A Glorious Life

[Cfduti]

Finally I've cried.

The hospital rang me to ask me to come in and help them get my mum to take her medicine.

Mum's near 90 and a slim 5 footer now. Still dark blond with some streaks of grey. She walks well except for a limp from a broken leg.

A six foot nurse told me that my mum is threatening and some of the staff are scared. Before I got a chance to talk to her (and I did talk her into taking her medicine) she stood at the front desk of the ward and demanded that things be done proper. You see, my mum is periodically reliving WWII when she was a nurse. She thinks I'm being kept somewhere and sometimes I'm let out so I can visit her. (In confidence she warns me to not let people know what I'm thinking or I'll get put in prison like her and be poisoned.)

I got her some nice new clothes and she was wearing them today, She can wander as she likes and is continually on the move. The nursing staff seem to have gone from thinking her as difficult to being quite accommodating and just keeping an eye to make sure she doesn't disappear, which she has on occasion, and so her experience is such that she seems to have dropped her hostility. I think she might be feeling the freedom now.

I was just reading the poems posted earlier and finally I could read them right through and cry.
It's a nice thing to find that I can.

I'm quite in awe of my mum now. What a fighter she is, and what a gentle soul, always caring for someone else.

I think she might now be learning to allow others to care for her.

Here's to you, mum.

 

[Jaycee23]

I can see why you are very proud of her. Hope things continue to go well

 

[Cfduti]

Yes I am proud of my mum. It's a relief to me to know that I am dispensable. Being a sole carer, for me, has over the years meant having to take over more and more aspects of her life and making sure hers is simple and from there she has a very active life which suits her active mind. In the process I lose sight of how she has such a spirit when life is difficult. Her mind is so fragmented now yet she has an amazing ability to create scenarios with internal logics to explain and make sense of her world.

One of her latest is that as others cannot see what she can see she accepts that and her visions are available to her because of an evolutionary trend which she has broken down into a number of steps and it's ok for her that others cannot see these interesting scenarios playing out as she gazes at a wall. Various people visit her. Sometimes a trench with bodies on the floor of her room bothers her. The people up the tree making a movie are fun to watch.

Mostly now she talks gibberish in toto or sequential non-sequiteurs but every once in a while some pretty amazing bits of thinking comes through. She should have tried her hand at fantasy and sci-fi (she's a big fan of Asimov).

anyway it's nice to know she can still put up a fight.