This for me regarding my mother was likely the very worst experience of my life. Nothing at all compares for how awful this was for me not even losing my father when I was 37.
It started when I took my mother and 10 year old daughter to England, Scotland, Germany, Austria and Switzerland and I met my son who was then 25 in Munich, Germany who was then traveling for several months with a friend who had just gotten his physics degree from UCSC across Europe on a Eurail pass which was quite reasonable then.
My mother then in 1999 was sort of still okay mentally and was around 80 years of age and had recently stopped driving a car because she didn't feel safe doing that anymore (which might have been an indicator of what was to come) if I had had any experience at all with this sort of thing. But, I hadn't.
I had expected that my 10 year old daughter might be the most difficult to travel with during the 11 hour flight from San Francisco to London on the first leg of my journey. However, the difficult one (unexpectedly) turned out to be my normally agreeable mother. I had just recovered from almost dying myself the previous may of 1999 and my wife and then 2 1/2 year old daughter decided to stay home because it would just be too much dealing with a 2 1/2 year old, a 10 year old, and 80 year old and me being then a 51 year old then in 1999. So, in the fall of 1999 my mother, my 10 year old daughter and I hopped on a Big jet and flew to London where I had my first Baguette in the Airport there.
At the time I had no idea what was in store for me. We hopped on the plane to Edinburgh because first we wanted to see Scotland where my mother's parents grew up and later towards the end of our trip to Europe we would visit London and the Tower of London and Glastonbury where Merlin and Arthur and the Sacred Chalice of Jesus all abound from the last Supper.
But, for now, I wanted to show my mother where her mother grew up in Clydebank near Glasgow and her father grew up in Ayr near Glasgow, Scotland so we did.
However, I hadn't foreseen jet lag being a problem and I was almost killing us in the roundabouts which are reverse of the roundabouts here. Roundabouts I found out replace most signals in England, Scotland and also sometimes in Europe as well. But, they are everywhere in Scotland and England. I also found out that they were designed for horses pulling cannons originally so they horses didn't have to ever stop because it was hard to get the weight going once again once you stop horses pulling cannons.
So, my mother was okay in Scotland and I soon left Edinburgh and Glascow after almost killing us from jet lag on roundabouts in the rental car I rented. So, I decided to move north over the Forth Bridge to Aviemore in the Cairngorm mountains after visiting Pitlochry which is an amazingly picturesque little town on the way there. The Cairngorm mountains are the ski area for wealthier English and Scottish people by the way and there were reindeer there then too running wild in 1999.
We went as far north as Inverness and Findhorn on this trip by the way before returning to Edinburgh where we stayed in a hotel eventually before flying back to London for our flight to Munich Germany.
Regarding my mother's onset of senile dementia (which I didn't understand was happening to her then by the way because I had no experience with this before) began in earnest in Munich, Germany. She had had a friend from church named Bruce who was only 19 years old who was cut in two by a machine gun burst at the battle of the Bulge during world war II so she couldn't deal with Germany at all. ON top of this the German and English flight attendants were screaming at each other as we left the plane about something so this was a problem too which freaked my mother too. I never really understood what that was all about either.
I met my son who was then single and 25 and his friend that just graduated with a physics degree from UCSC in Santa Cruz and we all rented a 6 passenger motor home so we could all travel together to Austria, Switzerland and northern Italy if there was enough time to do that before I had to return the 6 passenger stick shift diesel powered motor home back to Munich. I was really grateful to have the stick shift by the way especially over the Alps or we likely would have died doing this. One night I had dropped the boys off in northern Italy and it was snowing in the Alps and they have no guard rails and a truck came past me and I only had a few inches of clearance to a 1000 foot or more drop off and I was pretty scared with that truck passing me with so little clearance. It was also exciting and dangerous on the German Autobahn highways that have no speed limits. So, passing slower trucks was a real thrill with people passing me doing 150 mph on the autobahn when I could only do safely 70 or 75 mph at most in that motor home and less if it was windy. So, timing how I passed relatively slow semi trucks was pretty iffy figuring out how to pass then without getting us killed from behind by someone doing 150 mph.
