I Remember That I Love You
I’ve had this screencap of a Tweet by Dr. Loly Spencer saved on the desktop of my computer since I saw it out in the wild several months ago, because my god, as someone who had cared for a parent who had spiraled from the effects of dementia, it struck me. Hard.
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I have always known I’d miss my mother.
That sounds trite, I’m sure, but my mother’s death was something I had dreaded since I was 10 years old. My father had died that summer, and I often wondered about what on earth would happen if my mother was to die as well.
I mean, I knew I’d end up being cared for by one of my older siblings - which one, who knows, as they were all beautiful, hot messes in their own individual ways. This never came to pass, though, thank goodness.
But I always had the inevitable loss of my mother lodged into the back of my brain and it would torment me at the weirdest times, long before any signs that she would be departing this realm.
My mother and I always were and would remain close, my near-daily phone calls to her from where I had moved to being a point of contention between my future ex-husband and I, as he, a man estranged from his mother, didn’t understand why I felt the need to talk to her so frequently, mostly because long-distance calls still drove up our monthly phone bill.
“I’m literally all she has,” was my excuse, not that I should have had to provide one. But it was more than that. She was literally all I had as well, and had been for most of my life. She was everything to me.
Decades later, when it came time for her to be cared for as the beginnings of dementia and the trappings of age, for lack of better words, had made living alone nearly impossible for my fiercely independent mother; it was a no-brainer that I would be the one to provide that care.