Coffee with Mom

by Mike Glenn

  They were. They all were. She had a lifetime of stories to share.

  Coffee with Mom: “The only thing the doctor told me was what I already told him. Next time, I’ll just go talk to a parrot.”

  Anyone who met my mom loved her.

  But things were changing, and the doctors were confirming our worst fears. Mom had a problem, and it wasn’t going to get better.

  Mom was prescribed rehab after her surgery. Most of the exercises were focused on her balance and coordination. She did pretty well, but she wasn’t always a compliant patient.

  “Did you know what they made me do today?”

  “No, ma’am. What did they make you do?”

  “I had to walk across the room toe to heel. One foot in front of the other. Now, who walks like that? What good does it do to get really good at something no one ever does?”

  “Well, keep at it, Mom. You’re doing great.”

  But she didn’t do great at everything. She couldn’t remember words. In one test, she was given three words to remember. They would move on and talk about something else, and then ask Mom to recall the three words. She couldn’t. Again, she had a perfect alibi.

  “Why should I have to remember everything for them? If it’s important to them, they should write it down like I do. I write everything down. They should learn to do that too.” And she did write everything down. Her purse was filled with little notebooks with scribbled notes of things she didn’t want to forget—appointments, phone numbers, people’s names, and grocery lists.

  And then, the big rock dropped. She failed the driving test. She was told to drive around the neighborhoods around Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and when they were sufficiently away from the hospital, the therapists told Mom to find her way back. For most of us, it would have been a simple process of determining where we were located in relationship to the hospital and driving back. We may not have taken the most direct route back, but most of us would have gotten there.

  It wasn’t simple for my mom. When the therapist told her to drive back, she panicked. She couldn’t figure out where she was or how to get back.

  She flunked the driving test.

  The therapists didn’t say anything when they walked back into the rehab center, but Mom barely waited until she got to me.

  “These idiots say I can’t drive. They say I flunked the driver’s test. I’ve been driving since I was twelve years old. I used to drive my sisters to school and church after our mother died. I’ve never had an accident. I’ve never had a ticket. Then these educated, blue-coat-wearing idiots tell me I can’t drive. Well, I’m going to drive. They can’t tell me what to do. I’m going to drive. You’re not going to take my car away.”

  I couldn’t get a word in. Mom never seemed to take a breath. I got the feeling that she thought if she just kept talking, no one could tell her she couldn’t drive. This was going to be a fight, and I wasn’t ready for it. She didn’t have her car with her in Nashville, but she would go back home soon. What would I do then?

  “Mom, no one is going to take your keys from you. We still have a couple of doctors’ visits to go. Let’s talk to them, and we’ll get all of the information together then sit down to make a good decision. Just like we always do.”

  I wasn’t lying or making things up. We did have two more doctors’ visits. They didn’t go well either.

  The first doctor was a nationally known psychiatrist who specialized in Alzheimer’s. He was the guy who wrote the articles and did the studies everyone else quoted. The appointment was short and to the point. His diagnosis was definitive.

  “She has Alzheimer’s, and from her MRI films, I’d say she has vascular dementia as well. You need to start thinking about a place for your mother to live. She can’t live by herself. She’s going to need someone to look after her. Do you have plans?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Did you know smell is one of the first senses to be affected by Alzheimer’s?” the doctor asked. “That’s why so many of these patients have kitchen fires. They can’t smell the food burning. Your mother couldn’t tell the difference between the smell of chocolate and ammonia. She failed every one of the memory tests. You need to start making plans for her.”

  We still had one more doctor to go. A geriatric neurologist who specialized in senior adults and their brain issues. His diagnosis was just as fast and just as definitive.

  My mom had Alzheimer’s, and she wasn’t going to get better.

  She wasn’t going to give up either.

  “I don’t have Alzheimer’s. There’s nothing wrong with my brain. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’ve just been under a lot of pressure. Your daddy was sick, and I cared for him around the clock for the last twenty years. You have no idea how hard that was on me. And I had to take care of everything. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m just tired.”

  “But, Mom, the doctors . . .”

  “Doctors? What doctors? Those idiots? What do they know? Touch your nose, walk backward, who’s the president? Like I was on some kind of game show. They didn’t ask me anything that mattered. Like what bank do I go to? Where’s my church, or who’s my pastor? They just ask me a bunch of nothing, and when I wouldn’t play, they told you to stick me in a home.”

  “Mom, no one is going to stick you in a home.”

  “You know, when my grandmother and granddaddy got old, the children just built them a little house on the farm and cared for their parents. I can remember going out to their little house to play. But children don’t do that anymore. They just stick the old folks in homes and forget all about them.”

  “Mom, we don’t live on a farm.”

  Then, the paranoia returned.

  “I bet you’ve been planning this all along, haven’t you? You think you’re just going to throw me out of my house and steal all my stuff. Well, you’ve got another thing coming if you think you’re going to get one dime from me. I’ll dig a hole and hide it in the yard. After everything your father and I did for you. We bought you cars, helped you buy your first house, helped put your boys through college, and now, you’re going to just throw me in the street. Take me home. Take me home right now. I don’t want to stay here anymore. Take me home now.”

