Having raised William and Polly, I know my way around a diaper change.

Once mom and I finished in the bathroom, I rolled her out to the kitchen. I started to make some toast for mom. Anita returned from her errands. We had a long, winding discussion about the consistency of mom’s load and whether its cow-pie-ness was an improvement over the slurry of previous days.

Anita and I voted yes, it was, but mom was not persuaded and wanted to pursue having some food that would get things a bit firmer to, oh, I don’t know, caulk? Putty? Our exchange called to mind life’s basic functions, whatever the species—eat, poop, sleep, repeat.

When mom finished her toast she wanted to relocate to her bed so I strolled her there, settled her onto her bed, returned to the t.v. room for the red blanket from the back of the couch, came back to mom in her bed, spread the blanket over her, turned off the lamp on the sideboard as she had asked, kissed her cheek, and said good-bye. Rainy days are the best for a nap. And changing a nappy.

July 5, 2018, Thursday

This afternoon when I visited mom Anita was sitting at the kitchen table dicing some green peppers and onions for some barbeque she was going to make mom for dinner and some women from the fire restoration company were crawling all over kitchen sink counter and surrounding cabinets wiping, vacuuming, and otherwise continuing to clean up the soot from the cooking fire the other day. Somehow I had not noticed until this afternoon that there is a fine film of grime everywhere.

I joined mom in the t.v. room. She was watching Guy Fieri on the Food Network. He was watching another man make hot dog relish, his gestures and comments as vivid and emphatic as his spiky blond hair. He seems a bit too flashy and brash for mom but maybe she was absorbing his energy. In addition to looking forward to Anita’s barbeque mom was alert to what the restoration women were doing. “And I have learned their names!” she told me, raising her right arm and pointing to the ceiling.

Among mom’s usual questions about this and that she wanted to know if William still thought his and Polly’s trip was “fucking lit.” I have assumed that is the case since I have not heard otherwise. I could regret quoting William to mom the other day but instead I see her remembering the phrase as a measure of cognitive stability.

It also reminds me of a moment with William when he was about seven. We were at the back gate, William standing behind me with one hand on my hip and the other with his fingers in the corner of his mouth, my arms full of groceries, my hands fumbling with the gate’s balky latch. “Fucking gate!” I cursed. I shifted the groceries and took a moment to regroup. I looked down at William. He looked up at me, and then at the gate, and then back to me, and said, “Open the fucking gate, Mommy.”

July 9, 2018, Monday

When I stopped by mom’s Saturday afternoon Sylvia had just settled her into her chair in the corner of the sun room. She wore a coral-colored shirt, jeans, and a pair of dark glasses.

“Sylvia is the best,” mom said as Sylvia put an ashtray on the table next to mom’s chair. Sylvia giggled on her way back to the kitchen. “What about her voice?” I asked. I wasn’t concerned about Sylvia hearing me. Her “voice” is an open secret now. “Oh, awful! Just awful!” mom said, “but, whatever.” Mom shrugged. “She is sooo helpful,” she added.

Mom puffed the cigarette she had just lit. I showed her a picture of William and Polly taken at Ngorongoro Crater on one of their first few days of their trip. “Is that the place with all the flamingos where we went?” mom asked. “No, that was Lake Manyara,” I said.

Despite the mistake mom’s power of recollection amazed me. How did she pull that card out of her deck? Has someone upgraded her processor? Added more RAM? Or just vaporized the obscuring, impairing fog of overmedication? Mom’s question filled my own mind’s eye with images of all those leggy pink flamingos stalking around the shallows of the lake.

Back to the present mom and I appreciated the day’s beautiful weather, its clear blue sky and breeziness. But she was not keen about the breeze generated by the overhead fan and asked me to turn it down.

We also considered a new color for her living room and kitchen cabinets. Apricot? Rose? Mom is inspired by some pictures in a book on French décor that Laura Lee gave her. “I like those colors,” mom said, “they are warm to me.” This remark seemed unusually reflective to me for mom but I appreciated the genuine sentiment.

