A long farewell to my mother, 12 years of my daughter and her mother who gradually lost her memory
Dementia is a disease of cognitive and memory deterioration, and Alzheimer's disease is the most common subspecies of dementia.
There is no cure for dementia, and it can only be slowed down by drugs and care.
From her mother’s diagnosis of dementia in the summer of 2007 to her mother’s death in the winter of 2019, Lu Xiaoya spent 12 years making "the longest farewell" with her mother.
In the day-to-day care, Lu Xiaoya, who admitted that she “has never experienced much maternal love” since she was a child, established an intimate relationship with her mother that she had never had before.
Lu Xiaoya began to understand her mother, and also began to think about the impact of "lack of love" on herself and her family.
Now, 68-year-old Lu Xiaoya has become a gentle and elegant old lady.
She did not hesitate to hide her feelings, and then talked about her mother, crying and laughing.
Once, Lu Xiaoya was obsessed with finding traces of maternal love, but now she chooses to let it go: "I have the ability to love, this is enough."
"How is my mother?" "Not bad"
Lu Xiaoya first wrote down the events related to her mother's dementia on May 31, 2007.
On this day, she wrote in the "Efficiency Manual" "Take my mother to the Sixth Hospital of Beijing Medical College (Peking University Sixth Hospital)".
This year, Lu Xiaoya was 54 years old and her mother was 77 years old.
Long before Lu Xiaoya realized that her mother was sick, her dementia had left traces on her body: her mother always forgot to turn off the fire when cooking, and all the pots at home were burnt, and the neighbors complained several times; mother Sitting on the sofa and reading the newspaper, she took a closer look. The newspaper was taken upside down. Her mother called Lu Xiaoya more than a dozen times a day, saying that she could not find her passbook. Lu Xiaoya went home and found that the passbook had been in good condition. Put it in the cabinet...
There was an eraser in the mother's mind, slowly erasing her memory.
In the winter of 2007, when Lu Xiaoya discovered that her mother started to use hot water instead of showering, she knew that her mother had lost the memory of using a gas stove.
Lu Xiaoya and her sister began to help their mother bathe. Before this, the mother and daughter had never had close physical contact.
Because of the emotional alienation, to Lu Xiaoya, her mother's body seems to be an object: "We are very strange to each other. I will not touch her easily when it is not necessary."
Helping my mother take a bath is a rare close contact between mother and daughter in decades.
In Lu Xiaoya's memory, they never hug, even holding hands is not common.
The mother also seemed to resist physical contact.
Lu Xiaoya remembered that when her mother was getting older, she had tried to "pull her" when walking up the steps or crossing the road, but her mother would always throw her hand away.
After the mother became ill, the physical contact between the two of them increased significantly.
When Lu Xiaoya and her mother are sitting on the sofa, they always hold her hand.
The mother has lost the ability of normal expression and understanding. Sometimes, they will chat with each other. Sometimes, the two of them don't say anything, just sit quietly together.
When going out for a walk, Lu Xiaoya will definitely pull her mother: it can not only ensure that her mother will not fall, but it will also increase her psychological safety factor.
"(I hope) let her know that no matter where she goes, she will not be thrown away." Lu Xiaoya said, every time she went home for a walk, her hands were red, which was a trace of her mother's grip on her.
Sometimes, Lu Xiaoya wanted to take out her hand to touch her mother's face, help her massage her neck, or free her hand to help her take off her pants to go to the toilet, but her mother was reluctant to let go.
The ring on Lu Xiaoya's hand also hurt because of being held too tightly.
Lu Xiaoya feels that "handling" has become a way for mother to stay connected with the world.
In the later stages of the illness, her mother gradually forgot about Lu Xiaoya and began to call her "mother" or "sister".
Occasionally, Lu Xiaoya would jokingly call her "Baby Mom".
Once, Lu Xiaoya asked her mother: "Am I your mother?" The mother said, "Yes."
Lu Xiaoya asked again: "How am I as a mother?" Mrs. Lu said, "Not bad."
What do you think about home?
Isn't it just a room?
For Lu Xiaoya, taking care of a sick mother in the first place is the "bottom line" and "sense of responsibility".
She considers herself to be a "person who has not experienced much maternal love." The mother and daughter maintain a strange and polite alienation all the year round: not close, not expressing love to each other, and not living together.
When she was more than one year old, Lu Xiaoya was sent to live with her grandmother in Jiangsu, and her parents worked in Beijing.
Lu Xiaoya didn't remember her mother's appearance at that time, only that she sent herself to her grandmother's house.
The train was swaying, and the toddler Lu Xiaoya accidentally knocked over a thermos bottle, "still burning someone's foot".
There is also the memory of the mother. It is four years later that her parents took Lu Xiaoya, who was more than 5 years old, to Beijing for kindergarten.
