The past six weeks, maybe longer, have been full of ups and downs. For the most part, however, it has been mostly downs, during which episodes my mother spent most of her days in bed, said how bad she felt, said more than once how she wished she were dead. Mealtimes became unpredictable and were sometimes abandoned altogether and she would make do with an Ensure or a Boost. She repeatedly asked when we were going to see her doctor. We visit his office every four weeks, but when I offered to try to get us in early, she said not to bother, as it meant possibly getting up early, getting dressed and leaving the house. It was too big a mountain to climb. When the day finally came for our scheduled appointment, she was a mess, seemed confused and unable to get ready. All she wanted to do was go back to bed. So I went on my own, explained to her doctor what was going on, and we both agreed she seemed to be depressed. He ordered a substantial array of tests (blood and a chest x-ray) to make sure it was not a health issue, and we waited.

While waiting, something remarkable happened. I managed to link my YouTube account to our TV. Our watching, or in the first instance listening, started out rather haphazardly. My mum was in bed and I was making supper. She simply loves Frank Sinatra, and I found an audio compilation of his greatest hits and put it on at a low volume. She opened her eyes and began to listen. Over the next week or so, we watched a live Sinatra concert and other live appearances, and she began to sing “My Way” over and over again. We know a lot of Sinatra songs from a double CD I have. We used to play in the car when we went for drives. So other Sinatra tunes popped into our heads and we sang them together, to the best our of our limited abilities, as we struggled to remember the words. And slowly she seemed to brighten up. Her bad days were not so bad, and her good days lasted longer.

From Sinatra we went to Bobby Darin, then to other members of Sinatra’s Rat Pack, Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin. And from there we revisited “Dancing With the Stars” and lately we spent quite some time watching segments from “Britain’s Got Talent.” In the case of the latter, she didn’t want to go to bed, but I did. I set her up in bed with her pillows propped up and left her to watch until I’m not sure when.

When we went to her doctor, this past Monday, (we had a two o’clock appointment), she started the day out feeling good, but her mood changed suddenly. She said she didn’t want to go, all she wanted to do was go back to bed. A lot of days can be like that. Up one moment and then down the next. We persevered, however, made it to the doctor’s, and once we arrived she declared, as she often does when we see her doctor, that she felt fine.

Really, Mum? Fine?

Her doctor was aware of her prolonged bout with not feeling fine from my previous solo visit. I became somewhat exasperated when she said she felt fine. I reminded her that no, she was not fine. We have issues. Part of the problem, a very large part, is that when she’s down she cannot remember when she ever felt good, and when she feels good she cannot remember when she ever felt down. A not uncommon situation in people of all ages, but with my mother a lack of perspective amplifies the condition is amplified.

Thankfully she did not make a fuss when her doctor suggested she take a low-dose anti-depressant. He gave us a month’s worth of samples, and we’ll see how she’s doing when we visit him next month.

The good news, of course, is that physically she’s in really good shape. Now if we can only get her mood up and stabilized she can have some happier times to look forward to.

In the meantime my plan is to turn to YouTube when the games shows run out (the Game TV station is a big deal in our household) and the news is too depressing, and find some music to get her motor running.

As an aside, believe it or not, I found a video of my dad playing trumpet in the Oscar Rabin Band back in the late 1930s. He was a professional musician in England until we moved to Canada in 1958, where he continued his career with the Canadian Army Band. He has since passed, and so when I showed this video to my mum, it blew her mind. “There he is. Look, look. First trumpet on the left.” How often does anyone happen to come upon such a chance gift from the past?

I’ve been thinking lately a lot about ships. The ones which pass on the horizon and the ones which sink.

My mum and I are somewhere in between, but I feel we’re taking on water. We’re beginning to list, sometimes to port, sometimes to starboard. I don’t believe we’re about to plunge suddenly into the depths. We’re no Titanic about to split in half and go down while the band plays on. We’re more like a boat with the captain wondering how the heck we got out here so far from shore. Or on a dory or a trawler, or a tugboat which lost its way.

