After Alzheimer’s great contradiction, Mom has gone home

Anna Louise Farmer

Anna Louise Farmer

The phone rang at 3:30 a.m.

As soon as I could shake off the sleep enough to know that it wasn’t the alarm, I knew exactly what was going on.

Anna Louise Farmer, my mother, died early in the morning on Oct. 21. She passed at home, slipping from this earth after a long fight with Alzheimer’s disease. She was 82.

A strong and independent woman, she had been robbed of her memories and her personality, but never her humanity. She was a shadow of herself, but the traces of her life and who she had been were still there in her kind eyes and sly sense of humor. Obscured for sure, but still hanging on.

She had taken a turn for the worse in September. She stopped walking. Stopped talking. Her breathing was labored. She wasn’t eating much. The doctors and nurses said that we should consider hospice or palliative care.

We did. The hospital bed was brought into her home. Her medicine was changed. Oxygen hooked up. Plans were made.

And then, she stabilized. She was able to sit up. She started talking — a little. Her appetite returned. Her sweet tooth was back.

Death forestalled.

With the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, there’s no timeline for decline. Death can come quickly or a person can linger for years in the netherworld between this life and the next.

I decided to wait until after Election Day to go home and see her. I’m involved in a local campaign in Portland, helping with important non-discrimination work around the country, guiding clients through one crisis or the next. Soccer season is full on, school has just started. Big meetings. Conferences to attend. Oh, so important stuff. Lots of reasons to wait.

Blah. Blah.

Mom would hang on until I got there.

She didn’t. She couldn’t.

I had compartmentalized my grief, stuffed it away into a series of practical decisions. I couldn’t deal, wouldn’t deal, with the enormity or the emotion. So I hid behind excuses. I waited. There would be time.

There wasn’t.

I missed my chance to say goodbye one more time. And I regret it.

And, as I wait for the sun to come up and for the day to start, I’m writing about it because I don’t know what else to do.

Alzheimer’s disease took Mom away a long time ago. But she wasn’t gone, either. It’s the great contradiction.

The disease snuck up on us somehow — even though it had claimed my mom’s mom and a favorite aunt from that side of the family. By the time we realized what was going on, it had already started to take its toll.

And then the long steady decline, punctuated by trips to the hospital, bad telephone calls and questions without good answers.

We managed to keep Mom at home until the end. That’s where she wanted to be.

It was only possible because she had caregivers, nurses and doctors who loved her like blood and because my dad, who died in 1997 at 65, worked hard to stash away some money, believed almost religiously in insurance and earned a small pension through his labor.

Through the years, Sharon and Charlie McCraken and their family became our family, as they took care of Mom, loving her like their own.

In so many ways, we’ve been lucky. Other families facing similar circumstances have fewer options and go through Alzheimer’s alone or with a lot less support and fewer resources.

Mom worked hard and was tireless. She loved to garden and can. She was the rock upon which the family was built.

Where I grew up and in the faith of my childhood, we talk about death as going home. It’s supposed to be comforting to think of the people we love going home to God and the people they loved who went before them.

Mom made her last trip up the mountain to Whitetop, Virginia, to a small family cemetery on the farm where she grew up. She’s close to the small school she attended and where she briefly taught.

The spot overlooks the trickle of a river where she played as a girl, where I played as a boy, and the fields where the cattle, horses and chickens used to live.

She’ll be with her mother and father and her dearly loved little brother, Buddy. Surrounded by family who led the way.

Mom has gone home.

David Farmer

About David Farmer

David Farmer is a political and media consultant in Portland, where he lives with his wife and two children. He was senior adviser to Democrat Mike Michaud’s campaign for governor and a longtime journalist. You can reach him at dfarmer14@hotmail.com.