Everyone thinks the tie that binds us is love or blood, but I think it is memory.
Memories remind me of the fireflies I used to catch in a jar as a kid in Texas on a summer's evening. They made a bright lantern I used to find my way home. I would watch the fireflies with my mother, Madje, enchanted by their magical flashing on and off, like memories, recalled and forgotten. Then mama made me open the jar and we watched as they flew away, one by one, like memories that link our lives.
Now I watch as my mother experiences the melancholic voyage of memory loss. Like those fireflies, her memories are going, one by one, the victims of dementia.
Madje was a scientist who specialized in diseases caused by parasites. She did every kind of research and wrote important papers. She saved lives. Strong-willed, she ran away from home at 17 when her family wouldn't allow her to go to college. Determined, she paid her way through both a bachelor's and a master's degree. Logical about some things and eccentric about others, she was very practical. If a dress was still good enough to be worn, it would not be thrown out, no matter that it was out of style.
A Depression-era baby, she wasted nothing and minded every dollar, a long-time source of arguments between us. Once, when I scrambled eggs and left the remnants that stuck to the pan, I received a lecture that went on longer than it took me to eat the eggs. She even saved the tops of tin cans, claiming that they added metallic nutrients to the soil in her garden. A divorced woman raising an only child, she was strict.
The accumulated events in her life created a brilliant but complicated woman who became an eccentric recluse with age.
MOVING TO MIAMI
In 2004, after four years of flying to Austin for one week each month to buy food, pay bills, clean the house and visit, I moved her to Miami.
Suddenly, I was in charge. I moved her to a little jewel of an assisted living facility in the middle of Miami. After the initial realization of -- and anger about -- being moved, she blossomed. For one blissful year, we enjoyed tea parties, sitting in the beautiful gardens, days in the library. Despite the burdens on my finances and time, we grew closer. Then she began to wander.
I took her home with me and began searching for assisted living facilities equipped to deal with the special needs of people with dementia and Alzheimer's disease. I visited 50 places in the three-county area around Miami. One was a lock-down facility someone had recommended. I returned to my car and wept. I had Madje analyzed at a memory disorder center. It took us three moves before I found the right place and the right medications for her.
There we met Madeleina and Mariana from Romania and Celinda from Ecuador, who have become like sisters to me and daughters to my mother. They give Madje breakfast in bed, bathe and feed her, dress her and entertain her. They brush her long silver hair that looks like spun silk and put it into braids or add beautiful ribbons or combs.
We have been very lucky to find them. The search was not without angst and stumbles in the road. Always a willful and determined woman, Madje went through stages of anger, bliss, wandering, violent episodes of biting, scratching, kicking and screaming. She suffered physical and mental decline after two falls and two hip surgeries in the past several years.
I have been photographing my mother to help me get through this, trying to make new memories. I show her the photographs. For her, they are like postcards from distant lands. Each day, recollection is thrown into the sea we cross, making it easier for her to go.
It sounds cold to say it, loveless, in fact, but in some ways, dementia gave me the mother I always wanted. Madje changed as her brain withered. She became more reasonable, more childlike and kinder.
While she struggled with losing the core of her being, the worry fell from her face. She glowed. She was beautiful.
THE REAL MADJE
For the first time, I was able to look past my mother and see Madje, the real Madje, as a separate person, separate from me, and someone I did not want to lose.
The nature of mother-daughter relationships are either blissful or contentious and ours was the latter. I am, alas, my mother's daughter, an independent thinker. This streak of independence created a competition of wills, never allowing us to appreciate each other in the way we should have.
But dementia, that thief of self, also allows walls to tumble -- and as sad as that is in considering what is lost -- we can see one another as never before. It is a rebirth and a last chance to love.
I finally understood the events that might have befallen my mother as a child. Long-hidden secrets burst forth and broke my heart, but also helped me understand why she had been so fierce in her rules. These simply were not things revealed and discussed in ''good'' families and my mother wanted that so very much. Knowing what I now know might have helped me to be a better daughter then. Now, I have a chance to make up for that lost time.
There are other gifts, too: the gift of time and calmness, of finally knowing my mother as never before, of being able to care for her and her needs with a full heart and no regrets. The gift for which I am most grateful is just lying next to Madje on her big bed by the window where lace curtains are blown by an incoming sea breeze. I hold her as she once held me. She is my baby. The curtains are like Madje's memory, moving back and forth, lost until a glimmer of something returns, a catch of light, a sigh of wind.
How can she be so beautiful now, even as her brow is knit with confusion? It is excruciating to watch as she disappears before my eyes. With each day she nears the horizon in this voyage she will have to finish alone, leaving me with memories that I can use to make a lantern of fireflies to find my way back home.
