Alzheimer's gives back what I'm still not ready to receive
My mother and I at my MFA graduation in May 2007. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2013 at age 61.
They gave it back to me in a sealed white envelope.
The package was marked up by one of the aides at the nursing home using a thick, black Sharpie.
It read: "Please give to Elizabeth Gregory's family. Thanks."
Inside was a ring I'd given her when I was 18. A thin Black Hills gold band with two leaves intertwined with rose-gold vines. It was all I could afford at the time, but I remember wanting to give her something - anything - during the difficult time in her life when she was separating from my father.
She glowed at the gesture. "You don't need to spoil me, Lonna," she said. "I don't need anything."
"It's just a ring," I said.
I wanted to make her feel better. I wanted her to know that I would always be her loyal, loving daughter, even when she drove me bonkers, which she did (and often).
"Just wear it," I coaxed.
For the next 19 years, Mom wore the ring every day on the middle finger of her left hand.
When I look at photos now, if her hands are showing, so is the ring.
It's right there in the pictures of all of us together at my brother's wedding.
Again a few years later in a picture with her day-old granddaughter.
The ring glows in a picture of the two of us embracing as I accepted my graduate degree.
It was there when we buried her mother. Then her father.
The ring was so inconsequential for so long. Just there. A part of my mother, like one of the thousands of freckles adorning her arms. A constant object, like the "hugging pillow" she slept with every night for as long as I could remember. Or that laugh you could hear across a building and know it was her just from the flittering thrill it made.
That cheap little ring I bought with money I earned working as a barista during undergrad. Such a minor gesture.
But then it started to seem a little more totemic.
She wore it to her first neuropsychological appointment at age 60, when doctors said dementia was
"out of the picture."
"She's too young."
"There's no way."
A year later, in the same office, again the ring, tapping every once in a while on the doctor's desk. This time a different diagnosis.
“We were wrong.”
"It's dementia.”
“There's nothing you can do.”
“You best get your things in order."
Mom, 61, with a mind dissolving and with that ring shining on her middle finger.
When the diagnosis cut into me, making me fully aware of the fatality and futility of her fate, my mind raced forward into the future.
What I thought would happen:
A gentle succumbing to death in a couple of years, tops. "A brief but courageous journey through Alzheimer's. She died peacefully in her sleep with her family by her side."
And then I would be given her belongings after her death, like it's supposed to happen. I'd nobly receive the white package marked heavily with a thick, black Sharpie: "Please give to Elizabeth Gregory's family. Thanks."
What actually happened:
Kevin, my longtime partner and an unwavering caregiver to my mother, who is now 64 and severestage, handed me the white envelope a few nights ago. He didn't know what was in it. He was simply obeying the instructions on the package.
When I opened it, I turned the ring over in my hand, slipped it onto my right middle finger and quietly cried. Kevin shoved the empty envelope in his back pocket.
"But Mom's still alive," I thought.
My mother is not gone. Not dead. Her mind is buried in a conscious entropy where nothing is the same and where her reality shifts with every blink.
All this and she cannot even keep her little $98 ring.
I understand the logic behind handing the ring back to family. She might lose it. She'll get it stuck on something. She'll get food, or something worse, in it. What I don't understand is how to accept these little relics from my mom while she is still living.
I'm not sure what to do with the ring. Maybe I'll melt it down. Pawn it. Or "just wear it," as I'd once demanded her to do.
Maybe I'll give it to my niece, Mara, the one my mom now calls Lonna.
For now, I've stashed it next to Mom's wedding band in a jewelry tin. It might stay there for a long time. I might take it out tonight and slip it onto my finger.
Whatever I decide, I don't need to see it to know it still glows.
This essay was first published on September 4, 2016, in The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead.