This too shall pass, my mother used to say. This too shall pass. Sunny weather and rain, good times and bad. At first I found it a sterile saying. A platitude. And then I realized its power for hope and held it to myself when I felt lost and afraid. Much later I learned that it also holds within it a warning not to rely on the good moments remaining forever. They too are fleeting. This thought holds within it both halves of all possibility. All this shall pass. Someday, it will be different. Not good, not bad. Not worse, not better. Just different.

Things are so different now then they have ever been before that I am truly, for the first time in my life, fearing the future. I never did. The future always held promise and potential. Now I am scared of it, fearing it holds sadness and loss. Part of this is the slow evaporation of my mother. To watch her dying by infinitely small degrees (because Alzheimer’s is a disease — and one that will kill her eventually) and to not yet be free to talk about it, to look ahead and know that before this mourning can possibly end there will be terrible, terrible times, makes the future seem bleak beyond all description.

Yet this too shall pass. All things will. And I am both hopeful and afraid.

Yet it is astonishing to me (which it clearly should not be) that the more I talk about my mother’s plight, the more people I discover who have been or who are in the same boat. The comfort that brings is huge. That this is not some untrodden, silent path but a road many of us are walking together. (Sorry about that random, unprovoked metaphor change. It’s like the obligatory half-tone key change in an eighties ballad.) I suspect, since something like half of people over 85 have some degree of Alzheimers, that it is a road that more of us will land on in one way or the other. This may be scary — but it is also connecting. What my mother is going through, what her family is going through, is well-trodden territory. All around me are stories, advice, compassion, connection –

And this is why, in the end, I blog. To connect. And I am so very very grateful that all of you are there to connect to.

So in normal life (ha!) I’m much better at tuning out the wants-and-needs-of-others static than I was a child. And I no longer have to feel crabby just because everyone in the house is crabby. I can go be cheerful somewhere else. Or vice-versa.

But whenever I’m with my mother these last few months, something odd has been happening. I feel foggy, forgetful and absent. I feel nervous and strange. I forget the names for things. I lose my keys. I wander in a purposeless daze around the house. It might be simply the stress of facing up to what’s happening. But what it feels like is empathetic dementia. Which is almost as scary as the real thing and makes me want to do ten crossword puzzles every day.

Empathetic dementia. That could have been a whole episode on Star Trek. Where someone you love is losing her marbles, so you spill all of yours out of the bag and watch them all roll around on the floor together.

“See!” he said. “I knew it was Francesca. Your mother said it was Christina.”

My mother picked up the other phone.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Of course you’re Christina,” she said. “You’re the one with the two little ones.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m Francesca, the one with the two little ones.” I laughed a bit, trying to make light of it. “But I answer to anything, really. Hey you is fine.”

My mother laughed a little too. And hung up. I finished with my dad and hung up my end.

Then I sat in the chair, holding the phone. And what I really wanted to do was call my mother, to tell her that my mother didn’t know who I was all the time and that it made me feel sad. I wanted her to comfort me, to tell me that it would be all right and that she would be there for me.

How stupid, I thought, as I clenched my hands around the phone, keeping myself from dialing her number. Knowing she wasn’t really there any more to answer my call.

It’s not great, to be honest. I mean, there’s no actual violence being threatened but yesterday I succumbed entirely to the immense psychic onslaught and spent the whole day in a black, bleak pit of unassailable despair. It wasn’t until I blogged at myself (formerly known as writing in a journal) that I found out why and now things are a bit better.

And oh, the stories I could tell you but that’s all we have time for, folks. Send thoughts of healing calm this way. Between moving, the crap news about my mother and this, I’ve run down the emotional well-being tank quite considerably.

Yet chaos has order, is beautiful. There are patterns so perhaps we do not so much impose patterns on chaos as subtly discern, subconsciously or not, the existing pattern, latch onto it limpet-like. Perhaps there is order to be found and all we do is find it.