Regardless, on we sail attempting to plug the leaks where we find them. Doing a periodic walkabout from stem to stern with a cart full of rags to plug whatever breaches we may find. Thankfully, so far they have been manageable to a greater or lesser degree. But we are definitely riding lower in the water than when we set off a few years ago.

The other day we went to my mother’s doctor. Apart from a toe fungus, which her doctor says we are managing well, my mother is in pretty good shape. Blood pressure: good; heart and lungs: good; iron: good. She can still walk, though not too far. She can still get up the stairs to our condo, slowly, of course, and with the use of her cane. And we have the push chair for outings. Yesterday, a man from Victoria Lifeline came to change out her call button as the battery was running low. (How they know this I’m not sure.) So help is but the push of a button away. And we have telephone numbers we can call for advice from Geriatric Services and the Alzheimer’s Society.

We went to the South Beach Casino with friends last week. We had a wonderful time playing the machines and had a delicious lunch. (We went out with $60.00 and came back with $59.00! Not bad for an afternoon out.) She was animated, talking and laughing with our friends. But did she remember it? Not so much. She forgot she had called our friend’s house as soon as we arrived home to thank them for a lovely time. Then fifteen minutes later she wanted to call them to thank them for such a lovely time, until I reminded her, “Mum, you just spoke to them.” “Did I?” She did not quite believe me. “Yes, Mum.” “Oh, okay. Thank you. I don’t want them to think I’m losing it.”

And the next day, she can’t recall going to the casino at all.

But she’s pretty good for a 92-year-old gal, though one does have to take with a grain of salt her claims that she has a good memory and that she can still hold a conversation. Yes to the latter, but a qualified no to the former.

Her sense of time is erratic. She’ll insist so many things happened only a few weeks ago, like the passing of my stepfather who passed away in 2020, over three years a go. And that she only came to live with me last month. It’s painful to watch the confusion arise in her face when she realizes she may not be right after all. “Let’s not talk about it,” she might say or she might stick to her guns. In any case, I desist and ask her what she would like for supper or what TV shows she wants to watch.

And her sense of geography can be equally erratic. Sometimes she seems to think we live out in the country when we live only a half-hour drive away from the heart of the downtown.

Minor things to be sure, but we don’t argue about them. We have more important things to concern ourselves with.

So, adrift at sea? Not quite. And although we may not know where we’re going we’re going there full steam ahead. We don’t really have any other choice.

To paraphrase Lennon and McCartney “Please don’t wake me, no don’t shake me…” I’m only dreaming.

In my last post, I was perhaps a little too generous in describing my mother’s current abilities to stay focused and be generally alert. I neglected to mention how much she sleeps, sometimes for a whole day. Up for lunch for a while and then back to bed. Not everyday, but enough days to make me notice.

Why? There could be many reasons, but I have noticed lately that she is dreaming a lot. She will wake up and think she is somewhere in the past with people who have passed on . She thinks she has to go to work, or that we have to pick up one of her sisters at the airport, or friends are coming for dinner and she’s has to hurry to prepare the food, and perhaps most significantly her dreams are now often about Taras, her late second husband. The other day, in fact, while she was lying down, I was in the kitchen making supper, and when I stepped into the living room she told me she had expected to see Taras.

A few words set her straight, bring her back to reality, but something is going on when she is drifting in or out of sleep.

The idea that her procedural memory can remain intact after, as in my mother’s case, a small stroke, while a part of the brain which stores long term memories cannot be accessed, fascinates me. I can’t help wonder if she is finding her memories of family and friends, which are unavailable to her waking self, in her dreams.

I don’t know. But wherever her dreams take her, it seems to be a good place.

Seven years ago, Katrina O’Neil went into cardiac arrest and was without oxygen for 22 minutes.

She was 29 years old, and she went into a coma for three weeks. When she woke up, she thought she was 15.

She didn’t recognize the people around her. She reverted back to being a child and wanted her mother. Because that was what her brain was telling her — that she was just a child. Thirteen years of her memory had been wiped out, and those thirteen years remain for the most part lost.

