My sister and I care for my mother's ghost.

[Seachelle1]

I started crying today, missing my father so very much. He died very suddenly a year ago. My mother had a stroke 2 years ago and cannot live on her own. She is a different woman. I feel like I am loving a stranger. I was reading the other day and found this quote.

 

And I am writing here at the moment when my mother no longer recognizes me, and at which, though still capable of speaking or articulating, a little, she no longer calls me and for her and therefore for the rest of her life, I no longer have a name, that is what is happening, and when she nonetheless seems to reply to me, she is presumably replying to someone who happens to be me without her knowing it, if knowing means anything here, like the other day in Nice when I asked her if she was in pain (yes) then where? It was February 5 1989, she had in a rhetoric that could never have been hers, the audacity of this stroke about which she will alas, never know anything, no doubt knew nothing, and which, piercing the night replies to my question: I have a pain in my mother, as though she were speaking for me, both in my direction and in my place. I stop for a moment over a pang of remorse, in any case over the admission I owe the reader, in truth that I owe my mother herself for the reader will have understood that I am writing for my mother, perhaps even for a dead woman, for if I were here writing for my mother, it would be for a living mother who does not recognize her son, and I am paraphrasing here for whomever no longer recognizes me, unless it be so that one should no longer recognize me, another way of saying, another version, so that people think they finally recognize me.'

JACQUES DERRIDA

 

Is my mother already dead? Does anyone else know how to deal with this? I have so much rage and pain about my mother and my father. I've been going to counseling. Tell me your story. Guide me along. Hug me with your words. Please.

[carhill]

My sympathies.

 

The strokes which affect the cognitive function of the brain are amongst the most insidious of the disease. Indeed, the person can become a stranger. I cared for such a person for about eight years before laying her to rest. Hopefully, your mother, while perhaps seeming a stranger, is spared the psychosis I dealt with on a day to day basis. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

 

What I did was accept and love her as she was, remember the good woman I had always known and loved and grieve the death of that person, for I knew I would never see her again.

 

I hope you and your sister can find strength as a team in this time of need. Each day is a new day. There are small victories. Cherish them. Life is short. Counseling can help. Even though not attended for that reason (caregiving), MC helped me as a caregiver, mainly in how to better process emotions and stress. Hugs from friends helped. Reach out. People do care. Good luck.

[Seachelle1]

Thank you carhill.

 

One of the hardest thing about Dad dying and mom having a stroke was that my kids will never know my parents. They might sit down with my mother's body and the stranger inside her but they won't know her. Mom will never read them stories or tuck them into bed. Dad will never take them on long hikes and play the piano with them.

 

I was at the baby shower of my cousin this weekend and I had to bury my head and blink back tears. Nobody noticed, thank god, but my parents should be there and my sister and I should be able to live life like my cousins do. It's so wrong and upended that they're not here. Like I'm a broken compass and North has disappeared.

 

I AM grateful for everything I have. I am grateful for my broken Mama, but she is a bitter gift. To be gifted a second Mom in my first Mom's body? I love her with my whole heart but I have to grieve my mother because the mother I knew no longer exists. Maybe then I can fully accept her exactly as she is and not always try to change her back?

 

My mother is a bit of a fish.