Grief in plain sight…

It’s happening again. Deeper into the abyss. Darker now. And with it comes a new wave of grief.

Some days I feel like I’m fighting so hard. To stay present. To stay engaged. To be grateful for what I do have. To smile. To feel a real sense of happiness. And yet a lot of times lately, my grief just won’t let me be. It nags at me. Pulls on me. Weighs me down. I show up at work with a smile. I interact with friends. I swim, I cycle, and run with great vigor. On the surface, I seem fine, great even, yet my world continues to go off its axis. I grieve with no marker of a definable moment.

And that is a lonely place to be.

Every time she loses more of herself, I feel different too. I feel myself changing all over again. It’s hard to explain how it feels but I guess the closest I could get would be to describe it like my insides dying off? Singed from within. I don’t know if these parts of me will come back or there will just be this void. Hard to tell. When she loses, I lose too. We aren’t losing the same things, but the loss is there all the same.

She’s losing her speech now. More sounds, less words.

It’s not easy to watch. And it’s even harder because I haven’t been able to hold her since early March. She reaches out for me during our window visits but I can’t touch her.

Torture.

And while I feel that I have adapted so much better to the torture and endless grief, at times it rears its ugly head and reminds me that it’s still there. Always here, invisibly so. My grief, like with so many other caregivers, isn’t worn. You can’t see it. There isn’t a sign on my forehead that says “I’M IN A LOT OF PAIN!” I do wonder though – when people see me or talk to me, can they sense it? Is it coming off of me or have I gotten good at hiding it?

The reality is that my mother and I haven’t had substantive conversation in months…maybe longer. We will never have a conversation anchored in this reality ever again. And sometimes the reality of that is overwhelming and mind-boggling. I will never have a coherent conversation with my mother ever again. She’s sitting right in front of me, but I can’t talk to her in the here and now.

How is that even possible?

My time with her is spent entering her world. And nothing in her verbal world is recognizable any longer. For a while it was just sentences not connecting, but now less and less speech is expressed. It’s silly sounds in place of words that have been erased.

Often times I am not recognizable to her in the world she lives in now. I can’t reach her sometimes so I pretend to be whoever she thinks me to be. I am familiar to her and significant but she doesn’t know what being someone’s mother is, or being someone’s daughter. Those are just words that people try to connect to her and she agrees, but more to be agreeable, not because she actually understands that she is someone’s mother. It is all a blur. A great big mess.

I have acknowledged for some time now that my mother, as I knew her, is gone. My new normal with her shifts so quickly that I hardly ever have the time to adapt gracefully, let alone at all, so I constantly feel like I’m playing catch up. Watching. And crying in my car. I do that quite a bit.

It is so odd how there is a finality and yet her life is not final. I am at a loss. It’s hard to make sense of it. Because Alzheimer’s doesn’t make sense. And as a result, I find a lot of times – I don’t make sense.

How can I be motherless while I continue to love and advocate for this sweet and funny woman who needs my love now perhaps more than ever?

Motherless.

Parentless.

And yet while I try to make space in my psyche for this deep sadness of having lost my mother, at least on this level of consciousness, life keeps moving and there’s no outward marker of this tremendous loss.

But I feel it. All the time. And I am feeling it strongly now.

Oh well…Onward.