The Living Trust
Phoebe Becktell’s mother was blind and confused. The reading they had shared over the years was the path to keeping love alive.
By Phoebe Becktell, Ph.D.
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The author with her mother
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A professor once told me: “The older you get, the more like yourself you become.” With this in mind as I cared for my mother throughout the final six years of her life, I discovered that her life as a reader offered clues to her inner self, along with access to the living trust of stories she all but unwittingly established.
More than 350,000 new cases of dementia are diagnosed every year in the United States. Vascular dementia – more commonly known as “senility” – is the second most common. This is not the dementia of Alzheimer’s disease, with all the tangled axons and smothering plaques that lead to impaired judgment, loss of language, and personality changes. Rather it is the dementia of forgetfulness, fading memories, and a shrinking world. A person who suffers from dementia is the same person, or perhaps even more so, that he or she has always been. Remembering lovingly can reveal pathways into that shrinking world.
My sister and I were born when Mother was 18 and then 19. As a very young mother, she was bewildered by the inadequacies that she sensed existed long before social workers and psychologists put teen-aged parenting problems into language. But her instincts were right; she read to us. When our brother was born 11 years later, Mother was no longer a teen-ager, but she continued to deposit assets in a trust that consisted of stories.
When we were little she read us poetry, fairy stories, the comics. As we got older she turned to chapter books: Tom Sawyer, Five Little Peppers, Ramona, The Call of the Wild. She read to us long after we could read to ourselves, and she gave us books as presents. When we had our own children, she gave them books as well. We read to ourselves, we read to each other, we read to our kids and their friends. And we always talked about the books we read.
After we grew up and moved away, Mother went to college and then started to teach. Sometimes she was a substitute teacher, other times she was a homebound teacher, and she always carried a bag of books with her. When the kids in a classroom got unruly, she quieted them with a story; when a sick or injured child was weary, she read him a story; when a pregnant teenager had struggled through the assigned lesson, she rewarded her with a story.
As she grew older, Mother developed a series of eye ailments that impaired her vision. She got large-print books, used a magnifying glass, and tilted her head to make the most of her peripheral vision. Eventually she got books on tape. When she was 87, circulatory problems starved the fragile retinas of her eyes of oxygen, and most of her remaining vision was lost. She became slightly confused and depressed. We moved her to an assisted-living apartment near my home where she received help with medicines, hygiene, and meals. No longer able to manage the mechanics of the machine that played Books for the Blind, she became angry at her new helplessness. She sat in her dark with only the TV and stories from visitors and people who called on the phone.
We kept talking about books, though, and I told her about the stories I was reading. When I read Winona’s Web, by Pricilla Cogan, I mentioned it to Mother because she had lived in South Dakota near the Sioux Indians for years, and I thought she would be interested.
“It’s about a little old Sioux Indian woman who says she’s going to die in two months,” I told Mother. “She’s not ill, so her daughter thinks she’s depressed and takes her to a psychologist. This is the story of her therapy.”
I mentioned that the story was beautifully written, including a famous or should-be-famous quotation at the beginning of each chapter, which the author skillfully worked into the story.
“I loved books like that,” Mother said wistfully.
On her birthday, I gave Mother a copy of Winona’s Web and told her my gift was to read it to her. I began the reading that day, and afterward read several chapters during each visit. I thought Mother’s memory loss might necessitate a review or repetition from one session to the next, but she surprised me by telling me each time just where we had left off. She helped me pronounce the Lakota words properly, and we reminisced about the Sioux we had known when Dad was a missionary on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota. I noticed that both her memory and her mood were improving, and then I recalled Leslie Marmon Silko’s book, Ceremony, in which stories were related to healing.
They aren’t just entertainment.
Don’t be fooled.
They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.
(Ceremony, p. 2)
Mother and I continued to read books together. My sister and brother sent books, articles, and letters that told the ongoing stories of their lives. With her interest in stories revived, Mother also made the effort to play her Books on Tape, and we talked about the books I read and those she was listening to.
Because I had become the trustee of Mother’s living trust, I took stock of the assets and started to make regular deposits, while also drawing on the accruing interest.
