"When are you planning on going to the grocery store?" my mother asked after our trip to the hairdresser followed by a late lunch at Emil Villa's. I'd taken her back to her condo, helped her open her mail, and I thought my day was over.
"I'll go right now."
"Don't go now. You don't have time." I did though, and we both knew it. I hated being reminded that I had no life.
"When would you like me to go, Missus?" I asked with all the patience I could muster. She was Missus and I was Person, names that kept us unique and reminded us that we loved each other, even in trying times.
"I don't care." Fists clenched, she shook her arms for emphasis. "Go tomorrow or the next day or whenever you want to."
We did this dance every day. She needed help; I needed space. She feared I would abandon her, while I feared that her blood pressure would soar, causing another stroke.
It would be four years before I knew that a disease was eating her brain, robbing her of logical thought, and returning her to the emotional dependence of a child. I had no idea I was engaged in a psychological battle with a woman who was losing her ability to think logically. I put on my patient face and said, "I've got time and I want to go now. What would you like me to bring?"
She looked up with vacant, pleading eyes. Four years later I would call them Alzheimer eyes. "Can we look at the list?"
"Sure." She'd spent all one afternoon sitting at a wobbly card table typing the list, letter by letter, then going back and XXXing out her mistakes. I offered to type on either her typewriter or my computer while she dictated, but she said, "I have to do something for myself." Watching her struggle with the scraps of memory lurking in her brain made me want to scream. I dug my fingernails into my crossed arms until little red half-moons dotted my elbows.
I found the typed grocery list in a stack of old Saks catalogues. "Would you like Lean Cuisine's Chicken Chow Mein or Chicken with Vegetables?"
"Don't bring me that thing you brought last time. It only had one piece of meat and it was all fat."
Beef Portobello was the culprit. Furious and frustrated, she'd waved the fatty piece of meat on the end of her fork, then slammed the half-empty plastic tray on the counter. "Don't ever bring me this again!"
Like I have X-ray vision. Like I use it to check the contents of every box, and deliberately thwart your food life by bringing you only substandard packages. I breathed deeply. "Why don't I see what's in the freezer?"
In my best Vanna White imitation, I pulled out each item, turned, showed it, and called out its name. If I read the names while I looked in the freezer, she couldn't hear me. This was simpler. Besides my Vanna poses were entertaining, and I loved her approval, though at 48 I should have been far too old to care.
"Take some money out of the dresser." I did as I was told though I already had her money in her section of our wallet. Nothing was exclusively mine anymore.
Crisp fall air filled my lungs as I scurried to my car. I never realized how stale the air in her kitchen was until I escaped to the real world. I looked up at the bare spots already showing on the trees. I didn't know yet that Alzheimer's speckled her brain with holes in exactly the same way as fallen leaves made holes in the trees. I only wondered if this was the last year she would see the leaves turn.
If I had known about her disease, maybe I could have stopped trying to be the perfect daughter. Maybe I could have loved her for needing me instead of craving her approval. Maybe I could have recognized that I was an adult daughter, doing what needed to be done.
I realize now that her behavior contradicted everything I knew about Alzheimer's. She didn't wander around undressed or leave the stove on. She was just being herself — only more so.
When I came back from the store, she thanked me profusely. "I don't know what I would do without you, Person."
"No problem." My resentment disappeared whenever we were apart.
"Did you get everything on the list?"
They didn't have those cookies you like, but I found everything else."
"When will they?
I stared for a moment. "They don't make them anymore, remember, Missus?"
"Nobody ever makes anything I like."