Can't Look Back, Can't Look Ahead

It's been a tough few weeks for me.

Maybe it's because holidays are here, normally my favorite part of the year.  My mom loved the holidays and a I find myself sad - I mean, really sad - that she can't share them with us.  More than that, she'll never be able to share the holidays with us again.

I think that reality hits me even harder when I go see her, like I did yesterday and will in a little while this morning.  She's here but she's not here, you know?  It's like the mother I knew my whole life - the one who was my best friend - is out there, constantly just out of reach - I see her but I can't get to her.

Every time I get to her, every time I go to see her, I'm reminded in the starkest terms that she's not here.  And she never will be here again, not as my mom and not like she was before.

It's so hard to explain why I feel so down or even what it feels like.  Often times, when someone asks me about her, usually someone I don't see that often or who isn't a close friend, they insist on telling me about a relative who had Alzheimer's disease and how terrible it was for him or her.  I know, on some level, they're trying to connect with me an create a shared experience, but it has the opposite effect on me.

Sometimes I want to yell at those well meaning souls that it's not the same.  They don't know my mom and they sure as hell don't know how special our relationship was.  They don't know - and, in truth, I probably didn't either - how much a part of me my relationship with my mom was and how much I depended on that relationship as the fuel for the engine runs my life.  The daily telephone calls to check in, to talk about nothing and everything - those telephone calls centered me somehow and kept my emotional compass pointing in the right direction.  They don't know that I can't possible explain it to them.

I can't tell them I've lost my emotional compass or that it's broken, perhaps beyond repair, although I think and hope I'll be okay.  I can't say something to make them feel worse for me, for my family and for my mom.  So, I listen and nod at the appropriate times and tell them I'm fine.  I always use the line that yes, it's tough, but every family goes through something like this.

But I don't really believe it, even as I say it.

How many families - how many sons, like me - can't look back and remember their mother (or father) for who she was?  How many can't look back because it's just too fucking painful to recall the memories of the good times, the special times, and then see their mother like she is now.  That's exactly what I'll be doing in an hour or so.  How many people can't reflect on good times from holidays past because it makes it virtually impossible to enjoy the holidays now, with their mom confined to a wheelchair with a bunch of strangers without any idea that it's a week from Christmas?

I just can't look back, not right now.  For someone who is nostalgic and sentimental, sometimes to a fault, it's very, very hard to live this way.  I think my memories - my many, happy memories in general, somehow helped me to soldier on in life because I had faith that their are more happy memories to come.  I've lost that faith to a certain extent.

Which brings me to my next point.  I can't look forward into the future either.  The inevitable future is one without my mom.  It's one of holidays and birthdays - things she enjoyed so much - without her.  It's baseball and basketball games the J.P. and Joe will be playing in that she won't get to see.  It's telephone calls with me that she won't have and telephone calls with her that I won't have.  It's a life - my life - without her in it.  And I can't bear the thought of it.  I really can't.

Sometimes, like now, the weight of all of this crushes me.  I try soldier on, so to speak, to be myself and try to maintain my outgoing, upbeat personality, because that's what my mom taught me to do.  And that's what those around me, at home and at work, need from me.  But it's hard.  It's damn hard sometimes.

I can't look back and I can't look forward.  I'm stuck in this moment - this terrible, unfair and cruel moment - in which I watch my mom disappear a little more every time I see her.  She's fading away. And I'm powerless to stop it or to make what is left of her life even a little more bearable.