The Notebook That Spoke For Her

Her name was Brenda. Brenda Hollis. The county home health agency sent her out two days a week at first, then three, paid for mostly by Medicare, because dementia care that isn’t medical, the laundry, the showers, the nights, the meals, nobody pays for that. Brenda became something more than a nurse to us. She was the only other person who saw what I saw and did not flinch from it.

The notebook started the week the home health agency gave it to me. A plain spiral notebook, the kind you’d buy for a kid’s homework, with a cover that said nothing on it at all. Brenda told me to write down everything, the medications and the meals and the moods, because with dementia the smallest change can be the first sign of the next decline, and because, she said, “You’re going to need this, Sandra, even if you don’t know why yet.”

I did not know why yet. I know now.

I wrote down the morning I came in and found her trying to light the gas stove with a church bulletin because she was sure it was Thanksgiving and the turkey needed to go in, though it was March. I wrote down the afternoon she called me by my sister’s name, except I don’t have a sister, I never had a sister, and when I told her that she cried for forty minutes and could not tell me why, and I held her on the couch until she stopped. I wrote down every blood pressure reading, every pill, ten milligrams of donepezil crushed into applesauce because she couldn’t swallow it whole anymore, memantine twice a day, a low dose of something for the agitation that came on hardest after supper, the hour the home health books call sundowning, the hour I came to dread more than any other hour in my life.

There was a Thursday in the third year I will never forget, the day she fell reaching for a coffee can on a shelf she had reached a hundred times before without trouble. I found her on the kitchen floor, conscious, scared, holding her hip. Dave was still at work so I called Brenda first and then I got Mom into the back seat of my own car myself, because the ambulance from the county would have taken twenty minutes we didn’t have, and I drove her the eleven miles to the hospital in Fairmont with my hazard lights on the whole way. The doctor came back an hour later and said there was no fracture, just a bruise the size of a dinner plate, and that she had been lucky. I called Craig from the hallway outside her room to tell him. He was quiet a second and then he said he was glad I’d been close enough to get her there fast, since he was so far north, and that was the whole conversation, four minutes, and it did not occur to me until I’d hung up that “glad you were close enough” was as near as he ever came to saying thank you for something that had nothing to do with distance and everything to do with who showed up.