LESSON FROM A FIVE-YEAR-OLD

A severe stroke left my mother paranoid, confused and needy. Just when I was at my wit’s end, my child taught me the joys of patience.

- Leslie Kendall Dye

IT’S EIGHT O’CLOCK on a cold spring night. Our apartment has been hit by a cyclone— the handiwork of an energetic five-year-old. Every bit of furniture is draped with paper chains, scissors and Scotch tape, modelling clay, piles of acorns and party favors.

I’m so tired tonight. I’ve been on crutches for seven weeks, recovering from hip surgery, and I’m trying fruitlessly to clean up.

The phone rings—for the sixth time in less than an hour. I know who it is. When my mother was 68, a hemorrhagic stroke claimed her brain but not her life. She awoke from a coma severely damaged; the bleeding instantly razed the landscape of her mind. Dementia soon built a Gothic funhouse of distortions where coherent architecture had once stood.

She has been manacled inside that mind now for a decade, experiencing psychic distress.

My mother is dogged by paranoia: she thinks she has been kicked out of her assisted-living facility (not true); she thinks her daughters have not visited in months (it has been a few days); she thinks that her friend Jimmy never wants to see her again (he calls and visits weekly).

Each time she calls, I play a game with myself called “How Good of a Person Can I Be?” I’ve won five rounds of the game tonight; I am due for a fall.

She has no idea that she has repeated the things she is about to say a million times today and a million times yesterday. She has no idea that I had surgery, nor can she recall her own granddaughter’s name. She is unaware of most of the past, and she drifts in the present. Also, she is lonely.