“Ma’am?”

My mother was trying to get my attention. She did not know
me. After 12 years with Alzheimer’s disease she did not know much of anything.

I had stood up to turn off the television that the caregivers
left on while Mom sat alone in her room. For the last six years she had lived in
the locked “Memory Unit” of a facility near my home in Flagstaff, Ariz. At this
end stage of Alzheimer’s, Mom was like a baby. She wore diapers, was unable to
walk, spoke only a few words and was captivated by the simple movement and
flashing lights of a television screen.

After switching off the TV, I sat on the ottoman where my
mother’s feet were propped. She was wearing her favorite pink sweater that used
to be her mother’s. The caregivers had painted Mom’s nails a matching pink and
she was holding a chocolate ice cream cone, which she was forgetting to eat. I
put my hand on her leg and looked into her sparkling blue eyes.

“Yes?” I said in an attempt to humor myself, as if I was
about to get some kind of logical response. But there were no words. She just
smiled as the ice cream dripped onto her lap. In this silence at the end of my
mother’s life I was finally finding out what kind of person she really was.

The mother who raised me was possessed with untreated mental
illness. She was a hypochondriac who was convinced she had a mysterious fatal
disease. She was obsessed with cleanliness, food allergies and so worried about
air pollution that she wore a gas mask. She spent many days bed-ridden with
depression and seemed to only get worse as she grew older. My sisters and I accompanied
her on endless doctor’s visits as she searched in vain for a physician who
would take her many complaints seriously. The mother I grew up with almost
never laughed or smiled or stopped looking for the next worst-case scenario.
But Alzheimer’s disease was never on her long list of what might do her in.

When I was tasked with being the lone family member to care
for Mom, it seemed that worst-case scenario was, indeed, finally playing out for
us both. During the first years of her care, the obsessive-compulsive behaviors
my mother exhibited during my childhood were amplified by Alzheimer’s. I was called
to the facility almost daily to mitigate the trouble she was causing. She was
in a perpetual panic and monopolizing the caregivers’ time with her incessant,
incoherent demands. Where was the doctor? How could she eat food that was full
of poison? She needed to go through the trash, to make phone calls, to sift
through other people’s stuff, to stay awake all night in case I showed up. “Oh
Annette,” she would plead as she chased after me when I tried to slip through the
facility’s locked door. “You’ve got to get me out of here!”

It was excruciating. And I responded the way my mother had
taught me to handle difficult situations – with worry and dread. I hounded
doctors about her medications, the kitchen staff about her food, the caregivers
about whether or not her teeth were getting brushed daily. The years dragged
on. How long could this nightmare last? I feared that my crazy mother was
finally going to drive me insane.

But gradually the burden lifted. Mom stopped asking about
doctors and, instead, started talking to the squirrel outside her window. She
ate whatever was put in front of her and asked for more. The lines on her face
softened. She smiled at everyone. She enjoyed wearing fancy hats and wrapping
her hair with colorful scarves. While Alzheimer’s is brutal and tragic for
everyone involved, it can also offer unexpected gifts. In my mother’s case, it
was that she forgot how to worry. And I got to know the mother who had eluded
me most of my life. Behind the neurosis, was a woman who was sweet and joyful
to the core.

In her final year Mom also taught me how to let go. I
learned just by sitting with her hour after hour, day after day, holding hands
but not speaking. If she was not bothered by the fact she could not walk, then
neither was I. So what if she did not know my name? The important thing was
that in that moment when she was wearing her favorite pink sweater with a
manicure to match, she was happy and well cared for. And she was eating ice
cream, which she had been deathly allergic to until she forgot about such
things.

When I left her room on what would be our last visit, my
mother smiled as I said goodbye. Sunlight streamed through the window and onto
her shoulders. She was without a care in the world. Three days later, Mom’s
heart stopped in her sleep.  She died in
peace. And, in the end, she lived in peace.

Annette McGivney is Southwest Editor for
Backpacker magazine and teaches journalism at Northern Arizona University. Her
most recent book is Pure Land,
a memoir from Aquarius Press.

www.annettemcgivney.com