Chapter 40: Birthdays Belated

Over the past few months, I sneakily accessed mom and dad’s email contacts and asked a bunch of family and friends to send me stories of reminiscence.  Not only did I figure the milestone of 75 years on earth marked a good occasion for such a project; but more importantly, I’m hoping that mom’s regular reading of these stories might encourage her to remember different chapters from all phases of her life.  I’m still trying to work with her on capturing key moments in the story of her life for a document I’m building on my own computer.

It was a really lovely afternoon and mom and dad seemed very happy with everything – and they were both very appreciative of the book.  Yet…I still managed to get upset about something.  You know how you can get a new haircut and 50 people will give you compliments while one person says something and you just fixate on the words of that one negative person rather than collective positivity of the much larger group? 

Well.

I know I should be satisfied that the stories I collected were enough to fill a three-inch binder.  But. All I could think about was the really significant people from our life who either never responded to my requests or otherwise failed to deliver on promises to give me a submission.  I get that social media has made us a planet of narcissists and everyone is busy, but I can’t help but wonder if some of friends (and truly, even some of our blood relatives!) have been made very uncomfortable by mom’s diagnosis.  Do they think Mild Cognitive Impairment is catching?  Are they worried they’re going to be affected if they have to interact with mom?

What’s so frustrating is that mom is actually doing reasonably well.  Some days, it’s hard to tell that a part of her brain isn’t quite functioning the way it used to.  But – I guess one of the hazards of mom and dad being really open about talking about what’s happening is that you scare some people away.  And I would never want them to change what they’re doing.  In fact, I’m so grateful that they have taken the lead on just being very matter-of-fact about everything.  I know that they both feel that if someone doesn’t want to be their friend anymore because they are ashamed of the changes in mom’s brain, then clearly, those people were likely never friends to begin with.  I totally agree.  But it’s hard to watch a few people slowly start to disappear and be unavailable, even when I ask them to give mom a call or consider making a visit.

Sigh.  How do you force education on people?  I don’t know.  But – it’s something I’m going to think about.  A lot.  The old-world ways of dealing with aging are really harmful.  And honest, shouldn’t we consider aging a privilege when compared to the alternative?