What’s in a name?
For years Conrad Walters struggled with his mother-in-law’s irritating habits. Now he cherishes the time he has left with her, and the few words she greets him with.
Each time I visit my 92-year-old mother-in-law, she greets me with a gift. It doesn’t come wrapped in striped paper or topped with ribbons.
Her knotted joints have long since lost the dexterity for that. Instead, the gift arrives as two words: “Hello, Conrad.”
It wasn’t many years ago that Olive might have wished to forget my name. We constantly argued then, camouflaged snipers on distant hills. Our skirmishes, too frequent to count, flared with consistency. The topics were so trivial
I can recall only one in detail. It was Christmas and the dispute concerned the correct technique to carry a cardboard box and place it in the back of a car.
I carried the box as I wished and placed it where I wanted. I won.
Olive and I fell out with such intensity that I absented myself from family Christmases for five years. I saw her only when she would travel the two hours from Newcastle to Sydney every couple of months. She came with my blessings; she is my wife’s mother, after all. My own mother had died unexpectedly aged 72, and I didn’t begrudge my wife all the time she wished with hers.
But Olive’s habit of repeating everything three times, her obsession with trivia – need every conversation focus on the weather? – and her perpetual chatter exhausted me. We were civil for the benefit of my wife, though little more.
On one such visit, in November 2012, Olive awoke in agony. Her leg was cramped and the pain was excruciating. She was reluctant to seek medical help. As a former nurse, she knew that people often emerged from hospitals more sick than when they arrived.
As the pain intensified, though, I persuaded my wife, and the three of us spent much of the weekend in an emergency department.
The diagnosis was not quick, but it was clear: a cancerous tumour was pressing against her kidney and referring pain to her leg. For the next three months, my wife cared for Olive in Newcastle while doctors did their best. Each row on the calendar was a precious week of life.
She underwent radiotherapy – and the tumour shrank. But, whether from the stresses of the treatment or the thickening clouds of age, Olive deteriorated mentally.
When she began to wander outside her apartment at night, it became obvious she could no longer live at home, even under my wife’s full-time care. Without much of a social network in Newcastle, Olive came to Sydney, where we placed her in a nearby nursing home, a land of Zimmer-frame dodgems and a staff that could cope with her confused mind.
These days, as she drifts in and out of the sludgy pea soup of dementia, Olive has changed in deeper ways. With her memory unable to obsess and cling to what is before her, gone are the tedious repetition, the incessant chatter and the judgments driven by what others think.
And gone is her memory of our mutual dislike.
She doesn’t remember the time lightning struck and sizzled its way through her house to toast her computer, leaving her convinced I had sabotaged it, or perhaps invoked black magic.
She doesn’t remember the frustrating phone conversations we had as I tried to help her resolve technical problems. She: “Microwave Explorer is gone.”
Me: “Microsoft Explorer?”
She: “What have you done with it? Put it back.” Olive doesn’t remember our arguments about food or that it took me a year to stop her from piling food on my plate.
Freed from our soured history, dementia has given us a second chance.
I imagine Olive’s mind as a scroll that unfurls for metre after metre in looping copperplate script, and dementia is dissolving the letters at the bottom and eating back through time. She recalls her mother’s flair for dancing more than 80 years ago, yet cannot remember if she had lunch an hour ago.
Dementia ebbs and flows. At high tide, she looks forward to the day she will return to a home she thinks still awaits her. At low tide, she forgets that the nursing home does her laundry, and she curses the thieves who steal her clothes, even if she never praises the good Samaritans who replenish her closet with clean shirts.
I have some experience with ageing folk. A neighbour has called me John for 15 years, and my favourite aunt used to call me Jimmy Victor Conrad as she would cycle through the names of her nephews until she landed on the right one. I know one day my name will be erased from Olive’s porous memory, too. And my wife knows even her name will vanish. We know in the end dementia wins. But we don’t dwell on that.
Instead, we are thankful for the enigma of memory loss, which merges every dog into her faithful Dino and delivers the joy of the unexpected second chances that restore love where it seemed extinct.
We visit as we can, my wife more than me. Each time, though, I wonder: will she remember? I prepare myself. And, for now, every visit begins identically.
Hello, Conrad,” she says.
How could I not love such a gift? A mother gave me that name.
Published in The Sun-Herald, May 15, 2016.