This is how a recent article posted on a CBC news website starts. The symptoms seemed all too familiar. My mother did not go into a coma of any duration, but I recognized O’Neil’s symptoms as being very similar to what my mother experienced when she had what the doctor called a small or mild stroke.

The CBC article goes on to say that when O’Neil woke up from her coma, she understandably felt confused. She had lost thirteen years of memory. She also had trouble retaining information at first. Reverting back to when she was 15 years old meant O’Neil didn’t remember her three children or their births.

In my mother’s case the memory loss seemed to be connected with her most powerful emotions. She did not know that her husband had died or that all her family, brothers and sisters and her mother, had passed away. For weeks she insisted I was her late sister, Billie. If I tried to contradict her she became very angry, and so for a while I was Billie. A situation which became even more painful when she kept asking where I, her son, was. “Where’s Steven? Why does he not come to visit me? I hope nothing has happened to him.” A very tough few weeks in which I had to involve my cousin in England to swear that he had been to Billie’s funeral. He and a friend of mine helped me to coax my mother out of her stubborn belief that I was her sister, but there are still moments when she forgets and addresses me “Billie.” I am, I am.

That was about two years ago. Now she has accepted the fact that her brothers, sisters, and her mother have passed away. But she still has no sense of time, and when I tell her how many years have passed since her last remaining sister died, she is shocked. She may accept the fact, but it is simply a fact, and in many way she does not always connect it with, nor recognize the amount of time which has passed.

Worse, however, is the situations with her husbands. Her first husband, my dad, died when I was very young. She remarried some years later. Although she has some memories of my dad, they are scattered. She often forgets his name, and is not sure if he was her husband or not, though a prompt from me sets her right. But in the case of her second husband, Taras, she has almost no memories. She cannot remember, for instance, sitting at the dining room table with him or watching TV. Most troubling, however, is she cannot remember the two of them travelling to England to visit my mother’s family. They made multiple visits over the years. These trips were highlights of their time together, but she cannot recall a single visit. And if she does, she thinks I was the person travelling with her, or she had been on her own. We have gone through all the photographs, and there are albums full, chronicling those trips, and more, but they trigger only the vaguest of notions or nothing at all.

And then there’s the mysterious third husband mixed up somewhere between my dad and Taras. She doesn’t know who it is, but she’s sure it’s someone. This is a question to which I end up pleading ignorance.

In the CBC article, which I am practically quoting from here on, the reporter interviewed Dr. Howard Chertkow, a cognitive neurologist and the senior scientist at Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Centre in Toronto, said a situation like O’Neil’s is rare, but it isn’t unheard of.

He said he once had a patient with an almost identical story to that of Kartina O’Neil. Chertkow said the hippocampus, a complex brain structure in the temporal lobe that plays a big role in memory, was likely affected by the lack of oxygen.

“Something special about the hippocampus is that it’s very sensitive to lack of oxygen,” Chertkow said in the interview. “Because when the brain stops getting oxygen, it becomes acidotic. That means that the pH level of the brain goes down.”

He said the hippocampus is very sensitive to acidosis, so the cells break down, stop functioning and die within only a few minutes. Even when the hippocampus is damaged, the rest of the brain is still viable, he said, which is why certain things like O’Neil’s movement, sensation or procedural memory wouldn’t have been affected.

Procedural memory, sometimes called motor memory, has to do with learning how to do things. Chertkow said this type of memory doesn’t need the hippocampus in the same way and relies more on the part of the brain called the cerebellum.

O’Neil was a bus driver before the injury and while she doesn’t remember her training, she said, she has sat in a bus since losing her memory and has known where the air brakes were and many of the operational parts. Chertkow said long-term memories aren’t stored in the hippocampus, but the hippocampus acts as a gateway and the memories are in a network in the cortex and the surface of the brain.

“The long-term memories from before the accident are still there in her brain,” he said. “She just can’t bring them to consciousness.”