Mom was also looking forward to going out to dinner later with Rhonda at Olive Garden. Since it was Saturday I suggested they go early. “Oh, we will,” mom assured me. Maybe they should even make a reservation. “Yes, maybe,” mom said, “I hadn’t thought of that.” She exhaled and stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray on the table next to an aloe plant, convenient perhaps for burns, at least to a person.

It occurred to me that maybe the aloe plant is leftover from mom’s time making Polly’s Bread. I remember her burning herself routinely as she would rearrange or slip hot pans of rising bread from the oven, catching her arm on a rack or the oven door, and I remember seeing thick, fleshy, aloe spikes rising from pots on the kitchen windowsill.

When I mentioned that Wimbledon was on mom nearly jumped from her chair. Her alacrity and excitement startled me. She raised her arms and fluttered her fingers at me, the signal for me to take her hands and hoist her up to her stroller.

“Your legs are so strong,” mom said. I admitted they were also a bit feathery these days although there are only about a dozen total hairs. “No use chasing those down,” mom said as she sat in her stroller.

Then mom waved me on to push her back to the t.v. room to watch Wimbledon, where people have much more worthwhile things to chase down than stray hairs—tennis balls, trophies, titles, strawberries and cream, and perhaps even a glimpse of the Queen.

July 24, 2018, Tuesday

The first two times I visited mom after returning from Maine she was weak and whiny. “I am just whipped,” she would sigh. She would close her eyes and lean back against the couch in the t.v. room. Mom also complained about how Anita tires her with so many errands. I did not point out that she is the one asking Anita to do these errands and that she could stay home and rest if she could get comfortable with being home alone. But she can’t. Being home alone makes her anxious. Those visits were brief.

Being out so much with Anita inclines mom to stay at home as much as possible otherwise. When I visited mom Friday afternoon I asked her if she and Rhonda would be going out to dinner that evening. No, Rhonda was going to bring something from Olive Garden. “I said, ‘Rhonda, I am just happier eating here on the couch, where I can do nothing but eat’ and she said, ‘Okay, let’s do that!’ So we are.”

When I came by this Sunday afternoon mom was in better spirits, enjoying her smokes and having a Coke. I tuned us into the Food Network. Bobby Flay was on. “I like him,” mom said, waving at the t.v. with her cigarette as if it were a wand. I might agree but on this occasion he was making a nasty fried seafood concoction in a competition with another chef which he ultimately and perhaps deservedly lost.

I mentioned another of his shows. He co-hosts it with Giada Di Laurentis. I cannot watch it because of her red lipstick and huge, glacially white smile. I become distracted by how out of proportion it is to the rest of her head and then by how out of proportion that is to her body. But in mom’s opinion I am not missing anything. “She can do about one step up from peanut butter and jelly,” mom said.

From food we went to the other end of things. Mom had some big success in the bathroom earlier Sunday. “I stopped up the toilet two times,” she said. “Sylvia had to unstop it,” she continued, “these big round things.” She shaped her index fingers and thumbs into an oval and held them up over her tray. “How did that happen?” I asked. “I don’t know,” mom said. “It just did, thank God.” I wonder what Granny would have written in her calendar.

July 26, 2018, Thursday

Yesterday began sunny enough. Around nine-thirty I went to visit mom. I thought I would change things up a little since usually I visit in the afternoon. But she and Anita were not home.

Her yard man Andrew was cutting the grass. When he saw me he hopped off his mower, snuggled his earphones around his neck, and came over to the gate to tell me that they had taken Missy to the vet.

Andrew and I bantered pleasantly for a bit. It’s been a while since we have seen each other. But as we talked part of my mind whirred against another part that kept seeing him as “jolly”—a burly man with a jiggling belly and ruddy cheeks, features enhanced by his South African accent—and I wished I could keep it more on track.

With the day’s heat and humidity already increasing I said good-bye and stopped at the vet. It’s on my way home. Mom and Anita were just coming out of a room with the vet and an assistant. Mom was dabbing the corner of her right eye with a tissue. Missy was not with them.

