The Beginning of the End?
A personal essay By Carolyn Banks
The other day I had a tree-trimmer, Jared, come to give me an estimate. A lot of branches had grown so much they were scraping the roof. One of the branches was pulling the screen on the gutters up.
So okay, Jared and I are tromping around in the back of the house and he says, “The cutting is going to be easy, but it’s going to be hard getting the cut branches out of here.”
My house has a completely fenced yard, four-foot tall pickets with the only entrance a gate about three feet wide in the front of the house. Ha! But it’s not the only way in and out! Having experienced trouble getting things through that narrow gate, we, years ago, cut a panel out and put hardware on it so that we can remove the entire portion of fence—about six feet of it. Of course, none of this is visible. Best of all, the space that the removal of the panel creates is right on the driveway.
So I say to Jared, “Follow me. I’ll show you a secret.” He begins following me to the front. Halfway there, I stop. What were we going to see? I hope it comes back to me, but it doesn’t. My mind is totally blank. I actually have to turn to Jared and say, “What was I going to show you?”
“A secret,” he says. Then I remember and show him exactly that. “Oh, well,” I tell him, forcing a laugh. “That’s what happens when you’re over 80.” I am 82 and now I’m shaking with fear inside. Sure, I’ve had the occasional “senior moment” we oldsters joke about, like going into a room and forgetting what you went in there to get. This feels different. I don’t know how I know, but, for sure, it’s different.
My mother had dementia. For a long time, she fooled people because she had a little recitation she would make that made her sound normal. If you weren’t in touch with her for long, you didn’t know that she’d repeat it and repeat it. It was all she had, a schtick about feeding the song birds and warding off the pigeons. She fed potato bread. Only potato bread, and some of the recitation was about that.
My mom, like me, a widow, lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I live in Bastrop, Texas. One morning I got a phone call from a hospital. My mother had been taken there. She had been out on the streets at three in the morning looking for potato bread because she had run out.
She was really lucky. She saw a house with its light on and knocked on the door, asking to use the bathroom. The people inside let her in, but they realized she needed help. They also had the good sense to call the police, who took her to the hospital.
When I flew to Pittsburgh and got to the hospital, I was shocked at how disheveled she looked. My mom had been a clothes horse. When I was growing up, every closet in our house was filled with her clothes and my father and I had to hang our things in garment bags in the basement!
There was a hearing and my mom was declared incompetent. I moved her to an assisted living place here in Bastrop. I was surprised that they took her, but, although her mind was gone, her body was hale and hearty. Some of the things that happened were funny. For example, my mother’s room had a telephone and it had to be removed because my mother kept calling moving companies to take her back to Pittsburgh.
I would go to visit her and we’d watch “Wheel of Fortune” together. Sometimes she’d tell me she had a daughter who lived nearby but who never came to visit.
Now, after the incident with Jared, I am wondering if something like that is in store for me.
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