My mother was the daughter of two Polish immigrants. She and her sister and brother grew up in Niagara Falls, The Honeymoon Capital of the World. They spent most of their lives there. Growing up, my mother liked ice skating and going to the movies especially those featuring Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney, Gene Kelly, and Rock Hudson. My mother had beautiful penmanship. In 1948, she married my father. They raised three demanding daughters and two mischievous sons who all would earn Master’s Degrees (and I went on for a Ph.D.) My mother somehow found time to read books after cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry, and checking our homework. We always had LIFE, TIME, THE SATURDAY EVENING POST, READER’S DIGEST, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, and many other magazines in our mailbox. When I was in third grade, my mother (aka, “Santa”) placed Tom Swift and the Caves of Nuclear Fire under our Christmas tree for me and ignited a lifetime passion for reading. Baking was her passion so we always had cookies and cakes galore. My mother’s specialty was placek, a Polish dessert bread. The happy Kelley household always had the scent of apple pie or taffy tarts in the air. She also enjoyed playing card games and board games. Her favorite musicals were My Fair Lady and Oklahoma!.
My father retired after teaching and working as a guidance counselor for 35 years. My mother and my father traveled to Pearl Harbor (where my father was stationed for part of World War II) and were in the Rose Bowl for Super Bowl XXVII when the Buffalo Bills lost to the Dallas Cowboys. They flew to Florida and Arizona to visit my sisters on a regular basis.
That all came to an end when my father died suddenly in 2000 after a massive heart attack, probably triggered by a blood clot caused by his total knee replacement surgery; I began to visit my mother’s house every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday after that. My three sisters lived out-of-state. I would take my mother shopping. She loved Sam’s Club because of all the free food stations. But I noticed my mother was forgetting. I had extra car keys and house keys made because she kept losing them. Her short-term memory got shorter. Finally, I took my mother to a neurologist. After a battery of tests, the neurologist told my mother, “Mrs. Kelley, it’s likely you have Alzheimer’s. You can’t drive any more.”
For years, I drove my mother everywhere she wanted to go. She would have loved to live with Diane and me, but we already had our hands full with Diane’s 90-year-old-mother living with us. She refused to live with her daughters. “I’m not going to move to Florida or Arizona,” she declared. “This is my home.” My mother started falling in her house. She forgot to eat. I used to sit with her at dinnertime and kept reminding her to take a bite of her food. She was easily distracted. I suggested we get a companion to stay with her. My mother said, “I don’t want strangers in my house!”
Finally, my brother, my sisters, and I had a meeting and decided it wasn’t safe for my mother to live alone. We researched the local nursing homes and found my mother a room at the Northgate Alzheimer’s Unit. For seven years, my mother sang songs, made puzzles, played bingo, and made loops around the unit using her walker for safety. Each day I visited my mother, I tried to accomplish two things: make her laugh and stir her long-term memories. For the first few years, my mother laughed and remembered. But then she lost more memory. When my brother, who handled all of our mother’s financial matters, visited her a year ago, she asked him, “Do I know you?” He cried. My mother forgot who her daughters were, too. And this was about the time my mother stopped smiling.
My mother recognized me right up until the end, probably because I visited her the most and I always brought her a treat: pudding, cookies, candies, and her favorite snack, Snickers. My mother suffered a stroke around Thanksgiving. She rallied for a few days, then she suffered a second stroke. After that, her health declined fast. Had she lived a few more weeks she would have turned 89. As I visited my mother in the Alzheimer’s Unit over those seven years she spent there, I saw her diminished a little each day. What didn’t diminish was my love for my mother.
