I Can't Remember: Family Stories of Alzheimer's Disease

A Daughter's Dilemma

A DAUGHTER'S DILEMMA Copyrighted Material Lillian Smoller, at eighty-five , has Alzheimer's disease. She is able to let her family know what is happening to her, and it is terrifying. Her h~isband , Louis, and her son , Ted, live with her in a seven-room apartment in Brooklyn, New York. Her daughter, Arlene , tells her story. Copyrighted Material Mom i, eighty-,ix yca" old and i, in the thitd "age of Ahheimer 's disease. I first recognized a change in Mom about ten years ago when she became emotionally volatile. My dilemma is: How much responsibility do I have for Mom's care while maintaining my own family life? I am a fifty-two-year-old married woman raising three teenage boys. My career is in clinical psychology, and I have a Ph.D. in gerontology . I seem to be the logical one to coordinate her care, since I am her only daughter and have the knowledge of Alzheimer's disease. But I left my parents' home in Brooklyn, New York, long ago and now live in Colorado. How do I manage Mom's care long distance? Mom's role in life has always been that of the caretaker. As a young girl in Poland, she took care of her two younger brothers while her mother worked to support the family. Mom married at seventeen after immigrating to New York. Shortly after her marriage, she felt that she had made a mistake, because my father had a temper that frightened her. Never working outside the home, however, she was economically dependent on Dad. Her focus in life was being a mother and great balabosta (Yiddish for number one homemaker). The standing joke was for me to wear sunglasses when walking into Mom's sparkling clean home. AcCopyrighted Material 23 A DAUGHTER'S DILEMMA 24 cording to her family, she made the best stuffed cabbage, chicken soup, and coleslaw in Brooklyn. I was the youngest of the three children, having two older brothers. My brother Marty was twelve, and Teddy was seven years old when I was born. My mother's first child was a girl, who died of polio. After my second brother was born, the doctor told her not to have any more children, since she had a heart murmur and had had a very difficult pregnancy and delivery. Later, however, she wanted to try for a girl. She continued to grieve for her first child and wanted to fill the loss. I was the much-loved daughter. I modeled myself after Mom and loved her with all my heart. I was her confidant and listened to the hurt and sadness of her unfulfilled relationship with my dad. She told me to get an education and have my career established before marriage so that I would not repeat her mistakes. Her dreams were my dreams. Her hurts were my hurts. I sided with her about my dad until I was nineteen years old. Then came the years of search for my identity in California. I chose to follow Mom's directions and finished my Ph.D. in psychology and then got married. I didn't fulfill the expectations of marrying a Jew and living close to my family of origin. Those years were difficult. Then, nine years ago, I was shocked when Mom became Copyrighted Material Copyrighted Material 25 26 On a Mother's Day weekend, her elder son, Marty, and her daughter, Arlene, ~vho live eight hundred miles away, moved in to their parents' apartment to evahwte their mother's condition and help plan for her care. Copyrighted Material paranoid if I talked to Dad. She said that we were saying bad things about her and that I was taking Dad's side. During one telephone conversation , I told her that I didn't want to come between them in their arguments and that I loved my dad as I loved her. She said that she would never forgive me or talk to me again. This was the first time in my life that she had ever rejected me. Even with all of her grief, she had always expressed her love to me. The day after the fateful telephone conversation, she called to apologize and said that she didn't understand how she could have said that, adding, "That wasn't me." Those outbursts became more frequent and were directed particularly at my father...