The DWP

   

    It had seen better days. 

    A few neatly folded Kleenexes;

    a white porcelain jar with a yellow metal cap that read Carmex Lip Balm;

    a worn Emory file; 

    a brown leather wallet empty except for an expired Wisconsin Driver’s License, a Medicare card and two photos revealing towheaded, blue-eyed girls were housed together in the main compartment. 

    The side pocket with a broken zipper closure held a rattail comb;

    a shimmery-white tube of Vaseline Intensive Care hand-cream;

    and, a clear plastic container filled with green Tic Tac Candies. 

    A small, more secure inner pouch was home to an empty keyring with a General Motors emblem etched into it. 

    These items were the sole contents of a cheap, dirty, obviously once white purse.

    By 2001 Mom was living in what is clinically and coldly referred to as the middle stage of Alzheimer’s Disease.  That statement still makes me cringe to look at in print.  It is about as prejudiced as a sentiment can be – suggesting that a group of individuals who lived full and diverse lives are now so identical because of disease that they all fit into a descriptive box simply labeled “middle stage.”   Of course the reality was that she indeed had all of the symptoms and often desperate behaviors accompanied by dementia that predictably happen when someone is living in the middle stage of this affliction. 

    Mom was desperately clinging to a prop – a security blanket, as it were.  If that dirty-white-purse was out of her sight, it caused  her panic. 

    That DWP represented an era of when life made sense.  

    The ability to reason and focus,

    to recall episodic memories,

    recognize a face and match it with a name,

    to plan and dream had all been a vital part of her life for over sixty-years before disease struck. 

    The only thing familiar in a world filled with unrecognized faces, confusion coupled with myriad opportunities to make mistakes and fail, was that DWP.   She clutched and protected her DWP with all the strength and courage she could muster as she would secure the worn strap into its cradle atop her left shoulder.  She tucked the DWP under her arm, tight against her breast, like a mother hen does with her endangered chicks.     

    I recognized her vacant stare – it was like an omen signaling that the day was drawing near when I, as an unrecognized strange man, would probably frighten her.  My intimate approach of calling her Mom would cause her to divert her fear-filled eyes away from contact with me and embrace that familiar DWP;  grasping it tightly would promote calm when a unknown man was calling to her in a threatening and in an all too inappropriate way by naming her Mom.  “Mom, it’s me!”  Oh how I dreaded that inevitable phase when she would forget giving birth to and raising me.   “Where is my purse?!?!?”

    As a professional who had studied Alzheimer’s Disease and as one who had met literally dozens of people living with the affliction that cruelly and determinedly destroys the brain, like a Pac-Man icon, cell by cell – region by region, I knew firsthand of the importance of props.  Props that promote a perception of safety, calm and familiarity in a nightmarish existence consumed with confusion and panic.  I had trained staff and counseled families on the merits of a familiar object always kept within sight for a person living with dementia.  However, as a son – the unprofessional, I was embarrassed by the DWP.

    Perhaps the DWP could be replaced and she would learn to recognize a new and improved, better-suited purse, I foolishly tried to convince myself.  A purse that would reflect the good taste of the meticulous person, that she used to be, would be so much more appropriate.   It would make me feel more comfortable.  I knew it was an idea created by pride and faulty logic, but emotionally I wanted to get rid of it.  Totally destroy it.  The DWP’s presence was telling.  That purse alerted complete strangers to the fact that all might not be well.  It may as well have been a sandwich-board hanging from her neck by a noose advertising in bold red letters “something’s run amok with me!” 

    I am the master of keeping secrets hidden away in my closet.  That little DWP was revealing one of them.  And it was a big one.  I couldn’t, for the life of me, keep that door shut.  “Something has gone terribly wrong – Mom is missing!” screamed the DWP merely by its presence. 

    It represented security to Mom;

    but to me the DWP indicated that she was losing battle after battle.     

    Alzheimer’s was winning the war. 

    There was nothing that I could do. 

    No one could do a thing. 

    The consequences were imminent. 

    That closet door was blown wide open – hinges broken and its key lost forever. 

    I detested that truth-revealing, loud-mouthed so and so;  that little dirty-white-purse!

Ten years later:  2011   

    Oh how I miss that DWP.  I savor the era when Mom would hold eye contact, talk and had the cognition to look for her purse.  In 2001 she often recognized me.  At times she knew that I was her son and that she gave me my name.  There were moments when she could stand up tall on her own two feet, focus her eyes onto a connection between our souls, walk toward me, hug me and clearly enunciate in a confident voice “I love you Keith.” 

    This disease has taken Mom away.  We have her fetal-positioned body – the keeper of her beating heart, wheezing lungs and withering brain.  On rare occasions, upon hearing her name called, she will raise her eyebrows; with eyelids remaining closed.  Usually Dad’s voice is the only stimuli that will induce a response or reaction. When she does open her once green eyes, they reveal that they are no longer windows.  They are empty like an abandoned store’s plate glass display – clouded over with cobwebs and dust; useless.  They don’t focus on still or moving objects, but will blink if something gets too close.  Instincts are about all that she has in tact these days.

    Back in 2006, on a road trip, Mom had an unusually alert day.  She was stringing words into sentences and some even made sense.

    “Mom, do you know who I am?”

    “Sure I know you.” She grinned.

    “What’s my name?”

    “Lois.” She answered proud as can be.

    “That’s right, Mom.  I love you.”

 I knew that Aunt Lois, the person Mom was closest to her entire life was, in her world of confusion, her way of saying I know you, you’re family.  I’m fairly certain that Mom had forgotten that she had two sons and that I was one of them.  Lois.  The name that represented someone who loved her and someone that she loved in return.  I was Lois.  And, that was close enough for me! 

   

Mom is missing, but all search and rescue efforts were called off sixteen years ago when we heard the prognosis:  a life sentence of ten to twenty years.

    Solitary confinement.  

    No early parole.  

    Not even time off for good behavior. 

    Grin and bear it.

Mom’s eighty-year old soul is alive within her. 

    No rest-in-peace uttered.

    No closing hymn sung.

    No benediction given. 

    No pipe-organ postlude played.

    No formal celebration of her life. 

    No funeral procession to the cemetery. 

    No grave-digger employed. 

    No final goodbye appropriate. 

I do mourn.  I mourn the passing of that dirty-white-purse and live with the loss - often longing for its return.

"Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives.  Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid."  Book of John, 14:27