Back to my own experience for a minute, the issue of motor skills applies to my mother perfectly. She can walk, though admittedly not too far, is in full possession of all her bodily functions, can talk about all manner of things, makes jokes, laughs, holds conversations, instructs me on how to cook certain dishes, etc.

If you’re interested in finding out more about O’Neil’s story, it is now available in a new documentary by Fredericton filmmaker Robert Gow called Losing Yourself and is available on Accessible Media Inc.

With apologies to the CBC. Thank you for reading.

Not the compilation album put out by the Rolling Stones in 1967, but the kind of flowers you give your mother on Mothers Day. As I write, that was three weeks, and the flowers I gave my mother on Mothers Day (a very attractive, I must admit, bouquet of red, white, and yellow roses) are still in their vast on the dining room table. A bit worse for wear, yes, but still there, and will be, my mother has told me, until the petals start falling off the stems. That’s how much she loves them. She always cries on Mothers Day, but the verse in the card which I gave her (along with a gift card for the place where she gets her hair done) was more heartfelt, I think, than other years. “Cherish” is the word that comes to mind. She wants to cherish the fact that she is my mother and I am her son for as long as she can, for as long as we can.

It’s very hot here today. I was up at five a.m., not because of the heat, but because I’ve been getting out of bed an hour or so earlier than I usually do in an attempt to push on with the manuscript of a short story collection I’m putting together. It’s called “The Thud a Body Makes.” This morning, before sitting down to write this, I completed putting the first corrections into my computer from a printed copy of the manuscript. It’s amazing how many errors you discover when working from the printed page. I’m all fine with computers, but the mind can get lazy when working solely from what appears on the screen. The printed page offers a fresh view of what you’re already familiar with.

This thing about writing has been my saviour. It’s what gets me up in the morning. It’s what I look forward to in the evening while I’m doing the dishes or watching TV with my mum. I showed her the manuscript after I had printed it out to show her what I had been working on. She is very proud of me, and immediately sat down to read the first story with the kind of absolute attention any writer wants a reader to apply. She has for the most part forgotten all about it now, but her devotion lingers and I am happy to serve it the best I can.

Much work, of course, needs to be done before I go looking for a publisher, but correcting the printed manuscript is a few steps along from the beginning of any such project.

Speaking of flowers (or the album”Flowers”), The Rolling Stones seem to have been on my mind because I had a dream recently which involved Mick Jagger. In the dream, I was hanging around with a bunch of people I sort of knew but whom I admired very much. We roamed the streets talking about all sorts of things. I remember feeling depressed and left out, until I realized one of the people in our group was Mick Jagger. Weird, I know. Where did that come from? He came over to me and started talking, trying to make me feel better, telling me my prospects were better than I realized, I was doing the right thing, all that sort of stuff. And when I woke up I felt better in an odd way. Thanks, Mick, wherever you are.

Later this morning, I’m going to visit my best friend. We met in grade two, if you can believe it. He’s in hospital with all sorts of problems. The underlying issue, however, is colon cancer, but since he started chemo treatments as an outpatient he’s ended up back in hospital. He’s had a stroke which has left his left side very weak, and just a few days ago the nurse came in during the middle of the night to check on him and found him lying in a pool of his own blood. It was touch-and-go for a while, but the doctors were able to stop the internal bleeding, and four units of blood later, he was back up to his usual cheerful self. Amazing.

I had to leave my desk for a few minutes when my mother woke up, but now I’m back.

I brought my mother her tea, fibre gummies to keep her bowels working, painted her big toes with a toe fungal treatment, and we talked about the movie we saw last evening, “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” about Tina Turner’s struggle to break free of Ike Turner and make a musical career free from his abusive behaviour, before we went on to sing the first few line of the title song until I turned my attention to set up the air-conditioner so we don’t suffocate.

And the flowers remain, despite the heat.

I’m now going to get ready to go to the hospital, with the words of The Rolling Stones ringing in my head: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime you might just get what you need.”

Thanks, Mick.

