Holding on to the familiar

I’ve been spending time looking at a familiar scene from childhood. An oil painting of a red covered bridge surrounded by lush greens and sunny yellows of trees and grasses, a tranquil scene of suburban Pennsylvania where my family lived.

The painting hangs in the Los Angeles apartment where my 86-year-old mother is now. She doesn’t remember the bridge. She often doesn’t remember me, usually thinking I am her older sister, not her middle daughter. Alzheimer’s has blurred mom’s memory, blending people, places and events in unfamiliar ways.

As I write this in mom’s bright living room, looking up at that dappled landscape, mom is rustling papers in bed, turning the pages of the newspapers as necessary to her morning routine as a cup of sugary tea. She flips through both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times in about ten minutes. She no longer wears her glasses. No longer comprehends or wants to hear the troubling news of the day. She is content to hold on to the familiar, taking comfort in turning the pages as she has done for most of her life. Just as I hold my gaze on the wooden bridge, taking comfort in the shelter of shades of greens blurring into blues, blending into grays and yellows.

I realize how much I don’t know about the bridge. Was it just an image in the artist’s mind? My aunt tells me it was real, it once stood just a few miles from where I grew up. I stare at the narrow road rising into the dark bridge. There’s no way to see where the road beyond leads.

I realize how much I don’t know about my mother. My sister and I look for clues in her file cabinet. I learned that Adele Bateman, the artist who painted this landscape, was mom’s first husband’s aunt. Mom’s husband, Bob, died young, but mom held on to this and other paintings Bob and his family made, just as she held on to that family, and they to her.

My parent’s first date was visiting Bob’s grave. When Dud and Marie married and had five kids, we all grew up knowing about “Uncle Bob” and visiting with his family. This painting, like Bob’s sailboat at twilight, his brother Tony’s placid ducks, are talismans of mom’s life, memories of her people before us.

For years, mom has told us that we need to return these paintings to Uncle Bob’s family. She, a nurse for more than fifty years, was clear about how she wants to die and what we should do afterward. She insists she will die at home in bed. No nursing home for her.

We are doing what we can to honor what she wants.

She needs someone with her 24/7 to look after her frail mind and body. For now, my family is cobbling together a care routine. After three weeks here, I’ll go home to Minnesota. A sister from Maui will step in. Another sister, a full time nurse in L.A., has held things together for years. Another sister and brother have each spent time living with mom. We are trying to hold on to the familiar. Even when she does not remember us.

She coughs, needing her afternoon iced tea. “Where is everyone?” “Who is coming today?”

I tell her, in three days, her older sister, the one she thinks I am, will be here, flying in from Florida, where we still hope mom can move. We want her to be closer to more family. She’s not strong enough to fly. We’re not sure she’s strong enough to travel cross country in an RV, laying in a bed. If she can make that journey, she can stop to see Uncle Bob’s family on the way.

When her mind was clear, mom didn’t want to move to Florida. Now, though, she doesn’t understand why she is in this apartment where she’s lived for six years. Home to her, we think, is the Philadelphia semi-detached house where she grew up, a house sold sixty some years ago. She doesn’t understand why her father, who died in 1980, is not coming to get her. I tell her he loves her and they will be together when they can. “Is he coming today?”

For now, we hold on.

Mom looks out her window, past the gray tar-paper roof of the bowling alley next door, to the blue sky framing the tawny San Gabriel mountains just up the road. Her eyes search for the clouds she loves to watch.

I look at the leafy trees framing that red bridge, my eyes following the sloping road into the bridge, not knowing what lies beyond. I’m grateful for the decades I’ve had gazing at this familiar scene, a view I’ll treasure as long as memory holds.