I handed him five dollars. “Anything?” I asked.
“Yes, anything,” he said.
The guy had been sitting with his sign in front of the co-op for a few weeks now. Today was the first day that I wasn’t too compassion fatigued to read his sign and make eye contact with him. He was a nice young man wearing a sweatshirt from a local liberal arts college, smoking and listening to a podcast on his phone. Panhandling? I wondered. Research project? Performance art? Possibly all three. He reminded me of Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip with her psychiatric care stand. I wondered what it would be like to unburden myself of the hardest thing weighing on my mind today.
My mother is with my brother today. We had been scheduled to drive to St. Peter but on Wednesday mom called me at work to say that she would be helping my brother clean and fix up the house that he just bought so I should cancel our trip to see her sisters. I was a bit puzzled by this. Mom hasn’t cleaned her own home for quite a few years now. The last time she helped me with yard work she pulled up all of my perennials. When I noticed last week that her clothes and towels were getting dirty, I offered to start doing her laundry and she was thrilled. These are the things that I observe when I am with her. I have tried to talk with my brother about this but I get a blank stare when I do. I don’t think he sees the same things.
At lunch on Wednesday I left my brother a voicemail asking him to call me and wondered what to do. As luck would have it, I had planned to go to a support group after work for adult children who are caregivers of parents with dementia. The group was really good. I wish to observe the confidentiality of the specific things said, but in general it was a gigantic relief to talk with other human beings who think horrible things about their demented parents, who get weary having the same conversations over and over again at the dementia improv olympics, who wish they weren’t undermined so easily by family dynamics and old hurts, and who love and miss their parents so deeply that they show up to take care of the frightened, vulnerable, beautiful versions of their parents that they get each time they see them.
I told the group that my mom wanted me to drive her to my brother’s and help clean his house but I wanted to stand back, let my brother and my mom have time alone together and see what happened. The group said they thought this was OK.
On Thursday I texted my brother and asked him to call me. I asked if he was going to pick up mom and bring her back. “I guess,” he said. I called my aunt to cancel our trip and went to mom’s after work to set up her pills, buy groceries and exchange dirty laundry for clean. We picked out a pie for her to bring to celebrate my brother’s birthday with him. Then I went home and stood back.
Today I had breakfast with my kid before dropping them at a debate tournament, then had lunch at a fancy bakery and luxuriated in shopping alone at Target and my co-op. My phone was on and I thought of my mother and my brother. Part of me wondered if there was some magical way that neither one of them could see her Alzheimer’s and because of that they were having a wonderful time together. Maybe I was the only one who could see her Alzheimer’s. Maybe it disappeared when I wasn’t there. Maybe that’s why my mom cried whenever she saw me. If the world was that magical I might as well take the guy with the sign up on his offer to vent my grievance, my worry, my dearest wish to him and the universe. I handed him five dollars.
“I wish my brother would help me take care of our mother with Alzheimer’s,” I told him, feeling myself tearing up.
“That’s all you want to say? You’ve got a whole five minutes.”
I stood there and thought for a bit. “It makes me feel really sad and alone.”
I thought for a bit more. “That’s it. Thank you. I feel better.”
helloheidiland 