Lu Xiaoya's parents were reporters from Xinhua News Agency. The two were studying foreign languages and were preparing to go abroad, and had no time to take care of their children.
As soon as she arrived in Beijing, Lu Xiaoya was sent to a full-care kindergarten.
The kindergarten teacher told the parents that in order to allow the child to adapt to the new environment, they would not be able to pick her up for two weeks.
The little Lu Xiaoya who is full of her native dialect doesn't understand, why can't she see her grandma suddenly?
Why did he get to such a strange place that no one knew?
The only way to express loneliness and fear is to cry: crying when eating, crying in the bath, and while other children are sleeping, the short and small Lu Xiaoya sits on the top of the children's wardrobe in the next room crying.
The "cruel" parents really never visited her once.
Not long after Lu Xiaoya adjusted to the kindergarten life, her parents went abroad.
Even Lu Xiaoya went to elementary school with her aunt from her parents' unit.
Lu Xiaoya remembered that when her father returned to China to visit relatives, she would pick herself up from the boarding elementary school, and the father and daughter would go to the park and eat fruit together.
"Dad took me to'Bada Place', he took a book to read there, I played on the side, and then ate fruits together." Lu Xiaoya said, compared with her father, she has almost no memory of her mother taking her to play. .
The earliest and clearest memory of a mother appeared in 1963. After her mother returned to China after becoming pregnant, 10-year-old Lu Xiaoya accompanied her mother to the birth checkup.
In that era when "hard struggle" was promoted, her mother was wearing a sleeveless dress bought abroad and her "explosive" curly hair was perm. Lu Xiaoya was reluctant to walk with her mother. I feel ashamed in my heart."
Soon after the birth of her sister, in the turbulent times, 15-year-old Lu Xiaoya went to Shaanxi to jump in the queue. Her parents also went to different cadre schools and wrote letters as a channel for family communication.
Lu Xiaoya did not have a nickname. Her father called her "Ya'er" in the letter, and her mother would only call her "Lu Xiaoya" or "Xiaoya". In the letter, her father would care about her recent good times. The mother's letter was like "People "Editorial in the Daily", telling her "to accept the re-education of the poor and the lower middle peasants", almost no personal emotions are involved...
The strangeness of mother and daughter is also reflected in Lu Xiaoya's reply to her parents.
Although the head of the letter always says "Mom and Dad", subconsciously, Lu Xiaoya feels that she is just sharing these things with her father.
Among the same batch of educated youths, Lu Xiaoya is the youngest but "the most sensible."
During the holidays, other educated youths cried and missed home. Lu Xiaoya felt that the other party was unreasonable: "What do you think about home? Isn't it just a house or something?"
Lu Xiaoya's memory of home is the house.
When my parents were abroad, their home was a room about 10 square meters in size, with two beds in it, and a few boxes full of things.
Lu Xiaoya lives on campus and hardly goes home. This room is locked every day.
After the parents returned to the country, the home became two of the three-bedroom houses, where parents, younger brother, younger sister and a nanny lived.
Lu Xiaoya had no place to sleep when she went home during the holiday, and she had to make another camp bed.
Parents always work night shifts and often stay away at night. The nanny is responsible for taking care of younger siblings.
It is difficult for Lu Xiaoya to recall the scene of the family eating together. She is not sure whether such things have really happened: "I don’t have a sense of picture like how a family sits on a table and eats. Maybe it’s a memory problem, maybe it didn’t happen. ."
But in communicating with others, Lu Xiaoya found that they "miss home" more often means "miss family."
Lu Xiaoya remembered that there was a boy whose family was extremely poor.
The day before he cut the line, his parents were at work and gave him 50 cents to buy some meat dumplings.
The boys were "extremely sensible" and wrapped two kinds of dumplings with more meat and less meat.
Before the parents went home, the boys and younger brother cooked dumplings with little meat, leaving more meat for their parents.
Lu Xiaoya has never experienced such a warm family moment. This is the first time she has realized that the relationship between herself and her family seems to be different from that of others: "When you see other people's family relationships, you are at least envious."
My mother didn’t get enough love since she was a child, so she wouldn’t love others.
For the first 45 years of her life, Lu Xiaoya had been thinking: "Does mother love me?" She couldn't find the answer.
After the death of her father, the mother-daughter relationship became a knot in Lu Xiaoya's heart: if she couldn't make a statement, she couldn't find a solution.
At the age of 45, my heart knot opened.
This year, Lu Xiaoya started to study psychology systematically because of her work. One of the important topics is understanding herself.
According to the teacher's request, Lu Xiaoya and her classmates formed a "growth group" to share important things that they felt had affected her life.
Also in the "growth group", Lu Xiaoya shared her relationship with her mother completely for the first time.
"It is very difficult to say that your parents are bad in Chinese culture. Everyone will come out and criticize you." Lu Xiaoya said, but in the "growth group" with confidentiality commitments, she can open her heart to express her desire for something. The mood of maternal love but can't.
