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���������� Note: This brief story beautifully details the intersectionality of trauma. Extreme life experiences interact with the mundane to create life narratives and new states of understanding, never absent from our latent expectations and the need for something immutable.

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Her Own Kind of Absence

���������� Times; Celia Watson Seupel, 8/26/2014 ��

She lay so still as I approached her bed, I thought she was asleep. Or dead. Her eyes were open. “Mom?” I asked. Her gaze tilted toward me, but she said nothing.

It was 8:30 a.m. Only weeks earlier, she would have been in the kitchen by 8:30, asking me��. Now, she wouldn’t move, her thin, knobby fingers resting on the coverlet.

I didn’t know if my 93-year-old mother was depressed or if her dementia had suddenly worsened. She had been living in my upstate ���������� home for a year and a half, ever since I had convinced her she could no longer live alone.

Normally she was lively and functional. She just couldn’t remember anything.

I knelt by the bed, putting my hand over hers. “Are you O.K., Mom?” I asked.

She looked at me again, her eyes pale blue and watery, her white hair matted. “I don’t know,” she said. “Am I O.K.?”

Her words chilled me. A month before, we had suffered a trauma: . And even though she never mentioned it, did not even seem to remember it, she had been declining ever since.

Pushing her pillows together, I helped her sit upright and gave her water to sip. Ten days earlier, we had been to see Mom’s doctor. Together, we decided to start Mom on a low dose of Zoloft, an antidepressant medication.

Usually animated and cheerful, Mom had become increasingly quiet and vague ever since the dreadful news of Spencer’s suicide.

“Mom,” I asked her, “are you thinking about Spencer?”

“Spencer?” she echoed.

“Do you remember Spencer?”

She looked away. “I don’t know.”

Dementia is really weird. It’s not like memories get permanently erased; sometimes they are there, and sometimes they’re not.

I might show my mother a picture of my brother, who passed away years ago, and she would not remember him, then she might mention his name half an hour later when discussing his love of spaghetti. It’s as if the access, not the memory itself, gets broken.

I was convinced that although Mom did not seem to remember Spencer, she was devastated by his death and declining because of it. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, it’s not uncommon for depression to be mistaken for dementia in older people. The Alzheimer’s Association claims that��. But it can be difficult to tell the symptoms of dementia and depression apart.

Trying to rouse my mother, I pulled the covers down and urged her to get up. She didn’t move. Finally, I got her legs over the side of the bed, then pulled her to her feet so I could get her into the bathroom.

Immediately, she collapsed into my arms. I staggered, then managed to ease her half back onto the bed, her legs dangling off. All this she had done in a silence so complete, it was eerie. Suddenly, I was afraid.

My friend Sally, who’d had foot surgery, recently left her rented wheelchair for Mom and me — just in case. Now I wheeled it inside from the front porch and into Mom’s bedroom, talking nonstop.

“O.K., now we’re going to get up, Mom. We’re going to get dressed and go to the bathroom and then we’re going to go for a ride.”

Mom lay unresponsive on the bed. I dressed her like a mannequin, pulled her upright, sat her in the wheelchair, wheeled her the three feet to the bathroom and got her to use the toilet. She was cooperative, just in kind of a daze. This, I thought, was clinical depression.

Taking on more of her weight than I should have, I managed to get Mom outside and transfer her from the wheelchair to the car. Then I drove her to the hospital, where an emergency room orderly helped me to get her out of the car and back into another wheelchair.

By this time, Mom seemed more alert. “There’s something seriously wrong with my mother,” I told the emergency room triage nurse. “Maybe it’s depression, I don’t know.”

“Mrs. Watson,” the nurse said to my mother in an overly loud voice, “how are you feeling?”

“Oh,” said my mother in her usual polite manner, “I’m all right, thank you.”

We waited for an hour. I paced. Mom dozed. I started to think I’d made a mistake. Maybe I’d overreacted. My back hurt from lifting her. I sat down, suddenly exhausted, and fantasized about running away. Maybe I could creep out and leave Mom in the waiting room and they would just take care of her.

When they finally took her in and dressed her in the hospital gown, put her in a bed, took her blood pressure and drew her blood, I started to cry. I turned away so Mom wouldn’t see me crying. It would upset her.

There were two other beds in the room, with patients and families separated by curtains, so I left the room and stood in the hallway. I could not stop crying.

The nurse brought me a box of tissues.

“I lost my son recently,” I explained.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

The doctor came out soon afterward. “You’re mother’s blood sugar is almost 400,” he said. “That’s very high. Normal is 80 or 90. Did she have diabetes before?”

“No, never.” I cried harder. “Is she going to die?”

“No, no, she is going to be fine.” The doctor patted my shoulder. “I’ve given her a shot of insulin.”

After the shot of insulin, Mom’s blood sugar level quickly fell back to almost normal range, which the doctor said was a very good sign. But they wanted to keep her for a few days. The relief I felt was overwhelming.

When I went in to say goodbye, I’d stopped crying but my eyes were swollen. “What’s wrong?” Mom asked.

“I was just worried,” I told her.

She smiled and patted my hand. “I’m just fine,” she said.

I suddenly understood that Mom really did not remember Spencer. Maybe some part of her knew there was a difference, some kind of absence, but she did not consciously know he was gone. What I had thought was depression was, in fact, the rapid onset of Type 2 diabetes.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, kissing her soft cheek.

“You do whatever you need to do,” Mom said, looking at me very seriously. “I’ll be fine.”

I drove home and although it was still early afternoon, I crawled into Mom’s bed and pulled the covers up, my head cradled in the hollow of the pillow where her head had lain, breathing the scent of her hair and skin, my body curled into the impression of hers. There, I remembered Spencer and wept.

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