Mom passed away this morning.

To be honest, she left many years ago with the advent of altzhiemers. They call it the "long goodbye", and it was.

Memories fade. Missed calls. Unable to remember if she fed the cat. Unable to remember if she has a cat. Calling family members at all hours. Forgetting their names.

Repeating the same phrases over and over.

"Well, that's what makes  the world go round."

"Have you ever seen the trees so green?"

It was like watching a fine old Victorian mansion crumble to dust in front of you. And there was nothing you could do about it. It was overwhelmingly sad.

And then this one time vibrant woman became a small shell huddled under a blanket, blue-veined hands clutching a teddy bear, eyes closed and breathing in shallow gasps. Now she is gone.

This is not who she was.

She walked the wards in Bellvue in 1939, when the pylon and hemisphere of the New York Worlds Fair attracted the world. She received her graduate degree at that prestigious learning hospital and returned to New Hampshire to work. And work she did, with only a few months off over the years to give birth to three children and tend a husband who became ill.

Their marriage lasted, though there were rocky times. She held things together and worked the late shift because there was more money.

Her skills in the nursery with the premi's and new borns were well documented and it was in the prescence of new life that her abilities in this area were manifest. She was the first nurse to handle three of my nine children. 

She was known to the children of my sister and me as, "Nana", a name we called our own grandmother.

And she was there when we, as children, and then our own children, went to school. Sometimes she would forgo sleep to urge us on in our endeavors. She was a counselor and a disciplinarian.

Things changed when Dad passed. The spark was fanned to flame for a little while. She got a drivers license at 66 and tried hard to make it on her own. But it didn't last.

The slow down-hill plunge began. 

She often said she was, in her own words, "A tough, old broad." And when it became apparent even to her that things were not quite right, she would walk. All hours of the day and night. She would say, "I have to keep moving", as if constant motion would outdistance the disease. 

When we finally had to put her in the nursing home, for her own safety, she would figure out ways to short circuit the ankle and wrist alarm bracelet and escape. In fact, she was the ring leader in several nursing home "break outs."

But these final acts of defiance were short lived.

And now it is over. Fortunately, Rose and I and some of our children visited her this weekend, though she never knew. We held hands and prayed an "Our Father" and said goodbye.

The title of "oldest in the family" has now fallen to me. I hope I can live it with the dignity she showed me.

Peace, Mom. You can take off your shoes now and rest at the end of your shift in God's holy ward. 

© 2009 George Locke