Spoon feeding your mother.

Unlike toddlers, there is nothing humorous or charming about spoon feeding your mother.  Life has come full circle.  Where once she ensured I got my necessary quota of daily vitamins and protein, it is now my turn to keep her alive.  Pureed food, just like me so many decades ago, is the only way she will swallow food.  Anything larger and she spits it out.  It’s a by-product of dementia/alzheimers to reject just about everything.  Even so, I have to quickly follow a spoonful of pureed beef and potatoes with a sip of milk, so at least something gets down her throat.  She’s probably lost 30 lbs in the past couple months, barely has the strength to push her walker down the hall to the dining room.  Mom needs help just getting out of her chair.  And she is now totally blind.  Bladder control is disappearing fast.  She cannot grasp a cup, and holding a fork or spoon is asking too much of her limited strength.  I’ve decorated her room with multiple arrangements of silk flowers, hoping that even the tactile recognition or the simple knowledge they are there might elevate her spirits.  If anything it will show the staff that Mom has people who still care, so they better not ignore her needs.  Her conversational skills have disappeared, she just wants to get out.  Out of the nursing home, out of her life.  And poor Dad keeps focusing on these negative issues further bringing her and him down.  Mom just sinks further and further into an isolated world that must be unbearably depressing and overwhelming to her.  The end of life can be so bitter and cruel.

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