When you retire, it’s an often told fact that you will miss your work mates. They fill your days with their company, become friends, some more close than others, but if you’re lucky enough to work in a healthy workplace, as I was, they provide a social group experience that cannot be easily matched. It’s a community of companionship.

I retired when COVID became a global pandemic, so my experience of retiring was like that of everyone else: isolation and strict rules about where you could go. And so like everyone else, my mother and I waited it out. She was most affected by not being about to get her hair done, while my hair grew longer and longer, broken only by a few weeks here and there when the lock downs were lifted, only to be re-imposed again, and friendships were kept alive with emails and phone calls.

Her doctor kept seeing patients throughout, however, so we had working in our favour.

Gradually the situation got better. We were allowed to visit in small numbers depending on vaccination status. It all seems so far away now, the endless weeks and months of isolation.

For me, I had my mother and she had me. We got out for car rides in the bubble of an automobile.

It’s been four years now since my mother came to live with me, and I would not have it any other way. But as she has declined and my responsibilities for my mother’s care has increased, I grow anxious at the thought of meeting someone for lunch on the other side of town, where most of friends reside. (A movie is out of the question.) When I do go out, I try to stay close to home, a request which my friends seem only too happy to honour. Close enough that I can get home relatively quickly should something happen with my mother. We have Victoria Lifeline and should she needs help they will contact me on my cell phone. Call this paranoia, if you want. To me, however, it a precaution triggered by anxiety. I worry a lot, as I think I have mentioned before.

I understand people are available to sit with her, but I think my mother would prefer to be alone while I am out, not time she would like to spend with a stranger. Plus there’s that time limit, having to be home on time, clock watching.

Lately I have noticed an inner self lying behind my social self. When I’m with a friend, I hear myself talking, telling jokes, laughing, I feel a smile break out on my face, only for all that to disappear and my inner self, my regular care giver face, if you like, to emerge. A drained, tired self that lives in a present with no future and an uncertain past.

I can’t count the number of times people tell me I need to take care of myself. I’m sure they’re right. But how? If taking care of myself ends up creating more stress than the taking care of my mother does.

I’m not complaining. I’m just trying to explain all this, to myself, if to no one else.

Being in contact with some of the geriatric services available, is a help but not a solution. I’ve registered for a Zoom meeting to discuss the problems I and others in similar situations are experiencing. I’m curious to hear what others have to say.

Regardless, all in all, I am not unhappy. I have more time than ever before to sit at home and write. In fact, I am editing the manuscript of a short story collection which I hope to submit to a publisher in the near future.

But more of that, and other things later.

Well, maybe not a heaven, but last year I planned a trip that turned out to be well beyond my reach.

I’m a bit of a train nut, and as my retirement approached I was making plans to spend some time on VIA Rail and Amtrak. Then of course, those plans were derailed (please excuse the pun) first when first my stepfather fell sick and had to move into a care home, and then when my mother came to live with me. No how was I going anywhere. And I didn’t want to. My mother, however, did encourage me to take a trip if I wanted. And I did check out some short term care facilities where she might be able to stay for a week or two. But the more I thought about it, the less confident I became with the idea, even though at the time she was still in pretty good shape mentally.

Moving forward a couple of years, I found myself riding the rails with YouTubers who have dedicated railway travel sites. I must have logged a few thousand miles with them, exploring trains from North America, to Europe, and Japan. It’s great stuff, but it’s not the real thing. And I guess I had not given up entirely on the idea of boarding a real train and going somewhere, anywhere.

Enter the push chair. With it, my mother’s mobility suddenly expanded our horizons. We went all over the place with an ease we had not experienced before. And I had a brainwave, more like a brain cramp as it turned out, that we could take the train from Winnipeg to Vancouver, spend a few days, and return by train. (She can’t fly, especially now. Or I am afraid to let her fly.) But a train with a bedroom for two, our meals included, seemed like the perfect opportunity. I put the proposition to her, told her how wonderful it would be, and she said, “Okay.”