Today, Lu Xiaoya can't remember the sharing process, but she clearly remembers that in the process of telling her, changes have taken place: after the grievances in her heart fell out, this matter seemed to be less important.
Lu Xiaoya began to explore the reasons behind her mother’s behavior through psychological methods. It was at this time that she realized that her mother “has grievances in her native family”: “She did not get enough love at home, so it was natural. Yes, she will not love anyone either."
Mrs. Lu is from Jiangsu and has 9 brothers and sisters in her family. She is the third oldest.
Mrs. Lu’s sisters are twins, the newborns that the whole family has been looking forward to for 9 years. Soon after Mrs. Lu was born, her mother gave birth to her eldest brother.
Unlike older sisters and younger brothers who grew up in love, Mrs. Lu has not received much attention and love since she was young: older sisters can sit under the sweet-scented osmanthus tree to drink tea and review homework, but she can only help with work in the sultry kitchen; The clothes can only be worn by the old clothes worn by the sisters... The only thing that allows her parents to look different is her good academic performance, which has also become a way for her to realize her self-worth.
But after failing the university exams, Yaoqiang's mother was unwilling to repeat her studies and packed up her luggage and ran to the liberated area.
Decades later, Lu Xiaoya chatted with her mother who had been diagnosed with dementia. Her mother told her that the time in the liberated area was the happiest time in her life.
The 18-year-old Mrs. Lu is the youngest in the Liberated Area. She is called "little ghost" by the chiefs, while comrades like to call her "Xiao Lu."
"She felt that she was seen and received the love she had never had before." A "small" character made her feel the love that she rarely received in the family.
After getting married, the old lady Lu began to make up for her childhood material deficiencies: One year, Lu Xiaoya went to a relative's house, and the other party gave her a checkered shirt that was "definitely good". After returning home, her mother took the dress away; Even the apples at home, my mother has to eat the biggest and the most red one... Lu Xiaoya and her siblings made complaints about this: "Look at my mother, look at our mother..."
"I slowly understood what happened in my mother's life," Lu Xiaoya said, which made her "no longer pursue her mother's personal mistakes."
But unfortunately, they never talked about these topics in depth before their mother fell ill.
In the early days of her mother's illness, Lu Xiaoya wrote her a letter to try to express her thoughts.
In the letter, Lu Xiaoya wrote: "You are a child who has been hurt since childhood... You don't have much feelings for your family, and it is also related to these injuries. But did you know? Your children can also be hurt... …" "We have hardly received your appreciation and affirmation... We all hope that when we step into this house, our hearts will be warm and our mother's eyes will be kind..." "I really hope I can be more intimate with you...I also hope that you can let your younger brothers and sisters know that you love them and love them. You know that no matter how successful a child is, what he hopes most is to be loved by his mother! "
Later, Lu Xiaoya saw her mother cut the letter by the bed, but said nothing.
As the condition progressed, her mother was no longer sober, and Lu Xiaoya no longer had the opportunity to talk to her mother on these topics.
Looking for "evidence" of love
In the process of caring for her mother, Lu Xiaoya discovered that her mother showed extraordinary love for her child.
Seeing a child from a distance, Mrs. Lu's eyes seemed to be attracted by a magnet, staring at the other person; when the other person approached, she would bend down, smile on her face, and say in a whining voice: "Hello, baby!" Even if the other person passed by, she would turn her head and stare at the child passing by.
Her mother’s actions gave Lu Xiaoya a certain degree of comfort: “If the love for children is human instinct, then there is no doubt that my mother must have expressed her love for me in this way? The separation that began more than a year ago, I might be able to confirm this love even more, right?"
In the fall of 2013, Lu Xiaoya's daughter went abroad to study, and she came to bid farewell to her grandmother before leaving.
Lu Xiaoya hardly grew up in front of her mother since she was a child, but her daughter lived with her grandmother's house for a few years when she was a child, "it was like my mother watched her grow up." When the daughter and grandma bid farewell, she suddenly stretched out her right hand and gently stroked her grandmother's. Cheeks, tears came down instantly.
The old lady Lu seemed to understand, and some did not understand, she murmured: "It's all like this, I'm alone outside..." Lu Xiaoya also cried. She didn't remember whether her mother had such intimate caressing to her. : "She must have hugged me, as evidenced by photos from my childhood."
In that black and white photo, Lu Xiaoya, who is less than one year old, is wearing a white hat and a small apron around her chest.
The short-haired mother hugged Lu Xiaoya and narrowed her eyes with a smile.
This photo also became evidence that Lu Xiaoya confirmed that her mother had loved herself.
Another "evidence" is the tears of her mother under the lamp when she was 15 years old.
