The Yellow Wallpaper

I’ll be keeping this blog up indefinitely in the hopes that it may help someone who is caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease, but this will probably be my last post.  (Never say never.)  I’ll check it periodically and maybe update the links, but I’m moving to another blog: Songs from a Spiral Tree

I’ve begun the new blog as a writing challenge to myself–I won’t be posting daily but will gather my thoughts on certain topics and compose short essays about them.  I’ve lost count of the many blogs I’ve turned to at least once for counsel and answers and entertainment, and I’m hoping I can contribute to the meta-conversation.

My gratitude goes to all who have taken the time to read and comment on this blog. I have made some wonderful friends who have helped me in ways I can’t begin to describe.

Today was one of those flat summer days–flannel-colored sky and spongy air. I usually wake up on Sunday morning with a list of chores that should have been done on Saturday, and today was no different. Yesterday was a washout because my “post-traumatic” migraine (entirely expected) kept me out of the sunshine and in my own brooding shadow all day. So today I got up and set to doing the bill-paying, clothes-washing and house-cleaning that I had put off.

But first I had to establish what day it was for my mother, who invariably believes that Saturday is Sunday, and Sunday is Monday. We have this conversation each and every week. Once that’s settled, she tells me that she can no longer walk–usually after wandering in and out of the kitchen and bathroom several times and then making her bed. I give her her pills and her cane and remind her that she has to begin the day slowly, then I make those cinnamon buns that come in the tube, which perks her up immediately.

“Where are all the dogs?” I hear her ask, and I sigh.

“Mom, Dustin died.”

“I know that, but where are the others?” We try to establish which dogs she means, a conversation that wilts pretty quickly.

“Where’s Daddy?”

“It’s just you and me, today,” I say. I’m getting better at the evasive reply.

“I thought he was just here.”

“Not today.”

She looks puzzled for a few moments. I ask her if she’d like to look at the Sunday paper but she says no, and within fifteen minutes has slumped over, asleep, on the couch.

I shower and dress, check my email, and then begin to clean the bathroom. Here is where something mildly remarkable occurs. I spritz Chlorox cleanser over the bathroom sink and counter, and tear several sheets of paper towelling from the roll. Before wiping the sink I notice that the paper towel has a pattern printed on it–nothing memorable, just some floral designs. But on every other sheet is also printed a quotation, and I expect to read the usual banal/inspirational sentiment. The sheet I had pulled, however, had a quote from Katherine Mansfield:

“Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.”

What??! I stood there and stared at the paper towel, surprised and a little thrilled to find such philosophical resonance on a household cleaning product. Could this be? And what did it mean?

First of all, Katherine Mansfield was one of my writing teachers. Not literally, of course, but the first “real” English teacher I had in high school assigned us Mansfield’s story “Miss Brill” to read. It affected me profoundly, although I didn’t realize it at the time. I remember leaving myself behind as I read the story–it took me somewhere else and then brought me back. Her photograph accompanied the text–probably the most reproduced photo of her, in profile, her hair pinned up untidily–and I stared at this woman as if I’d known her from somewhere and then carried the image away with me.

Years later I made a study of her fiction, her letters and her short life. She grew up in New Zealand before moving to London, where she lived on the periphery of the Bloomsbury Group and moved warily around the likes of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. She was inspired by Chekhov, and her fiction is like layers and layers of different colored tissue paper pressed together to create a deceptively simple picture of a deep moment in time. Her subject matter is not “plot-driven” as much as it is revealed, through details of gesture and clothing. Although not the intellect that Woolf was, Mansfield was the more gifted writer of fiction.

So having her “speak” to me by way of a paper towel… Well, how could I not stop and relish the absurdity and the timeliness of it?

“Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.”

What does this mean? Do things change as a result of our accepting them? Do we change them by accepting them? Or is change the reminder to us that acceptance is a momentary act–a brief one-ness before we continue on our separate ways? Or is acceptance and change the inevitable progress of life, the cause and effect of mindful living?