With a green light to proceed, I duly books our accommodations on the train, and a hotel only a few blocks from the waterfront. Hurrah! Not only was I going to get my train ride, my mother would have the trip of a lifetime to remember…or not. Her short term was already a problem and was getting worse.

I was thrilled to tell my friends and they were thrilled for us. But then we went to Gimli. It’s a lovely town on the western shore of Lake Manitoba and only about an hour’s drive from Winnipeg. Apart from the car’s air-conditioning breaking down, we arrived safely and in time for lunch. I pulled the push chair out of the trunk and we set off to the restaurant we wanted to go to. Which was when I had an “oh my” moment, and not a good one either.

Though the push chair was absolutely the best way to get around parks and the shopping mall and parking lots, it proved to be not so good on the real streets of a real town. But the restaurant wasn’t too far away, and the bumpy ride was tolerable. We had lunch, and then bravely set off to explore a bit of the town. After only a few blocks, my hands and arms were getting numb from trying to find the smoothest path through sometimes broken sections of sidewalk, with my mum was bouncing all over the place. Not that Gimli isn’t a great place to visit, it is. But I was beginning to worry, maybe the chair wouldn’t be so great either on the streets of Vancouver.

We drove home. My mother didn’t complain about the failure of the air-conditioning as I thought she might, but about sitting in the car for so long. It made her very unconformable. And this was only a two-hour drive, an hour each way. Oh oh. This did not bode well.

Still, I knew we could get her and her push chair onto the train with the help of VIA staff, but what if we got on board and she had a bad day or two bad days, or she wanted to sleep most of the day? The same with Vancouver. Spend our three days there in our room because my mother was feeling too tired to go out? My dreams of a wonderful holiday began to slip away with a bunch of what-ifs, not the least of which being what would happen if she fell seriously ill or had an accident? I’m a bit of a worrywart, okay, I agree. I take after my grandmother in this respect.

After many sleepless nights, I asked my mother if she wouldn’t mind if we did not go to Vancouver. She said, “Okay.”

Hmmm. So I cancelled all our plans, lost almost a thousand dollars in the process, but was able to enjoy a new sense of calm. Day-to-day would be good enough for us. Going to the park and for a drive out into the country would have to do.

I no longer try to figure out ways to get away on a train for a few days. And I’m happy with that. Besides, this summer we might take a ride on The Prairie Dog Central, a vintage train pulled by a steam engine that takes passenger on run out and back at a location not too far from us.

After all, what a heaven for?

I’m 71 and aging along with my 92 year-old mother leaves me with a growing list of questions.

In many ways we are very fortunate. We are mortgage-free, don’t have to struggle with our finances, live close to shops and restaurants, and have access to convenient transportation. Plus we get along very well together, which is probably the most important thing of all.

My mother’s goal, however, is to live to be a hundred, a goal I’d be delighted to see her reach. She seems to think she will be invited to Buckingham Palace in England, will meet the king, and be interviewed on TV and radio. I simply say that will be wonderful. However, what will I be like if she reaches this goal? I’m not sure. Even looking a few years down the road, will I be able to assist her in all that I currently do for her. I am in reasonably good health, but who know what the future might bring.? I don’t want to see her go into long-term care. Although the care home my stepfather was in was a very good facility, no care home can replace the day-to-day living, the tiny little things I do for her, and the company we share together. Even daily visits are filled with hours of waiting in between.

On another, but related matter, she often expresses the worry what would happen to her if anything bad should happen to me. I remind her that we have an answer to cover contingencies for my death, or less catastrophically, if I had to spend even a few days in hospital while recovering from a surgery.

Our back-up plan is this: her god daughter, Nadine, would welcome my mother into her home for a while or forever. We discussed this a few months ago, and before I could even ask, she broached the subject with this generous offer. This took a weight off my mind. My mum’s too, but sometimes she forgets.

So on we go, my mother looking forward to meeting the king on her good days, and feeling her age when she can barely get out of bed on her bad days.

To paraphrase Frank Sinatra’s song “That’s life,” we both sometimes feel like we’re riding high in April, only to be shot down in May.