Mom and Memories of Days Gone By

My 87-year-old mother has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Or, as she put it, her “forgetter” is working overtime.

We visited Mom in Sacramento recently at the upscale residential facility where she lives. I asked her, as we arrived to take her to brunch, if she could play the piano for me. It might be the last time that she would play the songs I knew as a child.

Despite the ravages of age and decreasing short-term memory, Mom sat at the keyboard and began playing. I filmed her with the video camera as she played.

My formative years were spent listening to Dad preach and Mom play the piano. When I was born in Huntington Park in 1942, Dad was a preacher at a little storefront church in El Sereno. During the 1940s and 1950s, Dad and our family moved from church to church. Dad loved the Lord, but he never got along with the governing boards of his little churches.

I learned to make friends quickly because I knew that we would move within a year. We never owned a home or had financial resources. Mom was always the talented piano player who sacrificed formal training (and a scholarship) to be an itinerant preacher’s wife.

We had a traveling musical family that visited our church. Every member of the family--and they had several children--either played an instrument or sang. They traveled in a dilapidated school bus that always embarrassed me when my friends saw it parked at our parsonage.

When the family provided music for Dad’s weeklong revival services, they would share our one-bedroom parsonage where Mom, Dad, my three brothers and I lived. It was crowded but Mom always was gracious.

The “musical” family sometimes would stay on for months as they searched for another church at which to perform. Their long visits were no doubt related to the level of their talent.

Mom always played the offertory while the offering plate was being passed at Dad’s little churches. And that’s what I remembered on the Sunday morning in Sacramento as Mom’s hands danced across the keyboard one more time.

The ladies waiting for brunch at Mom’s facility applauded as she finished. Mom, to the ladies, is someone who often comes to their meals in mismatched clothes. Mom sometimes thinks that lunch is breakfast and she gets terribly confused. Her “forgetter” is at work.

Dad died of a heart attack in 1973. As we visited with mom and she asked me whatever happened to my dad, I realized what a terrible impact that Alzheimer’s has on its victims.

We visited the Vietnam Memorial in Sacramento on our trip. As Mom gazed at the name of my kid brother, she asked if we had ever had a funeral service for him. It was a profoundly sad question.

Mom is in excellent physical condition. But her mind is slowly shutting down. We will soon move her from a place where she lives independently to one where she will be assisted. After that, she will be transferred to a skilled nursing facility where she will no longer be able to express her wonderful talent on the piano. She’s a wonderful Mom and my kids don’t understand she can’t come home with us. We explained that maintaining someone with Alzheimer’s is difficult. Love and compassion don’t keep the victims of this condition from wandering away. And there are medical complications as the condition worsens.

As Mom played the piano I realized that it might be the last time that I hear her offertory--the collection of songs I knew as a child. But there will be my memories.