March 2, 2021

I’m feeling the absence of my mother today. A weight sits like a stone in my chest, the muscles tightening around it in order to carry it.

When did she begin to fade? The changes began to be noticeable sometime around 2012 or so. Small things. But after her stroke in 2016 that led to her moving into an Independent Living apartment, maybe that is when she lost some of herself. Momma tried so hard to hang onto her mind. Her body was weakening, but she was still independently mobile. It was the dementia that was gaining strength.

It began before her 90th birthday, but was subtle enough no one caught it. But then, a week before her birthday she became ill and had to be admitted to the hospital. Then she began having multiple mini-strokes. They only seemed to affect her brain — her memory and capacity to process information.

But we had to move Mom to a health care facility. She was cooperative, but she wasn’t happy. Would any of us be? Not exactly the sort of home I’d choose if I had a choice. But, as Mom had always done, she “made the best of it.” She championed those less able than herself, spending time holding their hand, or talking to them. The staff called her their Mother Hen. But the strokes kept hitting. And Momma kept losing ground.

She became more of a child. She was anxious and afraid all the time. Medication only made her worse. She would settle when we visited, or when we took her out to church or for an afternoon “tea” at my sister’s or my home. But when our visits were too long between, we received reports concerning difficult behaviors. Like a kid at school acting out.

Then COVID-19 arrived and all the health care facilities closed their doors. For some time they did not even allow window visits. We were able to visit her on Zoom a few times with the help of the staff, but she didn’t like it and couldn’t understand why we were talking to her on the computer and not coming to see her. Finally they began allowing visiting on the phone through a window. It was the only way to “see” her…but by then Mom was so confused she could never understand how we could be outside her window and on the phone and why we couldn’t come in. Often she’d be convinced it was someone else on the phone and either turn her back on us at the window, or hang up the phone so she could talk to us.

In the early summer they began to allow us to sit on the patio, eight feet away from her, weather permitting. There was little to say and she would often fall asleep. She was now wheelchair bound. When had that happened? Only a few months previous she was still using a walker!

Twice Mom was hospitalized during this time. Once due to sudden violent behaviors completely out of character for her. The second time because her blood pressure and heart rate had fallen dangerously low and they couldn’t get it to come back up.

Looking back, I am glad of those hospitalizations. Those were the only two times in five months of lockdown that my sister and I got to sit with our mother and hold her hand and kiss her cheek and comb her hair and laugh and cry with her.

Mom passed away on September 6th. In those 5 1/2 months from the onset of COVID Lockdown, we completely lost our mother. The woman who took her last labored breath after being unconscious for several days, was in most respects not the woman I had taken to Christmas Mass at the Cathedral a mere 8 months prior. She was not the same woman I read stories to in early March. The woman who was laying in that bed that day in September was the ghost of the mother I’d known all my life.

My Momma was a victim of Lockdown.