Sometimes, my mother (who is now age 95 and has severe dementia) calls me by my name and knows that I’m her daughter. Sometimes, though, she calls me Betty – her OLDER sister. I get that she has no memory and gets confused but does she really think I’m older than she is? Maybe I’m expecting too much …. She used to sometimes call me her younger sister’s name (Millie) but she hasn’t done that in a while. That seemed a little more palatable somehow. But even more than the age thing, I was surprised that she focused on Betty.
My mother and Betty were not the best of friends, even as children. They got along when they were young but barely spoke for many of their adult years. Mom’s mother died when Mom was about 12 and Betty was about 16. Two years later, their father also died. During those two years, as the eldest daughter, Betty took charge of the household – she cooked and cleaned for my mother, Millie, and their father. Mom helped with the cleaning, shoveling the driveway, laundry, and other chores, but I don’t think she ever truly considered how much Betty took on … at least until she came to live with me. Mom was very close to her father and Betty was … not. After her father died, Betty went to college/nursing school and became a registered nurse. My mother and her younger sister went to live with relatives – they stayed with their maternal aunt, uncle, and cousins during the school year and went to their paternal grandparent’s farm each summer.
When I was growing up, we rarely discussed that time of upheaval and transition. This was a blind spot for my mother – she only saw how these circumstances and events affected her. It’s like she was stuck in an adolescent, self-focus mode with regard to these people and that situation. This is understandable in a sense – there was no counseling in those days, no effort to help children process all the changes in their lives, and people did not really discuss or understand how these changes have long-lasting impact. Yet, even as an adult and a mother herself, she didn’t seem to connect how multiple people – her sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins – were affected by her parents’ deaths.
When we eventually did talk about it, I remember her surprise at my empathy not only for her but also for Betty and her cousins. While she was always sympathetic to Millie’s plight and was closer to Millie than to the others, she sometimes talked about Betty and her cousins rather harshly. I reminded her that their lives changed too – it wasn’t just her world that was turned upside down. Betty was an adolescent who suddenly had to become an adult after their mother’s death. Her cousins, who were in high school, suddenly had to share their home, parents, and school with two cousins they did not know well. She started to consider things from their perspective and realized that she had been harsh and had not considered how their lives changed.
I think this realization allowed Mom and Betty to reconnect in the later years. They would talk on the phone periodically – usually having the same conversation over and over again! They enjoyed chatting and sharing that sisterly connection. Both were lonely and had memory issues. They compared aches and pains. When Betty died at age 96, Mom was grateful for that reconnection. Perhaps it is those calls that brought Betty to the fore of Mom’s fading memories. I hope she calls for Betty with love, knowing that she and her sister did the best they could when they were vulnerable children and later as infirmed adults.
I just find it fascinating that she calls out for her older sister rather than her mother, her father, her aunt, or even Millie. The challenge is that because of her dementia I will never really know why she sometimes calls for Betty. Maybe she just calls for someone whose name is somewhere in her memory, but I hope it is because she values the love that was put on hold for so many years and came back to her late in life.