Or maybe someone at the Sparkle paper towel factory was gently reprimanding those of us who only clean our bathrooms periodically?

No. I’ve decided that this little experience was, at the very least, a reminder of how the “quotidian” can wink at us, pull back the curtain for a second, and then let it drop before we can catch our breath. There are surprises in the most mundane moments of the day, just as the most tumultuous happenings can seem mundane.

My friend Michael, author of Smoke & Mirrors, is doing something wonderful and creating a webring for blogs that chronicle personal journeys through dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease–The Memory Lane Webring. I’ve already joined this ring–if you scroll down to the new graphic on my sidebar and click on that, you’ll be taken to the webring homepage. If you then click on “Memory Lane link page” (in the left sidebar), you’ll arrive at the resource page.

Michael was the first connection I made after beginning my blog. I was trolling about the blogosphere, looking for others who had family members with dementia, when I came upon this entry. It’s one of many in his blog that eloquently deal with his parents’ struggles (his Mom died a year ago July 15th). He writes what I consider to be “blog poetry”–and when I read his August 3rd post about his intention to create the webring I asked him where I could sign up.

I’ve been trying to keep a list of active personal and informational blogs in my own blogroll, but the value of a webring is in having the official connection among them all–the graphical link that leads to the hub. I am more than happy to have my blog associated with Michael’s, as well as with any and all of the blogs in my blogroll. I’ve found some wonderful friendships through this writing.  If you’d like to contact Michael, I know he’s open to input about the webring–visit his blog or the webring.  I think it’s a terrific idea.

Not much to report, other than the obvious change in my theme. I had been on the lookout for something with a yellow background and liked this one, which is called RetroFlowers. I like the overall balance of the elements and find the text to be much more readable than my last theme. I also liked the header image–it’s suggestive enough to call to mind the wallpaper in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novella.

I think the presentation change mirrors a change in my attitude toward this blog. I began it on an impulse–it was a way to objectify my thoughts, to leave my own little breadcrumb trail. I wasn’t writing for anyone but myself. But the writing inspired me to explore this particular corner of the blogosphere, and, as is evident from my growing blog roll, I’ve met some remarkable people on the way. I feel as if I’ve found a community, and this has been a wonderful surprise for me.

As a result, I now have some friends who are making my caregiving experience a lot less lonely. Not only do they know–in their individual ways–what it’s like to become your parent’s parent, but they also challenge me to look at this experience from different vantage points. And I’ve discovered that they are giving me the strength to cope, to face what I can’t change, to see the humor and the meaning in it.

So I take back what I said in my first sentence–I do have something to report. I am reporting that what began as my little voice crying in the wilderness has become one side in an ongoing conversation. And it’s the conversation that is keeping me afloat.

I’ve just finished reading Sue Miller’s The Story of my Father, an account of her Dad’s Alzheimer’s Disease. I was a fan of Miller’s writing well before I found this memoir–her novels include The Good Mother and Inventing the Abbotts. Graceful, evocative writing and the willingness to explore the darker side of life are two hallmarks of her work. This memoir is no different. I finished it in no time (it usually takes me awhile to read a book because I don’t have many long stretches of reading time, but I carted this one around with me and read it on coffeebreak or when I had ten minutes to myself). Her father’s story is familiar to many of us, yet new in its detail.

I was especially engrossed in the “Afterword”, where she comes to terms with her own difficulty in writing about her father and finally articulates just how her own writing process has become a way to heal. Her conclusion is not glib.

“For it is by writing, by the simultaneously pleasurable and painful processes of working my way through the material I collected and made of the years I labored on this memoir, that I’ve come to see that his consolation would always have lain beyond the reach of any story I could have made of his life. But it is by the making of the story, and by everything that changed in my understanding of him and of myself as I made it, that I have been, as the writer that I am, also consoled.”