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Mom’s last Thanksgiving dinner was about ten months before she died. We left home early to make the 300-mile trip to have Thanksgiving lunch with Mom. We walked in shortly before lunch time. Mom had broken a hip a few months before and was now using a special walker, where she was strapped in and could not fall.
As we walked in, a nurse was bringing Mom out of her room. Mom was struggling to undo the seat belt so she could get out of the walker. She did not know my wife and I. She asked if I carried a knife that she could borrow to cut the seat belt off. As I leaned over near her, she slugged me a good one on the jaw.
She began to realize we were family, but did not actually know who we were. As we ate, she used very generic terms related to family. She asked how our family was. She asked if we had seen my siblings who lived there, but never mentioned my name or my youngest sister who lived 400 miles away.
When the meal was complete, we were sitting there talking and a nurse came up. She asked how everything was. Mom told her that she wanted the nurse to meet her brother, without a name. The nurse told her that I was not her brother, but her oldest son. Mom looked shocked and said, “He is?”
We visited more that afternoon, but she remained very generic in her comments. She never really knew who we were.
The next morning we walked in and Mom knew us instantly. She asked when we had gotten to town and did we plan to stay at her house, which is what we normally did on those trips. She never remembered that we had already spent much of Thanksgiving Day with her.
Shortly after that trip, she never knew any of us when we visited. She died ten months later.
Copyright © Jerry Blackerby 2008, 2009