Elizabeth Berg

Last week, John was having a bad night...I couldn't get him back in bed....he was slumped on the floor in the hall.  He was non-responsive and really out of it...he couldn't stand, and he couldn't talk.  He didn't seem to hear what I was saying.  I wondered if he'd had a stroke...or a heart attack....We've gone down the 911 route so many times.  My choices were kind of dismal...and after giving it a lot of thought, I decided to simply put a pillow under his head, cover him with a blanket and let him sleep in the hall.

But I worried that I was doing the wrong thing.  What if John was dying tonight?  That's what Alzheimer's is all about. It's a certain death sentence.  But it's a sad fading-away.  A very slow,  inexorable evaporation of the person they used to be.   

Of course, I COULDN'T sleep.  Some nights, you just can't sleep cuz of all the crying.....

So -- I decided to finish the book I was reading.  "Say When" by Elizabeth Berg.  One of my favorite authors...

 

At 3:00 in the morning...On the second to the last page of the book....I read...

 ...He thought of his mother, saying how, after her husband had died, she still listened for his car.  Griffin's father had had a heart attack in the middle of the night, and the day after the funeral Griffin had sat with his mother on the sofa in the living room, the blinds drawn, holding her hand as she wept without speaking for nearly an hour straight, the racking kind of sobs that hurt the observer nearly as much as the one weeping.  Then, abruptly, she had stopped.  She had blown her nose, signed hugely, and stood up.  She'd said, "I am going to lie down on my bed, under my blue satin quilt, for a day and a night.  Do not disturb me.  Do not ask me anything, and do not ask me for anything.  I'm going to remember every good thing I can think of about your father, and I am going to remember every bad thing.  And then I'm going to come down to the kitchen and make some eggs and fried potatoes, and start living what's left of my life."

*********

Wow.  She is SUCH a good writer...