As fall came, though, with darker days, and then a cold winter came again, my mother seemed to decline more rapidly and her confusion, including hallucinations, grew worse. When my family was gathered for Thanksgiving, they decided it was time for her to enter a nursing home. She entered one, where my sister-in-law was a nurse, on the day after Christmas.
A week later she entered a hospital with pneumonia, and we almost lost her. But she recovered from the pneumonia, though not from even more rapid decline it brought, and she went back to the nursing home a week later. And I tried to go on with my life, but found it very hard to do.
THE HOUSE
My mother's house was
a place of comfort,
a place of memories,
where I grew up.
Then I put her in
a nursing home.
She didn't remember
her house anymore.
Now my mother's house is mine,
but I don't want to go there.
I try to stay away.
It's not home anymore;
My mother isn't there.
There's only memories of how I failed,
and guilt because I'm not still trying
to make her house her home.
(Written March 1996 Copyright 1996-2002 Brenda Parris Sibley)
I moved on, following temporary employment to other towns in Alabama, though I went back to visit on the weekends.
Then near the end of April my sister called one morning. My mother had died in her sleep the night before. I didn't cry as my sister told me, but I couldn't stop the tears as I drove home for the funeral.
PRECIOUS TIMES
I cry a river
over times that are past,
when I held my mother's hand,
and when I made her laugh.
We walked and saw flowers
and listed to the birds;
She couldn't always understand,
but love didn't need words.
Even in the dark times,
when we were up through the night,
why didn't I see it?
Everything was right.
Why did I give up
and send her to a home?
She sat alone for a while,
and now she is gone.
(Written April 1996 Copyright 1996-2002
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