donât grab for food, face-first, head-on at the dinner table, there will be nothing left. No one is going to feed you.
****
My mother was never a great cook. A second-generation Irish American with close ties to County Wexford, she boiled everything gray. We used salt, pounds of it, as seasoning, and ketchup, poured liberally for supplemental flavoring, just to kill the taste. In the cluttered kitchen of our family home at 25 Brookdale Place in Rye, N.Y.ânot far from the Upper East Side of Manhattan where my mother grew upâthe pot roast simmered on Sundays from morning Mass until early evening. The hoary smell that wafted through the three-story stucco home still makes me nauseous today; Iâm sure the scent still emanates from the walls. You had to cut the pot roast with a chainsaw.
Mom used to call me a âlazy chewer,â but the meat was raw-hide-tough laced with fat. With all those mouths to feed, she knew how to stretch a dollar like it was Gumby.
As a teenager, I noticed her often standing at the kitchen window overlooking a corn patch with Rye Brook in the distance, meandering out to Long Island Sound. She was talking to herself, fully engaged in conversation. I wasnât sure with whom. At first, I thought it was a way of deflecting the stress of raising a brood of kids with a collective attention span of a young yellow lab. The disengaging increased: misplacing objects, loss of memory, poor judgment, and yes, the rageâwarning signs years later that I began noticing in myself.
After my father, a small man with the heady name of Francis Xavier OâBrien, had retired as director of pensions for Pan Am, and my mom left her teaching job, my parents sold the house in Rye in the early 1990s and moved to the Cape. They settled into our Eastham summer home, not far from Coast Guard Beach on the Cape Cod National Seashore, where daring life-saversonce plied the stormy surf to rescue shipwrecked sailors. The lure of the sea is intoxicating for my father. He had always sought retirement to Cape Cod and my mom, the dutiful wife, came along for the ride, ultimately a body and mind thrashing against the surf. Those early retirement years on the Cape were blissfulâan opportunity for me, living just two towns away in Brewster, to spend time with my folks. I felt privileged that I was the only sibling on the Cape, but with favor comes responsibility. My dad, in time, had severe circulation disorders requiring several life threatening operations, rendering him to a wheelchair. My mother progressively continued her cognitive decline, but fought off the symptoms like a champion to care for my father.
âI canât get sick,â she kept saying when all the siblings urged her to see a doctor. âI canât get sick,â as if saying the words made her whole.
Yet, she was sick, and she knew it.
The forewarning signs were textbook, but we were all in denial, as is often the case with dementia, for both the patient as well as the extended family. No one wanted to go there, particularly my dad, who feared a trip to the nursing home, a lights-out nightmare for him and my mom.
Over time, Mom began sticking knives into sockets, misplacing money, brushing her teeth with liquid soap, refusing to shower, not recognizing people she knew, hallucinating, and raging at others, often directly at me.
Unremittingly, she cared for my dad, always refusing to succumb to disability. She encouraged me in my own progression; she taught me how to fight, how to live with Alzheimerâs, how never to give into it. At times, we even took our Aricept together. I worked diligently at rebonding with my mother, restoring a relationship that had gone sour earlier, perhaps because she saw too much of my father in me. She knew and I knew, but we didnât talk about it much. I was a fatherâs son in every way; he was my idol. Yet, my mother became my role model in theresolute life she lived. St. Francis
****
My mother was never a great cook. A second-generation Irish American with close ties to County Wexford, she boiled everything gray. We used salt, pounds of it, as seasoning, and ketchup, poured liberally for supplemental flavoring, just to kill the taste. In the cluttered kitchen of our family home at 25 Brookdale Place in Rye, N.Y.ânot far from the Upper East Side of Manhattan where my mother grew upâthe pot roast simmered on Sundays from morning Mass until early evening. The hoary smell that wafted through the three-story stucco home still makes me nauseous today; Iâm sure the scent still emanates from the walls. You had to cut the pot roast with a chainsaw.
Mom used to call me a âlazy chewer,â but the meat was raw-hide-tough laced with fat. With all those mouths to feed, she knew how to stretch a dollar like it was Gumby.
As a teenager, I noticed her often standing at the kitchen window overlooking a corn patch with Rye Brook in the distance, meandering out to Long Island Sound. She was talking to herself, fully engaged in conversation. I wasnât sure with whom. At first, I thought it was a way of deflecting the stress of raising a brood of kids with a collective attention span of a young yellow lab. The disengaging increased: misplacing objects, loss of memory, poor judgment, and yes, the rageâwarning signs years later that I began noticing in myself.
After my father, a small man with the heady name of Francis Xavier OâBrien, had retired as director of pensions for Pan Am, and my mom left her teaching job, my parents sold the house in Rye in the early 1990s and moved to the Cape. They settled into our Eastham summer home, not far from Coast Guard Beach on the Cape Cod National Seashore, where daring life-saversonce plied the stormy surf to rescue shipwrecked sailors. The lure of the sea is intoxicating for my father. He had always sought retirement to Cape Cod and my mom, the dutiful wife, came along for the ride, ultimately a body and mind thrashing against the surf. Those early retirement years on the Cape were blissfulâan opportunity for me, living just two towns away in Brewster, to spend time with my folks. I felt privileged that I was the only sibling on the Cape, but with favor comes responsibility. My dad, in time, had severe circulation disorders requiring several life threatening operations, rendering him to a wheelchair. My mother progressively continued her cognitive decline, but fought off the symptoms like a champion to care for my father.
âI canât get sick,â she kept saying when all the siblings urged her to see a doctor. âI canât get sick,â as if saying the words made her whole.
Yet, she was sick, and she knew it.
The forewarning signs were textbook, but we were all in denial, as is often the case with dementia, for both the patient as well as the extended family. No one wanted to go there, particularly my dad, who feared a trip to the nursing home, a lights-out nightmare for him and my mom.
Over time, Mom began sticking knives into sockets, misplacing money, brushing her teeth with liquid soap, refusing to shower, not recognizing people she knew, hallucinating, and raging at others, often directly at me.
Unremittingly, she cared for my dad, always refusing to succumb to disability. She encouraged me in my own progression; she taught me how to fight, how to live with Alzheimerâs, how never to give into it. At times, we even took our Aricept together. I worked diligently at rebonding with my mother, restoring a relationship that had gone sour earlier, perhaps because she saw too much of my father in me. She knew and I knew, but we didnât talk about it much. I was a fatherâs son in every way; he was my idol. Yet, my mother became my role model in theresolute life she lived. St. Francis
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