looping

I sat at the table, finishing a puzzle for my mom. Sometimes she barks orders about puzzles. “Would you do that thing? I hate that thing! I’ve never had one like that before. I’m going to toss it if you don’t finish it!”

So I sit down to a 300 piece puzzle and I puzzle wizard my magic and it’s done. She says, “YAAAAY!” Sometimes she claps. Then she immediately puts the puzzle away and goes to get another one from the stacks and stacks in the storage room.

While I popped puzzle pieces in as quickly as possible, she was making dinner. Secretly, this is why I showed up. To watch over kitchen time. To keep her safe.

When you have Alzheimer’s making dinner is a curious thing. We had put two pot pies in the oven, one for her and one for dad. Then she repeatedly took out other things to start making and I’d say with a happy voice, “You have pot pies in the oven, no need to get that out, you get to save it for later!”

WHAT?! she says back and then opens the oven to check, stares at the pot pies for moment and then half laughs and half scoffs, shocked. She would then put the other food back in the fridge until a couple of minutes later when she’d take the same things back out and we’d do it all over again.

Doing it all over again is the core of this disease, I suppose. There are these moments that we run through like a loop; a short Groundhog’s Day, and then there is The Loop, the terrible loop of becoming a child again. She’s been through it, now she’s returned to it.

It seems strange to want to remember it all, but I do. I want to remember every moment of this because it is our real and true life, our battle, our daily moments,

ours.

I want to look back at this time with humor and grace and tenderness. I don’t always feel those things now. They are the foundation though, especially for my dad. The looping sometimes piles up other feelings on top of those true ones, and we get impatient and tired and sometimes snappy. But then somehow we look around, at the puzzle always on the table and the way mom’s hair is all squished at the back of her head from the couch, the way she laughs when we get her going, and it’s all familiar and good. We are looping too, through our emotions and frustrations, back to surrender and grace.