Caring For Mother:
“Caring For Mother,” by Virginia Stem Owens. In the introduction, Owens says something like “this is not a cheerful book,” but it is inspiring for its content and enjoyable for its writing. If there is a genre of Caregiver Memoirs, in which people describe their harrowing experiences as their close relatives or friends end their lives, this surely must rank among the best. The events described take place over the period of seven years in which her proudly independent mother gradually succumbs to physical and mental deterioration. In a sense the story parallels “The Diving Bell and The Butterfly,” in which one of the medical nightmares we all fear comes true. Owens wisely avoids focusing too much on the shortcomings of the medical profession and the endless frustrations for patients and their relatives in the U.S. Healthcare system. Instead, she chronicles her own experiences, especially the inner experiences of conflicted emotions and intellectual adaptation. Always ruthlessly honest, Owens describes emotional acceptance (“serenity”) as a transient experience, probably more the exception than the rule as it would be for anyone. Her intellectual research ranged from medical information to Greek philosophy to religous theology; for an overtly Christian person, Owens references far more Jewish theology than Christian, and declines to make the story into a testing of her personal faith.
After studying Aristotle’s concepts of the “essential whatness” of the soul, Owens creates her own understanding of her mother’s diminished state and their possibilities for communication: “My mother’s “essential whatness,” however little remained accessible to me, was what I tried to touch each day I was with her.”
“As time went by, I grew increasingly convinced of one thing, at least: she [her mother] had an underlying signification system, even in the midst of her dementia. Her intelligence was now entirely emotional. One understood it only by attending to metaphor, not logic. What I watched for were gestures. What I listened for were persistent images. These became the icons through which I recognized whatever self remains to her.”
Medical research seems to have helped her resolve the question of how to react to a patient’s hallucination – to confront/contradict or to mollify by agreement. Owens “… read about a strategy called Validation Therapy used especially with Alzheimer’s patients. It disinquished four successive stages of dementia: disorientation, time confusion, repetitive motions, and a final vegetative state. The therapy aims at helping people resolve certain emotional conflicts before they reach that final stage when the cause of their internal discord will no longer be available to the memory.”
By combining validation with metaphoric interpretation, Owens developed a means of relating to the altered version of her mother – by using her personal understanding of her mother’s history and character, she was able to interpret the delusions and provide sympathetic responses: “The day before my brother or my daughters arrive for visits, she spends the afternoon cooking in her nursing home bed, propped up on pillows, handing me finished dishes to store away,” Owens recounts. “‘Is there enough?’ she asks me with a worried look. ‘Are the beds made?’ These are her metaphors for love.”
Highly recommended.
Reviews of Caring For Mother bring to light the dilemma that Alzheimer’s has created for devout Christians. From Valerie Weaver-Zercher’s review in Books & Culture:
Caring for Mother is, in a word, relentless. Owens is unfailingly honest about the agony of watching her mother lose her faculties, her own frequent sense of failure and guilt, and her floundering faith in a gracious God. She does not shield herself or her readers from the anguish of a parent’s decline with Christian platitudes about heaven or the virtue of a life well-lived; indeed, she quashes the notion that spiritual fortitude or lifelong practices of faith will necessarily carry a person into tranquil twilight years. At the end of her life, Owens’ mother found no comfort in the faith that once sustained her, and she became displeased by any mention of religion. Owens tries repeatedly to help her mother recover her belief, to “find the switch that can flip on that steadfast faith she had always relied on.” In a heartrending scene toward the end of the book, Owens’ mother has a panic attack at the imminence of her death. Gripping her daughter’s hand, she says, “I don’t want to go away from you.” Owens is speechless and can only stroke her mother’s arm, “abashed to discover she loves me more than God.”
Before reading Caring for Mother, I assumed that the serenity that characterizes my own grandmother, who will turn 100 later this year, was bought with the countless hours she has spent throughout life in prayer, Scripture reading, and spiritual attentiveness. She’s the archetypal “prayer warrior,” that most cherished of Christian images of aging: the grandmother who spends hours praying for the struggling great-grandson, the overworked pastor, the granddaughter with three small children who lives an hour’s drive from family (that would be me). It seems that for some people, a lifetime’s stockpile of spiritual resources can be cashed in for peace at the end of life. But Alzheimer’s, which has been called “the theological disease” because it ravages memory and identity, can deplete even the most saintly Christian’s spiritual capital.
Indeed, end-stage dementia threatens the popular Christian narrative of “prayer warrior” aging to its core. That narrative can accomodate some humorous lapses in memory and judgment: the old woman can forget her children’s names, confuse a nurse for a granddaughter, even hobble into the dining room in her slip. What this narrative has not managed to hold, however, is an aging Christian’s agnosticism, what Owens calls, in her mother’s case, “the amputation of her spiritual sensibility.”
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