Stories from Caregivers: Mary from OREGON
OR
Mary
FROM OREGON
I am very blessed to have had the very best of mothers. Her name was Mona. She and I had always been the best of friends, even when I was a teen. We had gone through some very difficult experiences which had drawn us very closely together. She was my very best friend. I could talk to her about anything. As I got older, she gave me the ultimate compliment of feeling that she could also talk to me about anything that was on her mind. After my marriage broke up, I invited Mom to live with me. She was widowed and life was easier on both of us once we pooled our resources. On election day 1996, I was eager to vote, but something was wrong. Mom could barely speak. She kept restarting her sentence, but she couldn't finish. I knew she'd had a stroke. They ran tests and kept her in the hospital for several days. Then I brought her home. At first she tried to continue with the quilting she loved, but her tremor was so much worse she wasn't happy with the quality of her work. She then asked that I donate most of her fabrics to the Senior Center. Her inability to speak made us both feel isolated. We had always talked so much about every topic on the news and all the family news. It is difficult to have one-sided conversations. Mom became very incontinent, which embarrassed her terribly. She sometimes took her soiled underthings down the hall to the garbage so I wouldn't see them. She wore incontinence pads; she felt the underwear was too expensive. It wasn't until just before she died that I found out that we could get her incontinence supplies for free because she was on Medicaid. Nobody told us what was available to her. Her incontinence was serious enough that I had to frequently clean the carpets. I did finally get someone to sit with Mom for 3 hours a week while I did the grocery shopping. Prior to that, my sister drove 60 miles down the mountain. Not always possible in winter. I couldn't leave Mom alone because she felt she could still cook and do things that she really couldn't. She also kept falling; I couldn't pick her up. The doctor recommended that Mom go into a nursing home temporarily so she could get regular physical therapy. He hoped that might help her stay upright. Mom chose which facility she wanted to go into and I took the bus to visit her every day, Monday through Friday. I spoke with a staff member on Saturday. She said Mom was working on a quilt! She was trying to talk to people to teach them about quilting. Mom loved teaching people about sewing and quilting. She said Mom seemed quite happy and content. She died that night. I still miss her.
