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"She's so cute!" the kids often said, watching Sallie struggle with her uncooperative spoon or push her glass around on the tray as though it might be a toy car. She tossed her shining curls and rolled her big brown eyes expressively to emphasize whatever she was trying to say in her own brand of childish gibberish, captivating one and all. Everything was funny to her, and her lilting laughter brightened all our lives when she became a member of our household. Lovingly dubbed "Silly Sallie" by our "adopted" teenage daughter, Debbie, she was our entertainer at mealtimes, and her impish grin said she enjoyed being the center of attention.

Sallie was my 84-year-old mother, a victim of Alzheimer's disease. As her brain deteriorated, her memory slipped slowly back toward childhood. Truly growing younger all the time, Sallie seemed to be about a year old mentally, gradually forgetting all the skills she ever knew; speech, walking, feeding herself. Finishing a meal without help was a rare accomplishment for her, and more often than not, she fed herself only bread or finger foods. A spoon was only a toy for playing in her glass of iced tea. Feeding her could have been compared to jumping rope, timing each bite at just the right moment to catch her mouth open. Treated as a game, it was relatively easy. Otherwise, impossible.

When her speech first started to go, a sentence begun quite normally would disintegrate into a babble of strange sounds, which was embarrassing and frustrating for the short time that she was able to recognize the absence of recall. But this type of incident soon became the norm, and I teased her about speaking in her personal "unknown tongue." Thank goodness, her beautiful sense of humor remained intact for the duration.

Three years before, she could hold a reasonably understandable conversation. Now a combination of words that made sense were very rare, a "yes" or "no" sometimes questionable. More and more now her eyes bespoke an awareness of another time and place of existence that we could not share, where there was no need for spoken words.

Sallie required lifting from bed to wheelchair, now that she had forgotten how to stand. When I tried to help her to her feet, she simply picked them up like a child being lifted into her mother's arms. Unable to understand or follow directions, she was much like an infant in every way except that she seldom cried. She was very easy to care for, easy to please, relatively free from pain. Although she might not have remembered who I was, she always had a big smile for me, and that mischievous twinkle in her eyes.

When there was very little left to forget, I sometimes wondered - What next? Will she forget how to chew and swallow? move her limbs? breathe? But with whatever came, there was always a way to cope. Nature left to itself is often miraculously simple. After trying the few aids offered by medical science, we were inclined to trust even more in the Maker of the complex combination of atoms called the human body, and entrusted to him this one who had been so much to so many for so long.

On the morning of June 6, 1980, Sallie forgot to wake up.

Cora Gail Trent
www.cgtrent.com