Moving Mother

I haven't been tending to the blog much lately; other priorities have intruded. One of the big ones for me was moving my mother into an assisted-living facility for Alzheimer's patients. My friend Jeff and I drove to Nashville, Arkansas, last Sunday. From there, Jeff followed me to Houston in a U-Haul truck loaded with Mom's bedroom furniture. We unloaded Tuesday morning, then took off for home, arriving late Wednesday night. We drove over three thousand miles in eighty hours (and somewhere in those 80 hours, we ate slept, moved furniture, and visited with my sister and my Mom)!

Mom can't live on her own any more. The assisted-living place is where she needs to be. But moving her there means that she has been uprooted from a community where she has lived for 40 years--half her life. She's away from her church, her neighbors, her friends, and a wonderfully familiar little town. Now, she lives in a nice room in a pleasant facility among total strangers in a huge and confusing metropolitan area. That can't be helpful for an Alzheimer's patient who's struggling to maintain some semblence of a grip on reality. My head tells me that for her safety's sake, we made the right choice. But my heart hurts for what we've done to her. No matter how we try to explain the reasons--she has to be near one of her children, and that meant either Houston or Detroit--she just wants to "go home."

When your kids are little, sometimes you have to subject them to pain for their own good. I was never at peace with the look of betrayal on Alan and Caren's faces when they were getting shots at the doctor's office. There was no way to explain to them why I was allowing them to be hurt. And now we've inflicted a great hurt on Mom, and there's no way to explain it to her so that she can understand. My prayer is that somewhere amid all the blocked and miswired synapses, there's still the understanding that we love her, even when we make painful choices.