Mother’s Day can be a difficult day for so many people – Sarah Catherall knows this only too well and takes us through what it’s like when your mum has Alzheimer’s and eventually, is no longer here for this special day.
My mother lay in her rest home bed, surrounded by photographs and mementoes of her life. In one photo, my middle daughter, Bianca, was a wee toddler with a cheeky grin, and I was in my mid-thirties, with full cheeks and unlined skin. For seven years, that rest home was Mum’s home, and over the years, we didn’t change many of the photographs, which became symbolic of how Mum remembered us before she forgot who we were.
Alzheimer’s took my mother far too young: she was only 61 – six years older than I am now – when she was diagnosed with this cruel disease. Over the next five or so years, she declined quite rapidly, forgetting how to drive, forgetting the names of the flowers she nutured in her garden, and finally, forgetting how to play the piano and the songs she knew off by heart. Her care became too much for Dad, and he reluctantly put her in a home where the nurses were like guardian angels, caring for our mother as she faded day by day from this world.
Mum was 74 when she died in her sleep in April 2021, alone in her rest home bed, which was particularly tragic for my sisters, my father and I, that no-one was with her when she took her last breaths.
She was too young to die, but really, Mum left us many years earlier, and what I mourn most now is what should have been, the experiences she missed out on as an empty nester and a grandmother.
When my eldest daughter, Isabella, was born in 2000, Mum – and Dad – were in the car straight to Wellington to be with us. Mum fussed over her first grandchild, and my relationship with her changed as soon as I too became a mother, when she became our family matriarch.
She was wise and she guided me. While I loved being a mother, and I adored my baby, the walls began to close in on me and I didn’t cope with the lack of control over this tiny thing who wailed and refused to feed or to sleep. Mum supported me and she never judged. I would whizz out for a run and I would return to find my baby asleep in her cot, and washing folded in neat piles.
My second daughter, Bianca, came along in 2003, and Mum was still in her prime as a grandmother and a caring mother of her three adult daughters. Mum had struggled when my youngest sister left home, and her role as a grandmother gave her a renewed sense of purpose. My husband and I would go away for a weekend or on his work trip, and the girls would go to my parents’ house for a few days, where Mum would teach them how to make daisy chains, she would organise tea parties with tea party sets in her garden, and encourage them to play shops, “selling’’ her flowers to one another.
Mum had been a primary school teacher, and she made my daughters beautiful photo books to bring home, writing in her perfect teacher handwriting: “Today I played in Gran’s garden.’’
My third daughter was a toddler when we were beginning to lose Mum. It was around the time of Mia’s third birthday that Mum was diagnosed. We have a special photo of them together in a playground, when Mum was smiling but her blue-grey eyes were fading.
My daughters didn’t like visiting Mum in a rest home. The first one was near a park and we would take her across the road to feed the ducks. “Everyone else here is old,’’ Isabella or Bianca, would say, and it was true. Mum was in her mid-sixties – a decade older than I am now – and her brunette hair stood out in a sea of grey heads in the resident sitting room. It was cruel and wrong that she had just qualified for a gold card – and she was looking forward to retirement trips with dad – when she had to go into care.
As Mum deteriorated, these rest home visits got harder and harder. My daughters looked pained when we visited Gran in the hospital wing of her second rest home. Mum lay on the bed with her mouth wide open, her eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.
Mum had no idea who we were, and I struggled with the dilemma: should I take the girls to visit her? Is there any point? Is it better for them to remember her as she was?
It’s been four years since she passed away and I still think of Mum most days, my mourning for what could and should have been. She has nine grandchildren and she has missed school grandparent days, sports events, birthday parties, school balls, and school and university graduations.
Every time I am proud of my daughters, I imagine how deeply proud she would be too. When Bianca graduates with a commerce degree this month, Mum should be there, watching her granddaughter traipsing through the Dunedin streets in her graduation gown.
After Mum’s passing, we celebrated her life a few days after Mother’s Day, when we held a beautiful funeral and we all sang the songs she loved at her graveside. It has always felt fitting that Mum was laid to rest in May – the month of mothers, and grandmothers.
