Funeral For A Stranger

No one knew who she was behind closed doors

This is the true recollection of Sara, as told to Susan Seawolf Hayes, regarding the life and death of her mother. Our “Opening Our Hearts” stories are based on people’s real life experiences. By sharing these experiences publicly, we hope to help our readers feel less alone in their grief and, ultimately, to aid them in their healing process. In this post, Sara recalls the strange woman she calls “my birth mother,” who finally died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.

My mother died in August 2014. Attending her memorial services was an interesting experience since no one seemed to know the woman she was behind the front door. It was as if I was at a funeral for a stranger.

Though my mother came across as very charming to people outside the home, my father and mother had had a marriage filled with nearly daily arguments, even up to the end. They seemed to have some kind of “soul contract,” — that they would never part, no matter the consequences. And there were consequences.

Besides the constant fighting from my early childhood on, my mother took to lying frequently, especially to cover up the fact that she was fulfilling none of her everyday responsibilities. By age six, I was doing much of the housework. My mother wouldn’t and couldn’t (for a whole host of reasons, including back problems that seemed to somehow disappear completely when she got Alzheimer’s), and I finally became tired of their arguments over the housekeeping. I also often prayed they would divorce.

My mother also suffered from depression and deep insecurities, but in public, she was the socialite — the debutante at the ball — self-assured, breezy, never a misstep. She needed to be perfect because that is what she imagined would make people like her. More than anything she wanted everyone to like her. But when she reached our front door, everything changed.

Although, like my mother, I grew up in the same old Victorian house, I lived quite a different life from my parents. After college, I settled in the Pacific Northwest and eventually opened my own healing business. Ultimately, however, the cold, clouds and rain dampened my sunny spirit, and I decided to move back to California.

By that time, my mother was slipping away into Alzheimer’s, although she was able to hide it through her habit of light social chatting. She also lived in the same house her entire life, so she always knew where she was, unlike many with Alzheimer’s who wander off. It was 2012 when I moved back into the family house. I planned to stay perhaps three months while I found a place to live, but ended up stuck there for nearly three years.

From nearly the moment I moved back, I ended up being the caregiver for the woman who had barely cared for or nurtured me since I was a toddler, but my mother’s Alzheimer’s was progressing steadily. My father, however, was much in denial about how bad she was getting even though she had been making him 3-4 lunches for when he came home for lunch. He also refused to allow her to be put in a nursing home, but he was not the one who was losing whole nights of sleep, getting sick constantly from overwhelming stress, and enduring the hitting and beating from my mother when she’d get angry and frustrated.

Over time, my mother developed urinary and fecal incontinence and then major infections. Finally, this affected not just me, from cleaning up the messes regularly, but my father, who was still sleeping in the same bed with my mother. But still, ”Sara will take care of it,” seemed to be his thought, even as his wife was throwing filthy Depends straight into the washing machine and turning it on.

Meanwhile I developed a shingles outbreak and a massive sinus infection — I clearly was falling apart. “You at least have to put a second high-up lock on your bedroom door so I can get some sleep. If you don’t, I have leave to get healthy,” I told him, and to my surprise, he did it. No doubt it was probably illegal, but at least I was able to sleep and finally heal.

Because I was trapped at home watching my mother, making sure she didn’t wander off or leave the stove on, etc. I was unable to make friends or build a life of my own. I was on a permanent adrenaline fight-or-flight rush, using the few hours I had to tend to pets, to shower, to run errands, to eat. I was never really off duty. Even when my parents had gone to bed, I could hear my father screaming at her for fouling the bed, the carpet, the bathroom.

Finally, I gave my father the word. I was broke from not being able to work. He had to put my mother in a nursing home. To my relief he said yes, although I was the one who had to find the proper home. Then in rapid succession she suffered two strokes and within a few months was gone.

As Alzheimer’s began to devour the last fragments of my mother, I did the only thing I could as a healer: I tried to retrieve the pieces of her broken soul back together so she might make her exit from this life in a whole state. Though I couldn’t have a relationship with the person that was my birth mother, I could at least connect with her spirit. At her funeral, talking to everyone was very pleasant, but they seemed to be talking about a woman I never knew. It was a funeral for a stranger.

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