How I Lost My Mom and Then Found Her Again

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My mother and I had always been close. I never went through that period, typical of teenage girls, where I disliked my mom or found her embarrassing. She was reliably sweet and kind to me, and we were allies in a household where others (my dad and one sister) had tempers.

When someone else blew up at either of us, we consoled each other. We liked doing things together — shopping, cooking, crafts and making each other laugh. The night of my prom, when she was helping me get the long dress on, something started tickling my thighs and I reached up the skirt to pull out a spider, missing a limb. We screamed, then laughed hysterically.

This was the sweet flavor of our relationship for the first 45 years of my life. Then dementia snatched that mom away and delivered someone cranky, demanding, suspicious and unappreciative. In the last year of her life, eight years into dementia, she moved to an assisted living facility near me, so I was a handy target for her discontent. It was nearly impossible to please her. I was rarely on her good side anymore. It was like she hardly remembered we’d been close.

During that year, she lived in my town, and I saw her a couple of times a week. She always had a shopping list going, and she loved to go to stores with me to peruse the aisles at Target, Walgreens, CVS, or Costco, riding around in one of those motorized cart-mobiles.

While she much preferred the cart to her walker, she was scared to drive it. So I had to drive the thing, leaning over her in an uncomfortable position, maneuvering a lever on the handlebars, which was both the accelerator and the brake. Push it one way to go forward; the other way to stop.

On this day, Mom was shopping for Valentine’s Day cards — for a friend and for her youngest grandson, Keaton. At the front of the CVS store, near the register bay, was a big, Valentine-themed display stacked together into a tall pyramid.

At the core of the structure were boxes of Russell Stover Chocolates; the next layer was of fancy-wrapped bottles of bubbly apple cider; and the outer layer was tiny real roses in plastic pots, each dirt-filled cube wrapped festively. Some employee had spent a lot of time erecting this retail homage to the Hallmark holiday. It was February’s equivalent of the Christmas Tree.

My mom and I went through the aisles. In beauty products, she put two tubes of Neutrogena hand cream in the basket. “You sure you need that?” I said. “I just bought you one of those last week.” “Oh,” she said, “You can never have too much of it. It’s the only thing that works on my hands.”

Next, we motored through candy for her favorite butter rum lifesavers. In the cold and flu section, she tossed cough drops into the cart, remarking, "You never know when you might need them."

In the greeting cards section, a woman was selecting her own valentines, and there wasn’t room for us, so I steered the motorized cart around her, accidentally clipping her purse.

“Excuse us,” I said, “Sorry.” We were graceless; we took up a lot of space.

And that’s when it happened, at the start of that aisle, front of the store. Instead of turning left as I’d planned, something in my brain froze, some lights in my head went out, and there was a full-on power outage of the synapses. I pressed the lever and plowed us, full speed, into the tall Valentine’s Day display.

My mother screamed. An older woman, a manager-type, came running from behind the registers. A young salesman from the photo department rushed forward. All in an instant.

“Are you okay?” I asked my mom, and she was having been protected by the cart of merchandise in front of her vehicle.

“Are you?” she asked.

It was the first time in years that she had exhibited concern for me.

“I’M SO SORRY!” I exclaimed to the manager, who was shaking her head and wouldn’t speak. Who could blame her? All those open-containered, potted plants, their soil mingling with sparkling apple cider and broken glass, were sprawled on the floor.

The employees expertly tackled the mess, as though they’d trained exactly for this incident. I tried to help but was shooed away.

“They’re so efficient!” my mom said.

“I don’t even know how that happened,” I said.

“Was it my fault?” she asked. She had come to assume that most mishaps were.

“NO,” I assured her. “You were just sitting there; I was driving. I meant to turn, but I didn’t, and then I meant to brake, but instead I accelerated. It was like my brain hiccuped. I feel so bad.”

“Don’t feel bad,” she said. “Why should you feel bad? You didn’t mean to do it.”

Dementia had made my sweet and generous mother self-centered. But in the midst of this crisis, she snapped back into her former self. We had switched places. My brain had malfunctioned and wreaked havoc. In her brain, some synapses briefly reconnected, and she acted maternal, consoling me.

Within a few minutes, the mess was erased, and the towering display was intact again. As I drove my mom back to the care home, the scene played in my head on repeat.

“I should never show my face in that store again,” I said.

“I don’t know why you’re so worried about it,” my mom said. “Besides, did you see how fast they cleaned it up?”

My mother was awed by their efficiency, compared to her own diminishing abilities.

I was awed by the brief return of my sweet mom.


Have any of your relatives suffered from dementia? Let us know in the comments below.