Pressure
I’m feeling overwhelmed.
The world presses in from all sides.
I’m tired.
Every day I want to cry.
I don’t know what to do to make it better.
I finally realize that there’s nothing I can do.
I just have to keep going until I come out the other side
Wherever that is.


----
There’s nothing we can do about it, they say.
Just go home and wait.
Waiting for someone to die is depressing.
How sad, people say.
It must be so hard on you.
No one tells you about the endless days
Watching her fumble through her routine.
Day after day after day after day. Slipping
More each day.
My dad lived for another ten years,
The neurologist told her.
Oh my god, my mother said to me later,
Not another ten years. I don’t want to
Do that to any of you.
The problem is, of course, that my mother stopped living
When they gave the diagnosis.
Now she spends her days waiting to die.
There’s a big difference.

____
Ah, ah, ah! My mother cries out as she
Loses her balance, turns,
hits the table with her hip
Bounces off the chair and turns again
Ah, ah, ah - I finally reach her, catch her,
Hold her hands to steady her -
Just let me sit down here.
She’s ok, just shaken.
I hold her hands and lead her carefully
Across the room
To safety.
----------
My friend the nurse listens carefully, shakes her head.
That doesn’t sound like Alzheimer’s, she says.
Too much physical deterioration.
Haven’t the doctors done this test, or that test
Haven’t they tried to find out what else it could be?
I don’t know, I tell her. They all keep saying it’s Alzheimer’s.
Last summer our cousins, all nurses, clustered around and listened
And chatted - doesn’t look like Alzheimer’s to us, they say.
Sure there’s not a misdiagnosis?
She’s too much present, mentally
And too deteriorated physically.
Doesn’t act like Alzheimer’s.
But in the fall the neurologist gently discloses the brain scan results
Deterioration consistent with Alzheimer’s.
All hope is crushed.
My mother withdraws, prepares to die.
And now we’ve spent months, waiting.
Watching as she shrivels into herself
Crumbles away one ability at a time.
It’s as though she’s shutting down all exterior functions
One by one
As she hangs on tightly to the small thread of self
That ties her to life.
----------
No one listens to the daughter.
Get a second opinion, I insist.
Take her up to OHSU.
I call, I talk to people, I get the information.
I get nowhere.
After her first two falls I say, you need to go to the physical
Therapist, Mom. The osteopath massage therapist acupuncturist pain pills antidepressants.
You should be going to the gym. Let’s at least find another doctor.
Oh no, it’s too expensive. I can’t do that. I don’t want to do that.
Mom, you don’t have to live in pain. We can do something.
Oh no, it’s all right. I don’t want to spend the money.
Dad, you have to make her go. You have to take her somewhere
Talk to someone else
Find out what’s really wrong with her.
But it was all they could do
To do what they did.
I finally realized, you can’t make people do any more than they are able to do.
This was it for them, all they could do.
And in the end, would it have made any difference, at all?
-----------------