Fiftieth wedding anniversary gift

My mother died in pieces. The process began in June 1987, before her fiftieth wedding anniversary, when she suffered a "cerebral accident." Though nothing showed up on the CAT-scan, a spinal tap showed telltale blood in the fluid.

Walking into that hospital room, I find my mother strapped to the bed, moaning "Help me! Help me!" over and over; my sister says that she has been repeating these same two words for forty-eight hours. Can this frail and shrunken body, this face disfigured by fear and pain belong to the same woman who loomed so large and protective during my childhood? I float back to my first memory of the two of us: We are stepping off the gray curb at the crosswalk. The light is green. My hand is in her hand, the hand of that woman who seems so strong, so tall, there in the gray shadows of gray buildings in Elizabeth, New Jersey. I cannot be more than three years old. And now, forty years later, I reach for my mothers limp and bony hand. "Help me! Help me! Help me!" I cannot escape mother's cry, and I am helpless. I am weak. I am small. I am three years old again, but there is no one to hold my hand as I step off the curb.

That "accident" back in 1987 marked for Edith Krouse Rosenberg the beginning of a seven-year process of mental and physical deterioration; at the same time our family began a long descent into an abyss of diminishing hope and mounting despair. At first we all assumed that mother would recover from her confusion, that she would regain her sense of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, of earlier and later. She never did. For the last seven years of her life mother lived outside of time as we know it; and as her disease progressed, I discovered just how unstable the notion of time is. After her return from the hospital, it was not unusual for mother to start the day at 2:00 A.M., rattling the dishes as she tried to prepare breakfast, compulsively running her noisy washing machine loaded with a single towel and a single washcloth. She frequently ate lunch at 9:30 A.M., and took supper by 3:30. Her bedtime often coincided with the six o'clock news. Trying to take mother out to an early dinner presented its special challenges. If we didn't tell her of our plans till the last minute, she might become ornery and refuse to leave the apartment. If we prepared her well in advance for this change in her routine, she would appear in hat and coat hours before it was time to leave, urging us to hurry up, seeing that we were already late.

July, 1990. My turn to baby-sit for mother. My father is in the hospital recovering from gall bladder surgery. My brother has already served his time and gone back to his family and his job in Connecticut. My sister and brother-in-law are vacationing someplace in Europe. I am awakened at 6:00 A.M. by an insistent knock on the bedroom door and then "Jim! Jim! Come quick!" The small kitchen is a scene from Walt Disney's Sorcerer's Apprentice. Water, water everywhere, the sink overflowing. I find a ruined toaster oven at the bottom of the sink. Mother has mistaken a plastic plate for piece of rye bread; the plastic has melted and then hardened into a permanent fixture of the metal grill. She is desperately trying to clean the ruined toaster oven. I glare at mother. She responds by throwing her arms around me, all sweetness, and says: "You're such a wonderful son." I can barely repress my rage. But why am I so upset? Is it that I am totally unprepared to be a father to my mother? Is it that this woman has become a stranger wearing mother's face and body? I can find no way out of my confusion.

By the late fall of 1992, mother begins phoning me in a panic almost weekly to inform me that there is an imposter in her apartment pretending to be my father and that I'd better do something about it. Each time my father gets on the line to ask what he can possibly do to convince Edith that he is indeed himself. Do I laugh or cry? Who is the author of this cruel joke? More rage - rage at my mother for reducing my father to helplessness, rage at her madness for robbing me of a mother's love, and rage at the One who has made room for dementia on the shelf of human afflictions. A neurologist in my synagogue gives me a label for mother's bizarre behavior-Capgras' Syndrome-but he is reluctant to label the underlying disease.

March, 1993. An overnight stay with my parents. As usual, I sleep on the cherry wood bed of my childhood, but my childhood is being devoured by mother's maddening confusion. Breakfast, 7:00 A.M. "Mother, do you have any idea who I am?"

"Why, of course, you're my cousin."

"No, I'm your son."

"But that's impossible. You're the rabbi."

"I'm the rabbi and your son too."

"You mean you were inside of me?"

"Yes."

"You mean I gave birth to you?"

"Yes."

"I'm so flattered!"

For almost six years my mother's illness had no name. It was not until April 26, 1993, that a doctor finally confirmed what our deepest denial could not hide from us - Alzheimer's. Of course. The signs were there for all who had the courage and the honesty to look. Alzheimer's. How many crushed souls are contained in that one word.

Within a few days of the official diagnosis, the situation deteriorated. Our family was sinking. Mother's incontinence left us with few options for her care. My father, a seventy-eight-year-old diabetic, had undergone quadruple bypass surgery four years earlier. Taking care of mother was literally killing him. Every attempt at a solution produced its own set of new problems. Mother seemed content at a supervised daycare program, but she would become hopelessly disoriented upon returning home. We hired home health aides; mother responded erratically at best. Each time she would begin to adjust to the new aide in her home, the aide would quit. And so we began to think the unthinkable.

May 10, 1993. My sister and I arrive at my parents' apartment to take mother to the Daughters of Israel Geriatric Center. We do not tell her why we have come. What can we say? What can she understand? Mother looks into her bedroom mirror for the last time. As she walks haltingly down the sixteen stairs from the landing of her second floor apartment, grabbing the wooden banister with her left hand to steady herself, I feel as if I am watching her step into her grave. She is wearing a stunning straw hat with a red band, which my sister placed on her white hair just minutes ago. This hat manages to preserve, however tentatively, some fragile and precious connection to the woman who used to be my mother.

When I visit mother a month later at Daughters of Israel, she acts like a frightened deer. I can't believe that she is running away from me. I follow her around for ten minutes before I convince her I mean her no harm. At a subsequent visit, my nineteen-year-old daughter Karen comforts me in my pain: "Even though grandma doesn't know who we are, I sense that she does know that we are special to her, that we are people who care."

January 3, 1994. A small but territorial old lady at Daughters of Israel, infuriated at the appropriation of her favorite chair, pushes mother to the floor, shattering her hip. The very next day a college buddy of mine replaces mother's hip joint with an artificial one. The same man who once drank beer with me in the West End Cafe holds my mother's life in his hands. The operation is a success, but mother is unable to comprehend the instructions necessary for her physical rehabilitation. She will never walk again without assistance.

March 25, 1994. Mother suffers a massive stroke and sinks into a deep coma. Telephone lines weave together a father and his three children. We all agree: Do nothing to prolong Edith's dying. We are lucky; the doctors are on our side.

April 1, 1994. April Fools Day. Good Friday. The Sixth Day of Passover. My father calls me at 7:15 A.M. and tells me in a weepy, weary voice: "It is over." My first reaction to my father's tearful phone call is one of relief and release. If I were a Christian, I would probably credit my sense of joyful liberation to "grace." As a Jew, I take comfort in the fact that mother died during Passover, the time of our liberation from slavery in Egypt. At some ineffable level, I sense that mother's death is defeated by my own powerful and surprising feeling of spiritual renewal.

My father asks me not only to deliver the eulogy but also to conduct the funeral. Friends and colleagues tell me that it is foolish for me to try to be rabbi and son at the same time. Who will comfort the comforter? But I cannot say no to my father.