  “It’s too late to take you home tonight. We’ll go tomorrow.”

  “You’re lying. We’re not going tomorrow. You’re such a liar. I wonder what your church would think if I told them what a lying [expletive] you are.”

  Coffee with Mom: “Sometimes I think you guys have Alzheimer’s and not me. Seems to me you’re the ones with the problems. I’m fine.”

  Yep, that’s right. My own mother called me a lying [expletive]. She would do worse. I wouldn’t be prepared for that either.

  They say Alzheimer’s isn’t contagious. Maybe not. I just know when Mom was diagnosed we were all infected.

  It wasn’t just my mom who had Alzheimer’s. We all did, and this journey was just getting started.

  Chapter 5

  Taking the Car Keys

  Coffee with Mom: “I’m going to buy a car. Don’t worry. I’ll stop by your house and tell you goodbye.”

  Mom and Dad moved to Huntsville in 1961. During that time, they had made friends with everyone in the city. Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but it’s not much of one. They knew everybody, and everybody knew them. Everyone knew Dad had died, and everyone knew Mom lived alone, so her friends watched over her. It wasn’t long before I started getting calls. They would always call me at church because, while no one knew my home number, Mom and Dad had told everyone about the church where I am pastor. Before long, it wasn’t unusual to have three or four messages a day.

  Almost all of them began with the same request, “Please don’t tell your mother I called.” Then they would tell me the latest adventure caused by Mom’s disease. The stories ran
ged from funny to downright scary. One time she showed up at her usual restaurant for breakfast at four in the morning. She banged on the door until the cooks came out and told her they weren’t open yet. What made the story funny was she argued with them that it wasn’t four o’clock in the morning.

  I still smile when I hold that picture in my head. The cooks at this southern meat and three, wiping their hands on their aprons, pointing to their watches, and explaining to my mom it was too early to be open. Mom, of course, wouldn’t hear them. She would tell them it was time for breakfast, and they’d better be ready to serve her and her friends. She’d tell them she’d been coming to their restaurant for fifty years, and she wanted breakfast.

  My mom was never wrong. If she was, you’d never get her to admit it.

  She started showing up at neighbors’ houses on wrong days for events, and friends began to notice scratches and dents in her car. I had seen them too, and when I asked Mom about the damage to her car, she said teenagers had been vandalizing cars in the neighborhood.

  For that matter, I felt I was arguing with a teenager. I knew she was lying. She knew she was lying, but she was going to see just how far she could run with it. If I challenged her, she would tell me Dad did most of that damage. The truth was Dad never drove her car. He always drove his pickup. If they drove Mom’s car, then Mom drove. She never let anyone drive her car. Mom would never give up control for that long.

  Her friends were telling me she shouldn’t drive. Her doctors were telling me she shouldn’t drive. I knew she shouldn’t drive. The therapists at Vanderbilt had advised me to take the keys. The doctors at Vanderbilt had advised me to help my mother find “alternative transportation.” The vote was unanimous. Everyone agreed something had to be done.

  Which meant, of course, that I was the one who was going to have to do something. While everyone agreed something needed to be done, no one had the guts to confront my mom. Everyone would leave that up to me.

  Coffee with Mom: “Have you bought me a car yet? I could have built a car in the time I’ve been sitting here waiting on you.”

  While everyone might have agreed that Mom shouldn’t be driving, Mom vetoed everyone else’s suggestions and thoughts.

  I was Mom’s son. My mom and I have always had a very close relationship. Whenever my dad was facing a complicated situation with my mom, he would call me and tell me, “You need to talk to your mom.”

  And now, I would be the one to talk to her about her car, the keys, and the rest of her life.

  This was going to be a suicide mission.

  “I’ve been driving since I was twelve years old. When my mother died, my daddy would go to work, and I would be in charge of my three little sisters. We would drive to school. I would pick them up. I would take them over to our aunt’s house who kept us. I would take them to church. I did everything, and I did it all driving. And I’m not going to stop driving now,” she added. “I’m fine. There’s nothing wrong with me. You just have no idea how your daddy’s death has affected me. When you lose your mate, you lose everything. We did everything together, and sometimes when you all think I’m not paying attention, I’m thinking about him. I wish he hadn’t died. I’m just lost without him.”

  “I understand that, Mom, but we’re talking about your driving now. There does seem to be some problems.” (I was still under the impression I could reason with my mom.)

  “What problems? I bumped into a few things. Mike, you know how tight that driveway is. Your daddy used to run into things all of the time back there and you never took his keys away.”

  “But the doctors . . .”

  “What doctors?”

  “Every doctor we talked to, Mom.”

  “Those whack jobs at Vanderbilt? The ones who made me walk around and wave my arms in the air to prove to them I wouldn’t fall over? The doctors who made me walk around toe to heel like I was a little girl in dance class?”

