In Fear Of My Mother Being Diagnosed With Alzheimer's Disease Poem by Lola Barrington

Author: Megan Falley

In fear of my mother being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.
I knew it finally came for you when I got the phone call,
you'd forgotten which Street our house was on,
you were parked outside someone else's life
car still running.

For years you call me by my brothers name,
or the dogs, and eventually by the name of your mother...
who died long before I was born.

Most days I have to tell you things 50 times,
mom you're okay, mom I love you, mom they're not trying to kill you,
mom... I'm your daughter.. the only one.

Mom this, this is your home now.
I think about all the questions I should have asked before,
I wanna pluck the answers from your mouth each memory a hair
caught in the back of your throat.
If could do it all again I would do it all again.
I'd come back and set the table and all the dinners I missed,
I'd come back from the mother's day spent in different states,
I'd shift my finger hovering over the ignore button
and answer your call.



Mom this is a fork,
mom you use it like this,
mom you can't leave the oven on,
mom..love you. I love you Anne.
Annie's your name.

Mom I love you.
I wonder when you flench at the food I try to spoon into
your mouth if you remember me as I was then,
the little girl who caught your skin inside the sweater zipper,
the girl who snuck out of bed room windows and stole your pills.
I wonder if you remember the time I slammed the bedroom door so hard
it sounded like I hate you and the photograph of us fell off its nail.

Mom, he's been dead for years.
Mom, he loved you so much.
Mom he's gone forever, do you hear me? FOREVER.
Mom...he'll be back in five minutes,
mom, he just went to the store.

I don't know how to live with these things I've done,
these secrets of yours that I told because they made me more interesting.
This hurt I've polished until I could see my own face in it.
Mom, you were a good woman..mom, you are a good woman.
Mom, look how many people love you.
Ma, they visit when you're sleeping...mom, all of them.

Now I know when your call me on my birthday and say that:
August 6th,1988,9: 20 a.m. was the most magnificent day of your life
that there were eighty years of things to remember you chose this.
When the building of your memory went up in flames...you saved this.