I happened upon a movie called Still Alice. A college professor was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's, and tried to hide it for as long as she could. Eventually, Alice's family and boss realized, and she was forced to redefine her life with new limitations. This was
painful.
It was moving to see how her husband supported her, even as he grappled with the loss of her brilliant mind. He got angry when Alice went on a run without her phone. Really, his upset was just fear wearing a mask. He hired nurses to care for Alice, partly because it was too hard to watch her demise.
At one point Alice made a plan for her own death, should she reach a point of forgetting things like dates, and names. At
the last moment, her shaky hands dropped the pills, just as a caregiver walked through the front door.
I am grateful to see the reality of how commitments to each other keep us from floating out to sea. We step into marriage, and motherhood with rosy images of shared meals and sitting by the fire under a quilt. But woven under and within those blessings, there are dark days, when we don't like each other, or ourselves very much.
A
scene from my mother's last days in November 2006 still echos in my mind. I wrote about it for her memorial service.
A kindly gentleman with a stethoscope and spectacles leaned over her withered body and gave her a test she did not pass.
"Mrs. Soneson, who is the President?" he asked.
After a long pause, she said, "Ford."
This is a woman who felt as much delight in
watching political conventions as most people find in a Caribbean cruise. She thought it was an intense honor to have been born on the 4th anniversary of women getting the vote.
'"What day is today?" he went on.
"October?" she answered tentatively.
"Marjorie, what is 20 minus 3?" the doctor asked.
She looked worried. The question was clearly of
great importance, and she struggled with the effort to please him. We waited a painfully long time, but she couldn't form the words. I felt the heaviness of my mother's sense of failure.
The funny thing is, those questions are precisely the territory that her grandson has covered. Benjamin knows every president including middle names, which ones had beards, who wasn't married and who was in office when the Titanic sank. As for what day it
is, Benjamin recently told me the date of every Wednesday in September, October and November (he likes Wednesdays). Numbers, too, are safe in his care. Many mornings the first words out of his mouth are, 'Four 314's are twelve hundred and fifty-six,' or, 'Nine cubed is 729.'
Those earth-shattering facts may have slipped from my mothers' memory, but that's all right. Benjamin caught them and is holding tight. Besides, their absence from
Marjorie's mind leaves room for even more exciting things.
There's a story from The Doctrine of Faith that describes a test Midge is taking even as we sit thinking of her. It describes how an angel welcomed a newcomer to the spiritual world.
With the one who was in faith not separated from charity the angel spoke as follows:
"Friend, who are you?"
"I am a reformed
Christian."
"What is your doctrine and the religion you have from it?"
"Faith and charity."
"These are two things?"
"They cannot be separated."
"What is faith?"
"To believe what the Word teaches."
"What is charity?"
"To do
what the Word teaches."
"Have you only believed these things, or have you also done them?"
"I have also done them."
The angel of heaven then looked at the person and said,
"My friend, come with me and dwell with us."
I think she passed.