  “Mom, they’re not whack jobs. I took you to the best doctors I could find.”

  “Well, you should have kept looking. Those doctors asked me some stupid questions for about ten minutes, and then miraculously concluded I shouldn’t be driving. Who do they think they are?”

  “Mom, you failed the driving test.”

  “I got lost in downtown Nashville. I didn’t get lost at home. I got lost in a city where I had never driven. Let me take the driving test here, in my hometown. I’ll bet I’ll pass the test here.”

  “But, Mom . . .”

  That’s the problem when you’re dealing with an Alzheimer’s patient; sometimes they make sense. Well, almost. What if we did allow her to take the test in Huntsville? What if she was just confused being in a strange city and panicked when she realized what was at stake?

  I was a rookie at doing this, and I was getting schooled by my own mother. One of her tactics was to create enough confusion so I couldn’t tell which way was up. I wanted to do the right thing, but what was the right thing?

  I knew I wasn’t trying to take anything from my mother. I knew I was only trying to protect her, but she would throw up just enough smoke that sometimes I would end up being unsure of my own motives.

  “Mike,” my friends would say, “that’s just the disease talking.”

  I knew that, but it looked like my mother.

  I had to learn, for one thing, to have the plan already worked out before I started talking to my mom. If I got into a debate with her, she would create such chaos in the conversation that I would forget what we were talking about. More than once I would come home from visiting my mom, and Jeannie would ask if I had accomplished the task I went to Huntsville to do.

  “No,” I would say, “I didn’t.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I just go so confused.”

  “Sometimes,” Jeannie would say, “I think you’re the one with Alzheimer’s.” And some days, I thought that too.

  My mom’s next move was bargaining. What if she promised just to drive to the bank, the grocery store, and to church, but nowhere else? She would be careful, and she would only drive in times of low traffic. Besides, on Sunday morning when she went to church, there was no one on the road. She’d be fine.

  Okay, I know what you’re thinking. Surely, he didn’t fall for that one. Yes, I did. I’m not proud, but like I said, dealing with an Alzheimer’s patient, you get a little crazy yourself.

  And you know what happened. The first way I knew Mom was lying to me—besides my own common sense—was a picture sent to me from my nephew. My nephew had taken his family to our family’s lake house, and Mom had driven out there to see them. There she was in the picture! Standing on the deck holding her great-grandchild.

  “Mom, what were you doing at the lake?”

  “I didn’t go to the lake.”

  “Mom, I have a picture of you on the deck holding your great-grandchild. How did you get out to the lake?”

  “Oh, that? It was so good to see all of them. That little boy has grown up so much. He’s so cute . . .”

  “Mom! How did you get to the lake?”

  “I drove. I just ran out there to get everything unlocked and hooked up for them. They had such a great time.”

  “Mom, you promised you wouldn’t drive to the lake house.”

  “Well, sometimes things can’t be helped.”

  “Mom, you can’t be driving on the highway like that.”

  “Why, I’m fine. Everything is fine. I just drove out there and drove back. I don’t know why you’re getting all upset. Nothing happened.”

  “Mom, you’re not supposed to be driving at all.”

  “Mike, you’re not going to take my keys—”

  “Mom, I don’t want to, but I’m responsible since the doctors said—”

  “Oh, those whack jobs? They made me walk around with m
y hands in the air . . .” And here we would go again.

  There was one more incident. In the moment, it didn’t seem that big. My friend meant it as a joke, but it hit me like a ton of bricks. One of my good friends is an attorney, and we were talking about our parents. He was dealing with a similar situation with his father. I was talking about my adventure in trying to get my mom to stop driving.

  He laughed, and then he patted me on the back. “Let me tell you your future,” he said. “The plaintiff’s attorney will ask you, ‘Mr. Glenn, did you know your mother shouldn’t be driving? In fact, didn’t your mother’s doctors tell her she shouldn’t be driving? But you let her drive anyway and that’s when she hit the school bus’ . . . And when you answer ‘Yes,’ they come and take all of your stuff too.”

  Wait a minute. I knew Mom shouldn’t be driving. I let her drive anyway. I’m power of attorney. I’m supposed to act in her best interest. And now, everything I have is at risk every time she drives.

  I have never been this afraid. I couldn’t get the keys from her fast enough.

  “You can’t take my keys! I need my keys! You are ruining my life.”

  “Mom, I have no choice. I really have no choice.”

  I got the keys. I got both sets of keys. I thought it was over.

  It wasn’t. She had another set. So, we ended up going through the whole thing again. Once I moved her to Nashville, I sold her car, and she didn’t drive anymore. Well, at least that I’m aware of anyway.

  Sometimes, life gives you hard choices, and sometimes, life doesn’t give you any choice at all. This is where I was. My mom was sick. She could no longer handle her life. I was going to have to do that for her. The problem was, unlike with cancer or heart disease, Mom didn’t know she was sick. At least, Dad knew he was sick.