Not that I think that’s what I’m doing now, exactly, but it makes it sound better than simple grasping at proverbial straws. Watch this:

Instead of returning to England (or staying in Philadelphia) when Ed finished his PhD, we moved to (south) central PA, a place neither of us had ever intended to go, and which I actively resisted going to. We traded in a smallish, but much-loved Philadelphia house for larger house in a small town, farther from my parents but only by an hour.

A week after we move, my mother is diagnosed with Alzheimers (at long last). She has clearly gone downhill quickly in the last few weeks and suddenly what was a niggling worry is now a family crisis.

If I had just moved to England, I would have been distraught past all imagining. How would I have managed to be present, to help, to support, to just deal. Clearly, staying in the United States for the time being was a good idea, even meant to be.

AND (I only just managed to reframe this one) we have not seen my mother very much these last few months because visiting her in NY had become stressful and unpleasant. Without understanding why, I knew it was too much for my parents to have the children visiting. So I asked my father at the end of last week what we should be doing. Should we, I asked, come and visit more regularly?

No, he said. We need to come see you. It’s better for your mother.

And now I live in a place that they can have their own room. Where I can put cable television into their room for my dad. In a house that can absorb two more people without cracking. In a place that has a slower pace, where my mother and dad can walk to the grocery store and to get a coffee and come back to sit in the garden. And I only live in a such a place, we could only have afforded such a place, because we moved to a small town. In Philadelphia, there was no spare room and the house felt crowded as soon as they arrived. And it was down the Jersey Turnpike, which my dad hated driving on.

So maybe that’s why I’m where I am right now. Or at least, it makes where I am make more sense to me in the wider context of my (rather than just Ed’s or the children’s) life.

Order from the chaos. A reason for what seemed not right. It makes it a little easier to be where I am. It makes what’s happening to my mother (which is its own brand of unsensical and chaotic and unreasonable) a tiny bit easier to bear. That I live in a house they will be happy to come to. That I am a drive, not a plane ride away. Maybe right now I am where I need to be.

(Except that it’s even easier to write that last sentence because I’m in England on holiday right now and as happy as a pig in mud, I tell you. I did mention we were going, didn’t I? Oh. Oops. Well, we’re in England for the first time in years and it is insanely good to be here. But it will be okay to be home again too.)

For that reason, and for many others, right now is a fallow time for me. Unlike the summer green all around, my inner fields are dark and frozen. Words don’t come easily. No accidental poetry, no glimmers of new ideas. I don’t want to knit. I read, but don’t write. I plod, not dance. It’s hard.

I want to write that I believe that fallow times are necessary, that fields and sleeping seeds draw strength from the rest a long, cold winter grants them. That the rest is necessary to grow once spring comes. That the plants will grow better for not being forced before their time.

I want to believe this. And perhaps I do, somewhere under the cold crust of my winter-sleeping self. But right now, I just feel barren. I feel like spring will not come back.

But that is the lie of every winter. That somehow we need to beg the sun to return, that if we don’t beg hard enough, it won’t come back, that the winter will stay. But the sun returns, almost whether we will it or no. As my mother would say, has said a hundred times: This too shall pass.

All things pass, sun and rain, snow and warm, good and ill. All things pass.

I learned that many of these fears are only of what MIGHT happen. I might fall off the bicycle and hurt myself if I don’t hold on. A dog might bite me. No one might like me. The ghosts might scare me, the oogieboogies take me.

I remember though, when I realized that one of my fears, one of my strongest fears, was not a might. Not a maybe. It was only a when. One day, my parents will die. One day, I will lose my mother and my father. I was young when this came to me, that one day, without doubt (unless I died first) I would have to survive my parents’ death. It was like I was suddenly breathing desert air. Hot and dry, my breath burned in me and it was as if the world hardened around me. Suddenly all my fears were both inconsequential, and more powerful. My fears were not just imaginary bugbears for me to overcome. What I feared, might be. Would be. And I would someday have to deal.

