Communication

Today I visited my mother at the nursing home. The ladies were gathered around a large oak table in a beautiful room called “The Garden Room” because the walls are lined with live plants. The ladies all sit there staring and waiting for their food to arrive. One lady is only interested in trying to stand up and when she does her alarm goes off. It doesn’t seem to bother her at all. She just has a blank stare and never says a word to anyone. Another little lady at the end of the table keeps asking if anyone knows that lady’s background—what she was like when she was young. My mother keeps telling me that she’s not going to pay for the carpet going inside the bank. I told her that we don’t have to and she’s okay again. More food arrives and my mother is excited that tonight they brought her a corn muffin. She seems to be doing a lot better with her silverware and I’m paying more attention to the lady across from us who never speaks, eats very little, and is still trying to stand up. All of a sudden I see my mother put the butter container into her mouth and I tell her, “spit it out.” She does. Then my mother tries to pull her sweater off. I asked her why she was doing that and she replied that she didn’t know.

We talk so much about communication. How did we learn to communicate? What makes us lose it? It’s a terrible thing to watch these people who have lost their communication skills. They don’t know what to talk about so they just sit and stare.

My mother was never at a loss for words. She always had a lot to talk about and ask about. She was involved in many activities and loved to bake biscuits for the monthly senior breakfast. She’s still baking biscuits, but only in her mind. My mother would ask me so many questions, I felt I was being interrogated by the FBI. Now she’s eating empty butter containers.

I know that I was not prepared with this transition in my mother’s life. I’m the only one bothered about it, she seems totally happy and content with what she does and says. She’s not interested in television, reading the newspaper, or anything else anymore.

Communication—don’t lose it.