We talk about houses becoming homes: a house is just a building until the people that occupy it bring it to life. It becomes a home. The structure is alive with activity, its inhabitants laugh, cry, learn, and grow. They eat and sleep, and they decorate. The house is festooned with bits and pieces of its owners: kids draw on walls, put keepsakes on bulletin boards, measure themselves on a wall or door jamb near the kitchen; parents put magnets on the frig, pin up their kid’s artwork, add mementos, posters, paintings, and other decor. Everything that adorns the house tells a story about making that house a home, making the memories. However, the objects tell the stories only as long as the inhabitants can interpret. What we don’t now know about my parent’s home, we aren’t likely to learn.
My parent’s home is becoming a house again. Dad is 91 and while his short-term memory is starting to fail him, he’s articulate and mentally with it. My mom on the other hand is 86 and her memory has ceased to function. Mom is a shell of her former self and her home is a shell for her. My parents have been married 67 years and are very much in love still, but mom isn’t the same companion, the same woman who just a month ago would sit on the sofa with dad holding hands. So my dad’s home is taking on the identity of a house, simply a structure, also.
Mom doesn’t do any of the activities that keep a home functioning anymore. Dad knows that. But so much worse than losing the care that makes this house a home, his wife, the woman who kept the home functioning, is slipping away from him. And as Dad’s memory slips away, so too do the stories that animate the objects. Everything slips away from us, the children. The stories we forget can’t be retrieved. The family history that isn’t already recorded is lost.
The process that robs the house of life is mystifying, upsetting and poignant. People are starting to slip away. Just today my mom wondered who that cute little boy Jackson was. Jackson is one of my grandkids – he lives in Colorado, but he is talked about unceasingly in my parent’s household. Why? Because my father thinks Jackson is the most remarkable child who ever lived. Which elicits another “why?” Because when Jackson was barely two years old, he ran up to my dad, hugged him, and said, “I love you, Grandpa.” Mom doesn’t know Jackson anymore. She won’t know Cooper soon, or Annabelle, or my daughter Karen. When she looks at the pictures on the frig she wonders who those cute little children belong to.
It’s funny, isn’t it? That is comes to this?
Mom can’t learn anything, and familiar tasks are quickly becoming unfamiliar. Cooking no longer happens. My dad, who surprisingly has never operated anything in the kitchen, has tried to help in small ways. For example, he wanted stew and laid out the ingredients on the counter – meat, carrots, onions. But Mom had no idea what to do with them. She tries and says she’ll try harder, but she’s losing the concept of trying even.
You find out things you never knew as the home devolves. I never saw my dad cooking, but it never occurred to me that he couldn’t – or never had. One of my sisters remembers, in retrospect, that whenever Mom went anywhere out of town, she left food in the frig with labels – “Friday dinner, heat for 30 minutes at 350.” I never saw him operating the washing machine but I didn’t realize that he couldn’t. He’s lost in the household without Mom and he realizes it’s too late for him to learn. He’s in that tricky stage when he knows he’s not remembering and learning – and watches Mom, seeing what may be in store for him.
So my sister who lives in Alaska is here for a week to see for herself the deterioration that has occurred since her last visit at Thanksgiving. She, my sister here in Bakersfield, my brother and I will talk. There’s nothing we can do at present, but we want to talk and make sure we are all agreed.
My parents have always been adamant that no one will be in their house – there will be no live-ins, no home health, no assistance. And at this stage, until Mom begins to wander, they do have to stay in their home, or the remnants of their home. Moving to any type of facility is certain death – Mom is existing solely on patterns and familiarity, the little bit that she still has. So we have to make sure the house is stocked with food they don’t need to cook. Nuts, fruit, bread, crackers, peanut butter, milk, cereal, tuna. We have to evaluate how important bathing is. Things like that. And all the while we watch the home slip away.
All of a sudden I realize I need to bring this to a close. It’s getting a little too close to…to home. I have to fight to maintain perspective. I have to remember the long, full, vital lives that built the home. And I have to remember that while the home slowly returns to the objectivity of a house, a building, a structure, it still lives within us – the children, the grandchildren, the great-grandchildren.
