How I Found My Way Back to My Mother After I Lost Her to Dementia
By Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop
When it came to contemplating her own death, my mother was unflinching. As a teenager, she’d been evacuated from her home in Gibraltar on a ship that sailed up the English Channel right through the Dunkirk retreat. She’d lived through the bombing raids on London while working as a decoding agent at MI5, the British Intelligence Service. She’d hopped across roofs collecting shrapnel and taken refuge in the famous London basement nightclubs which provided entertainment and protection at the same time. She married her Yankee soldier husband during a V-1 raid in London and crossed the North Atlantic in a convoy dodging U-boats. At the age of 18, pregnant with my oldest brother, she sailed away from everybody she knew to start her life in a new country. Before she turned 20, my mother had seen more of life and death than most.
When she was 75 and in relatively good health, she invited me to spend a weekend with her so that we could discuss what she considered a “good death.” She wanted no IV feeding or hydration, she ordered a Do Not Resuscitate bracelet which she wore daily, and we hammered out a detailed medical proxy. But neither one of us discussed a more complicated scenario: that she might lose her mind before her body. The slow diminishing of her faculties left her, as one doctor put it, “waking up every day in the middle of a movie.”
Her last four years required patience, acceptance, and an ability to “choose your battles,” qualities that are useful when dealing with toddlers. However, when I was a toddler, my mother had kept herself apart from me and my five brothers. We were raised by a succession of maids and housekeepers so that when the stress of a marriage lived in the spotlight of Cold War Washington became more than she could bear, she retreated into the bottle.
Now I was being asked to care for a mother who had never taken care of me, who behaved more like a toddler than the competent, forthright woman I had come to know in the 30 years since she’d achieved sobriety. Her dementia triggered my childhood memories of her erratic drinking behavior. I never had the mother I wanted as a child. Once she and I had finally come to trust one another, I was furious to lose her all over again—this time to dementia.
The signs were there for a while before we realized what they meant. The first one was a loss of taste.
“Everything tastes like oatmeal so that’s all I bother to eat,” she said one day on the phone.
“How odd,” I said. “Do you think it’s one of your medications?”
“I doubt it,” she said and changed the subject.
But then one afternoon, she got lost driving even though she was only a few blocks from home. We began to notice dents in the car and a missing side mirror.
Then the questions began. Why can’t I drive anymore? Who is stealing my money? Why are these people bothering me? (She was referring to the Paraguayan caregivers who had been working for her for several years.) Is the dog in or out? (The dog had died a few weeks before.) Underneath the questions and the grumbling, I felt her increasing sense of frustration and bewilderment that she could no longer run her own life, and I empathized. But at the same time, I flinched when she barked at Zuni, her attentive caregiver, and bristled when she questioned my judgement. And yes, more times than I like to admit, I snapped back at her when she asked me the same question three times in a row. Finally, I realized that I was making things worse. For both of us.
It took us years to get past her sense of betrayal, not to mention my feelings of abandonment. And now here we were again, back in that same place—except this time I was the parent, and she was the child.
As a writer of fiction and the daughter of journalist Stewart Alsop, I had made certain career decisions which helped me stand apart from my famous father. I published under my middle name to avoid comparisons to him. I stuck very happily to fiction after a brief summer stint as an intern for a local newspaper which convinced me that I’d rather make up stories than report them. However, fiction is often inspired by a writer’s life, as one of my uncles pointed out when he said, “Every time Elizabeth writes a book, it’s like dodging a bullet.”
One of my novels tells the story of two boys who, after their father dies of a blood disease, discover their mother is an alcoholic. My father died of leukemia at the age of sixty and it took my forty-eight-year-old mother three more years to claw her way to sobriety. When she read my novel, Knock, Knock, Who’s There? she confronted me with her fury and despair over my “outing” her. It took us years to get past her sense of betrayal, not to mention my feelings of abandonment. And now here we were again, back in that same place—except this time I was the parent, and she was the child. Now that I held the power, was I trying to punish her for all the times she hadn’t been there for me? If so, was that the way I wanted my relationship with my mother to end?
I turned back to writing, the tool I’d always used to move me from one place to another, emotionally as well as physically. In addition to countless articles, columns, and books about American history and politics, my father had written his own memoir and was the subject of a number of biographies. But nobody knew my mother’s story, least of all me. It was time to put the spotlight on her.
On a visit to Gibraltar, I stood outside her childhood home, walked under the arch where her grandfather had greeted the Duke of Cornwall, and visited the docks where, during the war, her father had reported suspicious cargo to the British authorities. I came home with a book of photographs, one that my mother kept next to her chair and pored over two or three times a day.
I began to interview her, first with a microphone and a tape recorder, but later with a video camera. The mother who couldn’t remember our lunch guest of an hour before came up with detailed stories about her childhood, triggered by the photo albums I set in her lap. She described London during the war, the boys she dated and never saw again, the buildings razed by the bombs, the wild party atmosphere. And every time we talked about her past, another detail would surface.
“I remember that night on the balcony of the Ritz when your father and I watched a V-1 rocket land next door in Green Park. I wore a black dress, and he hid in the stairwell.”
In the final months before her death at the age of eighty-six, she continued to love watching the videos, although sometimes she wasn’t sure who was speaking. On one of my younger brother’s last visits with her in the nursing home, he texted me in despair: “What do I talk to her about?”
“Show her the videos again,” I suggested, and they passed a happy hour together watching and listening to the narrator—whose voice she no longer recognized—describe her past.
Once I began to dive into her history, we found our way back to each other. I learned to answer the same question again and again without frustration. I accepted her restlessness. I learned to redirect the conversation by starting a sentence with, “Remember the time, Mummy, you danced with Daddy at the Queen Charlotte Ball?” or “What was the name of the evacuation ship you took from Gibraltar?” Often I was rewarded with another tiny, crucial detail.
One day, she said how glad she was that I was writing her “autobiography.” I didn’t correct her. I simply smiled and said it made me happy too because her story needed to be told.
“By my daughter,” she said. “Nobody else.”
We had come full circle.
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Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop is the author of over fifty works of fiction for readers of all ages. Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies (Regal House, October 25, 2022) is her first memoir. You can visit her online at elizabethwinthrop.com.