When mom saw me she burst into tears and dropped herself into the nearest chair. The vet and assistant stood by solemnly as mom cried and I leaned over to hug her. Missy’s spleen had ruptured overnight, probably from a tumor.

It’s not uncommon in a dog of her age, the vet said. It’s also not treatable and, according to the vet, a peaceful way to go although Missy was still alive when mom and Anita brought her. The vet euthanized her. “I wish they could do that for people,” mom said, twice.

After a few minutes Anita took mom to the bathroom. Mom shuffled out a little later, thanking the staff on her way for their attention and sympathy and then whispering to me, “I just made the biggest poop. It’s this new pill that Anita gave me. I don’t know what it is but I love it!”

God love mom, I thought—she loves her pills and she loves her poop—and at least she’s had some kind of relief today.

Mom took my hand and we went out the door to her car. I situated her in the passenger seat while Anita went around to the driver’s side. Mom began to cry again.

“I have no one to sleep with me anymore,” she said between small, hiccuping sobs. I handed her a tissue from her purse.

I put my hand on her wizened leg and looked at her slumped in the passenger seat, wearing her dark glasses and wiping her nose, her head bobbing. She wiggled against the back of the seat to get comfortable.

All of this, I thought, this unwelcome and undignified decline, and now we have this to deal with on top of it? More loss? More ache? More pain?

Yes, we do, and we will.

July 30, 2018, Monday

Today’s overcast, coolish, drizzly weather may have induced some rumination on its own but that may have happened anyway after spending time with mom over the weekend and watching her succumb each afternoon to sundowning, typical of people experiencing dementia and mourning.

Hospice has moved mom back from one notch before end-of-life but I have my doubts because of the depth of her depression. When the mood comes on in the middle of the afternoon, it’s paralyzing.

Mom gets weepy and weak and anxious. She can’t make any decisions. She says things like, “You are so lucky to be you” and “You have made me so happy” and answers, “A new body” when I ask her what she wants.

I sit next to her and rub her back or kneel on the floor and hold her hand and look into her watery blue eyes and wonder what the heck I can say or do and what is real. All of it?

Perhaps today feels more intense because it follows yesterday afternoon’s visit from Aunt Lee, Lee, and Walker. Walker came home from camp at the end of last week after he broke his left forearm there last Sunday morning playing Frisbee with some other boys.

Despite his cast and sling Walker was looking slim and summery and made an effort to engage mom in narrating her copy of the photo album that Lee had made of Walker and Margaret for Christmas last year. Mom lost interest after about five minutes and went quiet except for asking Sylvia for some Miralax.

The rest of us continued to talk, Walker giggling when he admitted he’s lousy at doing things with his right hand, and then after about ten minutes I looked at mom.

She was gazing past me, unfocused, without any expression or animation. She’s checked out, I thought, and depression has checked in and unpacked its bags and made itself at home.

I went over to talk to mom. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. There aren’t many options—stay, go to the bathroom, go to the sun room.

After considering them with her I joined her on the couch and started to rub her back. Everyone else said good-bye and left.

Mom and I relayed a lunch request to Sylvia—she asked me to ask her to bring her a sandwich and some chips. The food seemed to help. “Want a chip?” mom offered, passing me one over her left shoulder.

As she chewed I watched her ear bob up and down from the movement of her jaw, the mechanical efficiency of the action reminding me again of life’s basic functions. Chew, swallow, digest, sleep, repeat.

Who is this tiny, shrinking person? I left trying to reassure mom that her mood will pass. The sun sets. The next day, it rises. “Oh, okay, okay,” mom said. “I will call you a little later to see how you are.” “Oh, okay.” Sundowner syndrome sinks me too.

To read more about my time with my mother, please see Fast Food and Back Rubs, Cookies and Cigarettes, and Peace Plants and Passing Gas.

You may also support my work at Buy Me a Coffee.