My mother is not dying. She is not dead. She is, however, disappearing. She has early-onset dementia. And I am losing her. Have been losing her now for a few years and now it’s clear that she is not coming back. And the air I am breathing burns me.

Nor a wreath. Nor stockings. Nor a creche. Nor probably even a poinsettia. Nor nothing.

Really. Nothing. No sparkly lights. No tinsel. No fa la la. No dreidels, even. No Yule log. No gingerbread. No hammentaschen. No carolling.

“What do you think,” asked my father, cheerfully.
“I think that’s crazy,” I said bluntly.

Honestly, sometimes I wonder how they spawned me. It’s not like I’m always beautifully crafty like some bloggers I love. But I do love holidays, especially this one. I love the mulled wine and the lights on people’s house (although not the inflatables). I love carolling and going for walks and digging out the Christmas books and watching the specials and the whole thing. The one gap in my whole Christmas fervour (well, other than the crazy consumerist thing) is a belief in Santa.

You will not be surprised (considering the above) to hear that I never believed in Father Christmas. My sisters and I were never under any illusions as to who filled our stockings. I probably broke the hearts of more than one other child in my confident and cheerful disbelief in all things Santa. Yet I love stories and pretend and magic and fairy dust and think there should be more such things in our live. So when I had children of my own, I was sort of neutral.

Ed believed in Father Christmas, although I suspect it was a solid, unflappable sort of philosophical acceptance of the possibility of such a figure rather than a raging belief. He’s not a raging sort of person. But he thought it would be nice and I thought it would be nice if we left Father Christmas a mince pie and a large sherry which I could then consume to bolster the wrapping process. So Father Christmas fills stockings in our house (coming in through the keyhole) and the presents under the tree are from friends and family.

It’s a comfortable compromise although I think Daniel already suspects that it’s just a nice story. He seems fine with that. His world is filled with nice stories and I’m going to keep it that way. Perhaps someday he will blog irritably about his mother’s preoccupation with mistletoe and holly and how he longs for a quiet weekend. That’s fine. I hope that I will notice and respect that when it happens. Right now, though, I want to make the house smell of Christmas. And to take a deep breath and let my parents be their crazy selves and for that to be okay.

More to the point, it is my mother who is unhappy, who feels like a non-person, who is patently not making the transition from work to retirement well, whose memory is slipping. She is disappearing before my eyes and neither I nor my sisters quite know what to do about it. She’s very private, has never wanted to talk about how she feels and yet is quite clearly depressed and getting worse. And my father is oblivious. The wedding has really thrown all this into such painfully clear relief. It seems to bring her no joy. Which is so sad.

Part of me completely wants to walk away. My parents are adults, for gawd’s sake. They have been adults longer than I’ve been alive. They’ll deal. That’s what adults do, deal. Hell, I’m having to deal. I’ve got plenty to deal with over here trying to be my own adult when what I really really want is some sort of UberMother who knows some answers and makes really good tea.

Another part of me knows that I can’t walk away. That life is a cycle of caring for and being cared for. Of looking after and being looked after. Independence, self-reliance are myths. Unless I am about to go into the Vermont woods somewhere and build my own cabin out of wood I chopped down and eat bear steaks and roots and berries (and so on), then I am part of the web of family, village and community. I am connected. And I want to be, very much, despite my occasional (okay, daily) desire to run, run like the wind.

So I’ll deal. And as soon as I deal, I’m going to find (as I am already finding) that there will be lots of people who also want to deal and we will deal together.

But just to be clear, if Ed left bits of paper on every conceivable surface, like my father does (which he wouldn’t), there would be strong words. There might even be cursing. And we would deal. And also to be clear, my child is bright, but she’s not yet up to reading Douglas Adams (from whence the very useful image of the Somebody Else’s Problem Field (SEPF) comes). Someday I’ll explain to you my theory of SEPF and healthy relationships.