I used to say, “If you see me getting smaller, you’ll know I’m leaving!” I thought I was so funny. The metaphor does not deal with the emotions involved with the “leaving or fading away” process. It brings to mind the movie Philadelphia. The song says something like this, “I was bruised and battered, didn’t know my own face … I was unrecognizable to myself … on the streets of Philadelphia.”
Here on the streets of Boulder, Colorado, I have a loved one who is fading away. She used to be vibrant and was told numerous times that she looked like Doris Day. Sure, she was shy ... but she still is today. Being larger than life to me at one time, she seems as if she is turning into a tiny bird that gets smaller each day.
She was a looker, believe me. Now when I see her face, I see pale blue veins in a face with skin so thin it could rip with just a wayward look. She recognizes me still but tells the nurse I am her Mom. It’s funny; I have felt like her mom all my life. There was a role reversal sometime when she divorced Dad. I guess after all the infidelity, beatings and black eyes, she needed a mom desperately. So I was hers.
We spend hours playing with her musical bears as if they were the dolls of my childhood. So not only is she fading away, but almost imploding from within. She has her own world now ... finally. It may not be what she wanted, but it is hers and hers alone. No one tells her reality anymore. No one can, she won’t listen.
Bravo! I say. But even as I am her biggest fan, I am also her worst enemy because I was given the audacious task of being her Durable Medical Power of Attorney. So sometimes when I call her, it feels as if her words are ripping my flesh apart. Yet, when I visit her, she acts as if the circus had just come to town!
Circus is the right word for the aging process. One day you can jump rope and the next you get your feet all tangled up and begin to disappear. I don’t want to have any regrets when she joins the angels. I want peace just like her from the madness of dementia. Why me I ask? Then the message I hear is, why not me?
The correct question is why her?
