Sat 3-26-16
I was pondering what to get my mom for her birthday. Each year is more sad and different as her Alzheimer’s dementia progresses. I would call it “evil” progress if the word wasn’t almost meaningless to me.
Books are out of the question. Crossword puzzle books (easier and easier) are good and quickly consumed but she has tons of those and she likes buying them herself, during every single grocery and gas station stop in fact. In addition my parents have too much household crap that they can’t get rid of.
So I settled once again on fresh cut flowers. She delights in flowers, plants and gardens. Life for her is increasingly a succession of heres and nows, an abiding present. What’s important is that when she looks around she sees pretty, blooming things, and smiling faces, no matter to what degree she recognizes those faces or can put a name to them.
Her joy is quick and evident, but it must be derived from the ephemeral and not from the “stock-taking” and the integration of a lifetime of experiences that other older people enjoy.
Nevertheless those quickly fading flowers represent her most enduring bequest to me: she imparted a love of green growing things, of living things, of nature. This is the memory of generations, the transmission of a disposition and of a mental and emotional outlook on things.
I will never walk in a prairie without thinking of her as a little girl in North Dakota. I will never walk through a garden without stopping to dwell and think of her tending her own garden, year after year, as I grew up. Her brain cannot keep its integrity, it cannot endure like a rock. But there is another way to achieve permanence: through constant renewal. Although she is losing her memories, they will persist in me and in others who knew her.
Included: I finally fashioned a decent soda can stove.
pseudoisaac 