Faith And Flowers

My mother’s Alzheimer’s is a journey we are taking together.

- Marcia Gay Harden

FOR YEARS, MOM AND I HAD TALKED about writing a book together. A book about ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging. A big coffee table book with beautiful pictures of flowers, like the calla lily and fern she’d arranged at the alter for my wedding. Mom said calla lilies were a symbol of holiness, faith and purity. The book would have been full of the information she conveyed so well, as she did at the ikebana class she taught for my friends in California while we awaited the birth of my oldest daughter.

But we never wrote that book. My mother has Alzheimer’s. She was diagnosed in 2011, though some signs appeared even before then. There is nothing good about Alzheimer’s. It’s not a disease where you can make lemonade from lemons. It steals our memories, and what are we without our memories? But my mother has taught me that, in the midst of loss, there is indestructible spirit. There is beauty. And always love.

Though she has forgotten so much, sometimes even the names and faces of her children, much of her personality is intact. She still likes polite children and beds that are made. She loves birds and classical music, the Beach Boys and Petula Clark. She is neat, almost prim, and she has a passion for flowers. She also still loves ikebana, something she came to master when we were stationed in Yokohama, Japan, where my father had been sent to command a ship during the Vietnam War.

I was the middle of five—children, mind you, not kids. As my mom said, kids was a name for goats. In many ways, my parents were polar opposites: Mom, the delicate Dallas lady, and Dad, the rough-and-tumble El Paso cowboy turned naval officer. But they were also the yin to each other’s yang. I often wonder how she did it all, raising us on her own while Dad was away at sea for long stretches of time.