But I was only 50 and still pretty skilled at stuff like this so we were okay.
But, Munich is where my mother started to slip away from me in earnest. Once she got into the motorhome she refused to get out of it again until I gave away the motor home back in Munich, Germany. This meant that I had to get food for her and bring it to here everywhere and meant that the rest rooms needed more attention in the motor home than we normally would have too. And any activity that my daughter, my son and his friend and I were involved in we had to leave my mother alone sometimes for the afternoon or evening so we could do anything.
Her behavior just got worse and worse until London where she wouldn't leave or change the hotel room when I wanted to and just stayed watching TV in the room the whole time we were in London. And if you have watched much English TV it can be like watching Grass growing or something like that sort of mind numbing. So, she was slipping further and further away from my daughter and I and I was at the time getting angry with her because of this because I had had no experience then with senile dementia or what is called Transfer Trauma which is what often happens to older people when taken out of their safe normal routines when they are elderly enough.
So, my mother was definitely experiencing Transfer Trauma and the beginnings of Senile Dementia then.
When we returned from Europe after three weeks there (about 1 1/2 weeks in England and Scotland and about 1 1/2 weeks in Germany,Switzerland, Austria and Italy, my mother was very strange indeed. One day I took her for a drive down the coast and a song came on the radio and she began to scream while hitting the inside of our car door: "I want the words" because she was a coloratura soprano and for some reason thought she should know the words to a new song she hadn't heard before. I began to get scared at this point because my mother had completely lost it. Within a month or two of this experience my mother almost burned her apartment down. My son was back from his 3 month trip to Europe and was caring for my mother then as they got along well and because she had sort of become his mother when my first wife (his mother) left him and I when he was 3. So, my mother had also become my son's (de facto) mother as well always. So, they were very close and he wanted to care for her as she was declining in abilities both physical and mental.
But, that day he had told her not to use anything but the microwave because he had to go to work. But, when he returned she was sitting at the kitchen table praying while plastic was on fire running down the stove onto the floor from tupper ware. So, instead of turning a stove burner off she sat and prayed about it which was when we realized she wasn't ever safe to leave alone anymore and we had to put her in an institution which was awful because my wife wouldn't let her stay with us because of liability of her burning our home down too potentially.
Dealing with all this was the worst experience of my life simply because I promised my father never to put my mother in a rest home before he died and now I couldn't fulfill my promise to my father.
I suppose if I had been single I might have taken my mother in the woods and shot her and myself, but luckily I was married with children and had more responsibilities to others not just to my mother and father in this situation so I and my mother both lived on through this really awful mess that I had promised my father not to be a part of.
My mother continued to live another 7 years until she was 90 in this rest home but then got the "Death Rattle" because she was in a coma by then and for 2 years before that she didn't know who my son and I were anymore and when I told her we were there she just made a farting sound with her mouth like we were full of shit to say that we were her son and grandson. So, this was horrific too in addition to everything else along the way to that.
So, my wife's father died in July I believe and then he was cremated. Then my mother died in September or October of 2008 I believe while I was with my wife and daughter transporting his ashes to Saint Louis to be buried with his parents there. So, I had to tell the people there at the mortuary to put my mother's body on ice until I returned from Saint Louis.
Then I pushed my mother's body into the cremation furnace myself after kissing her on the forehead one last time after her being several days frozen like a popsicle. I went outside and watched my mothers ashes go up a 1 foot wide chimney for the crematoriam and thought how she would like to go out into the air like this as smoke. Later after her remaining ashes cooled (usually the bones are the ashes you get) and I put these in a velvet blue container on my grand piano for a year or two until my family (especially my son) was ready to rent a yacht and put her ashes out to sea. However, my wife and I bought a grave marker for my mother and father in the Mt. Shasta Cemetary on Lassen Lane there in mt. Shasta,California. But their bodies aren't there it's just a remembrance for us and them forever there. My Dad's ashes are above Horse Camp on Mt. Shasta and my mother's ashes are in the ocean near where a musician she liked crashed his experimental plane years ago now.
Hopefully, this story will help some of you deal with this sort of thing out there better.
By God's Grace
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