One April morning in 2004, my brother-in-law Antonio arrived at our house with his mother and a suitcase. He told us the elderly woman could no longer live alone. Alzheimer's had taken hold of her, and he had no intention of caring for her himself. Either we found her a place, he said, or we kept her with us. It was around eleven in the morning when they arrived. By three in the afternoon, he was gone.
That's how quickly, without any warning, a life can change—not just one, but many. My mother-in-law had lived in Lecce, in her own home near her family. We had only recently moved to Sabaudia to start our own life together. Antonio continued his comfortable routine in Venice with his wife in their large, empty house—their children had moved out. Meanwhile, nine of us crowded into a hundred square meters. My partner Paolo and I were somehow happy about it anyway, despite the shock. We took time to understand. At first, his mother could manage the bathroom on her own and helped with housework. She laughed, she joked. Today she is a woman who is "at peace" in her own way, talking to herself about her youth. Now she doesn't know what a bathroom is. She can't wash herself. Sometimes she can't eat on her own. She wants to sit all day, drink only water, eat sweets. She wants to be in the car.
This is all that remains of a strong, lively, active woman—someone who, according to Paolo's stories, was always convinced she needed no one and was certainly never humble. Paolo's good memories of her are few. At sixteen, he ran away to the Navy to escape her. Today, as he always says, "She finally caught me, even though I spent my whole life running from her."
We decided to keep her with us because, as the psychologist from the Kronos project told us, she would benefit from being with family. And I never want my own parents—still relatively young—to end their lives in an institution. The same goes for my mother-in-law. We chose this twisted, uncertain path with our hearts. But now we're truly alone. The Kronos project no longer follows her case because of how far her cognitive decline has progressed. We can only rely on our primary care doctor, who, despite his best efforts, can do little against Alzheimer's.
Now we can only love her and make sure she gets her regular medical checkups.
But she doesn't feel it anymore. She doesn't feel our affection or our small daily kindnesses. She doesn't notice a new dress or a birthday cake.
Sometimes she thinks Paolo is her husband and gets angry if he hugs me. Sometimes she thinks he's her father. Paolo used to laugh at first. Now he cries. Sometimes he feels as though she isn't his mother anymore, and he feels guilty because he can't embrace her the way he wants to. He apologizes to me for the sleepless nights when we have to clean the whole room because she's removed her diaper. I know this sounds brutal, but it's the naked truth. It's why no caregiver comes back after the first try, and why no institution can give us even a brief break—ten days a year. I manage to stay less emotionally involved, but my heart aches for her, even though sometimes I have to speak to her and correct her the way you do with a child. My real pain is for Paolo, and I feel powerless watching his eyes fill with tears. Our children, though, think it's normal for grandparents to forget, to need help washing and eating. They treat her like one of them—jokes, dancing, cuddles—even though she doesn't move much anymore and doesn't enjoy the jokes as much. They feel Paolo's struggle too. But day by day, she's become one of us. She's part of the family now. There are endless difficulties. Yet some evenings Paolo and I sit and reflect. He had hoped his mother would have a peaceful old age. I think that her "absence" now will be something we'll miss terribly when she's truly gone. We wonder what we'll do when we're old. And we've decided that, if God wills it, we'll still hold each other's hand.
Laura Broccolo, 2006