That was the eve before Lu Xiaoya went to Shaanxi to jump in the queue. She had already gone to bed, and her mother had her back to her, making up her clothes under the lamp.
Those were two pure cotton shirts brought back by mother from abroad, with delicate embroidery on them, but the sleeves and collar were torn.
Lu Xiaoya heard her mother's sobbing, "She is sad, and I think there is love behind this sadness."
In November 2019, after her mother suffered from dementia for 12 years, Lu Xiaoya ushered in the moment to say goodbye to her.
Mother was sent to the intensive care unit due to myocardial infarction, and Lu Xiaoya went to see her.
When she gently stroked her mother's forehead, her mother opened her eyes, "Look at me blinking and blinking", making a "gurgling" sound in her mouth.
Lu Xiaoya is not sure, did her mother recognize herself?
As usual, Lu Xiaoya opened the bed, found her mother's hand that didn't have a needle, and put her hand on the palm of her hand.
The mother grabbed her.
Lu Xiaoya bent down and said softly to her mother's ear: "Mom, I am Xiaoya, I am your eldest daughter, I came back from abroad, can you recognize me? Your daughter is by your side, don't be afraid... …" At the end of the visiting time, Lu Xiaoya wanted to gently pull her hand out, but as usual, she felt that her mother did not want to let go.
"Although I don't have much strength, I can still feel her holding me."
From the first heart attack to death, the mother spent 10 days.
After being told by the doctor that "there may be no hope this time", Lu Xiaoya looked at the monitor on the bedside and found that the high pressure was gone.
She stroked her mother's forehead again, but she did not open her eyes.
When she held her mother's hand without the needle, the nurse was surprised to find that her mother's blood pressure had increased.
"Is that the reaction of her body when I held my mother's hand?" Lu Xiaoya sighed with the incredible life. She knew that the last thing a person turned off at the end of life was the auditory system. She gently lay on her mother, gently Said to her: "Mom, you have been working so hard these years. If you are too tired, just go and reunite with Dad...Thank you, thank you for giving us life..."
It has always been Lu Xiaoya's regret that she could not understand her mother's experience earlier and could not express her gratitude to her when she was awake.
She always felt that if she could understand her mother earlier, would she be able to make her feel more happy in her later years?
"I have the ability to love, this is enough"
Dementia has a genetic predisposition. After the death of her mother, Lu Xiaoya began to think about her old age.
Unlike her mother who can take care of her with 3 children after being sick, Lu Xiaoya has only one daughter, and she hopes that she will not be a burden for her children.
Studies have shown that learning a new language helps keep the brain alive.
At the age of 63, Lu Xiaoya began to learn English.
She enrolled in an online course to learn English, starting with simple oral English.
Today, Lu Xiaoya has formed a reading group for English reading, including novels and biographies. In 2020, she has read 6 original English books.
Recently, she was reading "Klara and the Sun" by Japanese writer Kazuo Ishiguro, a novel about the relationship between artificial intelligence and humans.
Lu Xiaoya likes to learn these new things. With the help of young people, she began to listen to various interesting courses on a knowledge service app, such as cryptography.
Lu Xiaoya also allowed herself to maintain a certain amount of exercise.
She gave classes at Capital Normal University and Beijing Normal University, sharing stories of travel and growth with students.
Because she has to go to class, she has to go out at least twice a week, and necessary exercise has become a means for her to avoid physical deterioration.
My daughter is also a school teacher, and sometimes Lu Xiaoya will go home with her late after class.
Once, Lu Xiaoya was already 9:30 in the evening after class, and the two of them could not get a taxi. There was still more than ten minutes away from the subway station to home. Under the street light, her daughter held Lu Xiaoya's hand tightly, "I can feel Now, she is holding me, because it is dark, she is afraid that I will fall."
Lu Xiaoya enjoys the close relationship with her daughter.
It was also the relationship with her daughter that made Lu Xiaoya realize that she did not actually lose the ability to love.
Some time ago, Lu Xiaoya sorted out the computer and found a video file named "I Love You Forever".
The video was taken in 2014. At that time, the mother's dementia was already serious and she could not read and communicate normally.
In the video, Lu Xiaoya is reading a picture book of "I Love You Forever" to her mother. The two are sitting on the sofa, close to each other.
When she read "Mom, I love you", Lu Xiaoya put her arm around her mother's shoulder and asked gently: "Do you love me?" Mother did not respond, and Lu Xiaoya retracted her hand and continued to read the next page as if she was okay. .
"I was hoping for her response at the time, and I was still disappointed and even lost." Lu Xiaoya recalled that she was too persistent at the time and she persistently wanted her mother to say "I love you" in person.
Now, watching this video again, Lu Xiaoya is relieved: "Why am I so persistent that I have to ask her to say that sentence? I have the ability to love her, to love my relatives, and even to help many people. I have The ability to love is enough."
Beijing News reporter Li Gui