Mom Won’t Be Home for Christmas : Aging: This strong, proud woman is no longer ‘younger than springtime.’ Alzheimer’s claimed her spirit and strength; she entered a nursing home on her 86th birthday. Son bids farewell by decorating house for holidays.

It’s time to hunt for the tree, put the candles in the windows and the mural above the fireplace once again. But it’s never going to be quite the same here at home. Alice doesn’t live here anymore.

I’m not really sure when she left. I guess I realized Alice--my 86-year-old mother--was slowly departing when she grabbed the phone book one late summer day four years ago and had the beautiful red maple tree in the front yard hacked down and hauled away. My red maple tree. The one my dad and I planted, oh, probably 35 years earlier. Mom said it didn’t go with her white house. And besides, the leaves made a mess in the fall.

My brother, stunned, called and told me. I, too, was taken aback.

When she was younger, Alice won all sorts of awards for her flower arrangements. She could have been a terrific interior decorator. So, for her to say red and white wasn’t a good match sent a powerful message. But it was slow to sink in, as Alzheimer’s often is.

At the very least, it made the family realize it was time to keep closer tabs on her. Although I lived 100 miles away, Dick, my oldest brother, was within three blocks. That was reassuring. He could be there quickly if something went wrong. And fortunately, not much did, except for a few burned pots and pans.

The key to the car was the first thing to go. We would do her shopping and most of her cooking. She balked at losing her mobility, but her fear of getting lost while behind the wheel appeared to make it easier for her to accept. She became, in her words, “Alice in Wonderland.”

Not much else seemed to change. She did stop planting her wonderful garden, which always bloomed resplendent in August, but she still enjoyed writing her poetry: “Blue skies as far as eyes can see. Snow-clad branches full and free. Winter giving way to spring. My heart soars in wondering. How can such a wonder be? To warm the hearts of you and me!”

Reminder notes slowly became commonplace, as expected. “I must remember my paper girl and have some extra cash ready and waiting. She is adorable.” Things like that.

Days, weeks, months were spent watching television in a front room of her house. She didn’t want to go to the senior citizens’ center, she said. She’d rather use her makeshift treadmill, sit in her easy chair or work in the yard to pass the time. Looking back, that was a mistake.

Eventually, she forgot how to work the remote control. She still cooked and ate her oatmeal in the morning and nibbled on cookies and other sweets during the day, but at night we often would have trouble convincing her to eat. She’d say, “I’m not hungry, I’ve been eating all day.”

Mom had been living alone since my stepfather died 10 years ago and had become as used to it as a person can after 50 years of marriage. She treasured the interaction her bridge group afforded on Thursday afternoons. (She could still play the game, though not with the proficiency of her youth.)

There was Annie, older and more frail than Mom, but still so sharp mentally. And she still had her wheels, as did Elsie and Mildred. The cards played second fiddle to the camaraderie “the girls” enjoyed. And those rides in the country became cherished memories--if only for a fleeting moment.

Gradually, it became evident that Mom wasn’t tending to her personal hygiene. That led to the usual battles over bathing associated with the disease. Pleading turned to shouting at first. Tears often streamed down her cheeks--mine, too--when I visited. “I have not been a dirty old lady all my life,” she said one day. “I’m not forgetful, even at my old age!”

It didn’t take me long to adapt, though. I quickly realized that reasoning was impossible and arguing served no purpose, except to make us both miserable.

Dick took longer to learn that valuable lesson. He always thought if he was hard on her, he could make her remember. Sometimes, that strategy seemed to work, but never for long. Still, he has never stopped trying.

When I was younger, I always tried to picture the future. How old my dad would be, say, when I was 25, and how I could try to repay him in some small way for all the great things he did for me. I never got that chance. He died when I was 20.

I didn’t want that to happen with Mom. I’ve made sacrifices to achieve that and I have no regrets. I’ll always be able to cherish all the Sundays together in church (Mom is a deeply religious person and hates to miss a sermon), the summer walks in the cemetery just up the street from home, the chats on the bench under the trees by the pond as the chipmunks raced between the gravestones. And Mom reminding me with a laugh: “We all have to die, kiddo. Even you.”

We took Mom to the doctor about a year ago for a checkup, something she hadn’t had in decades; she was never sick. The prognosis: the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s. Nothing else was wrong, which was something of a relief since she had seemed to be deteriorating so.

Alzheimer’s, I thought, was a disease that gradually worsened over time, taking years to disable its victims. But it doesn’t always work that way, I found.

Mom’s circumstances changed. Her dear friend Annie got sick and had to move away to live with her daughter. Mildred left, too, to live with relatives in Colorado. Mom had coped admirably with the loneliness that comes from being twice widowed, but this seemed too much.

My sister Dee, the oldest in the family, made sure to call every Sunday night from her home near Pittsburgh. Dee never saw the smiles her calls brought to Mom’s face, but we did.

I visited every weekend and spent my vacations at home, but each time I left Mom pleaded, often with a tear in her eye, “Oh, I wish you could come back home to live. I miss you so.”

That was my greatest hope, to somehow be able to spend more time with her, to ease her fears. Then Dick called one Friday in November and said, “I don’t think Mother is going to make it through the day.”

That was a shock. It happened overnight. She was complaining again about her eyes, as she had been now and again since she fell one February day four years ago and hit her head on some ice. Doctors had found nothing.

I rushed home and took her to a clinic. Nothing major, we were told. We received a prescription for eyedrops, and returned home.

Mom spent the weekend in her chair and never opened her eyes, except to have the drops put in. The pain, she said, was too great. I left her alone Sunday night, expecting my other brother, Jim, to drop by any minute with her dinner. He never showed, and when Dick arrived a couple of hours later, he found her sitting on the hallway floor. Lost.

She was hospitalized the next day with a 104-degree fever. Doctors said she was suffering from dehydration, a bladder infection and shingles on the right side of her head. The eye was swollen shut.

During her stay in the hospital, she became more agreeable at first. “Whatever you say, kid,” she’d say when we asked her to eat something or go for a walk down the hall.

We remained hopeful, but Thanksgiving came and went with not much improvement. She seemed to be preparing us for the inevitable.

“We all have to go sometime,” she told me one day in early December. “Say good night. We’ll never see each other again. You’d better say I’m dead now. I’m gone.”

The hope had been to bring her home. I would take a leave of absence from my job to help care for her until she got back on her feet and we worked out some kind of routine for her. But she had gotten so weak in the hospital--she began refusing to eat anything solid and at times appeared to have forgotten how to swallow--that we had to move her into a nursing home. On her 86th birthday. It was difficult to watch.

This strong, proud woman is no longer “younger than springtime,” as she was wont to say whenever anybody asked her age. She is slowly wasting away. It is clear she has decided to move on. And yet the mothering instinct remains, even in her weakened state. She still consoles me when I shed a tear at her bedside: “Don’t cry, son.”

Mom always waved goodbye from the bedroom window after every one of my visits. There’s nobody there now, and that makes me sad.

I really didn’t want to decorate Mom’s house for the holidays, as I normally do. There doesn’t seem to be much to celebrate this year. But I’ve changed my mind. Mom would want me to, I know. The family will be together, and we’ll have dinner there as always, even if she can’t make it. Family has always been foremost to her.

I guess it will be my way of saying goodbye.