Summer has abandoned the mountain, and the colors of autumn are fast spreading from valley to valley.
Just before the bright orange full moon, my mother seemed to have lost another bit of her brainpower. Several times a day, now, she says that she doesn’t know where she is and she wants to go home. She is terrified of being abandoned, left alone to fend for herself, despite the fact that we never leave her alone, not even at night, now that I’m sleeping on a bed in the next room. Any kind of altercation — even on the television — sends her mind imploding. She cries. She cries a lot, but not from pain anymore. We took her to an orthopedist, who looked at her recent x-ray and gave her a cortisone shot in the shoulder that has been so excruciatingly painful. She has not been complaining about pain in that shoulder.
Her pain is her awareness that she is being abandoned by her “self.” When she asks “where am I?” it’s not the confusion over “where” that terrifies her; it is the loss of the “I.”
“Am I going crazy?’ she asks in lucid moments.
We can’t bear to tell her that, yes, she is.
91 years and counting.