When her memory declined, we read shorter books with fewer characters, and we requested one-cassette tapes because she’d forgot how to turn them. One time I picked up a book of vignettes about life in Northwestern Colorado, the part of the country where she and my father once had a cabin. I read one selection to her. She sat there nodding and smiling, sightless eyes turned toward me, attentive – so I read another.
Still smiling, Mother said: “Can you make any sense out of that?” She had not understood anything I read. She, who had given us the gift of stories, could no longer follow the story line; but her attention indicated that the act of reading and listening were familiar and comforting. She had read to us before we could understand, and we had listened … so I went on.
Five years later, when a major cerebral event weakened her and plunged her further into confusion, we moved her into a nursing home. Now even her past was jumbled and disordered. She could not keep track of current events any better than she could remember extended family links. In frustration, I yearned for a more productive approach to our time together.
One evening as I scanned my bookshelves, I spied the tiny book Mother had given my sister and me in 1934 – All About the Little Small Red Hen (published by Cupples & Leon Co., no author given). Just maybe, I thought, something from the past in which she now dwells would capture her interest.
The next day I asked her if she remembered the book. Her face creased into a delighted smile as she recalled the days all those years ago when she’d read the book to us. To encourage her to do her physical therapy, I read to her from that while she exercised on the recumbent bicycle.
Once upon a time,
Though I can’t say exactly when,
There lived, away in the country,
A Little Small Red Hen.
As I read about the little red hen being captured by the cunning old fox and then outwitting him, Mother leaned forward, sightless eyes focused on me. The therapists hovered and listened. When I finished reading, one of them asked: “Was that a good story?”
Mother turned toward her and responded emphatically: “That has always been a good story.”
Now it was my turn to outfit a bag with books. I filled it with children’s stories, nature books, poetry, the Bible, and family favorites.
Mother whispered along with me as I read:
“. . . when the trees bow down their heads,
the wind is passing by”
Christina G. Rossetti
When I came to the part in A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh about Pooh’s being named Pooh because his arms were so stiff he had to blow the flies off his nose, I puffed: “Pooh. Pooh.” and she laughed out loud.
Although she assured me she did not remember it at all, when I read the poem The King’s Breakfast (also by Milne) to her, she listened attentively. Then, toward the end, I paused before she said along with me:
I do like a little bit of butter to my bread!
After that, she remembered how we had always laughed when the King slid down the banister. “It was pure silliness,” she said. “We permitted ourselves a lot of silliness ... it’s important.”
Some of the stories triggered a yearning, echoing the reality of loss. Others called up a memory. Many of the stories she didn’t remember; they were forever new to her. No matter. At each visit when I suggested reading, she said: “Well, that was the idea wasn’t it?”
I added and subtracted books from my bag and made my selections according to Mother’s whims. After reading several Robert Frost poems, I realized they didn’t hold the same enchantment for her as they once had, so I put them aside. Instead I read a few chapters of A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm (Edwin Way Teale), one of her favorites. Then one day she asked me not to read that any more. I was puzzled until she added: “It makes me homesick for the cabin.”
At Christmas time I read The Story of the Other Wiseman (Henry van Dyke), as she had done for us every Christmas for years. Then I read How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Only then did she realize we were entering the holiday season.
As Mother slipped deeper and deeper into her dementia, I continued to make adjustments in what we read. Because even a story line from a familiar tale often eluded her, I turned to the metaphors of poetry – my sister’s poetry.
. . . . I climb drifts where, to and fro,
small mice feet went like laughing bells
and prints of wings are etched on snow.
Joanna S. Sampson
And the Psalms. Mother plucked the words out of the depths of her confusion and recited along with me:
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; . . . .
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil;
For thou art with me . . .
When my brother came to visit, Mother asked him: “Is that where I am? In the valley of the shadow?”
As her condition began to deteriorate more rapidly, I felt a sense of urgency about again sharing stories that had been meaningful in our lives. So I read my sister’s narrative poem, The Blossom Tree. Mother and I reminisced about the young man who had illustrated the booklet, and recalled how the poem had been choreographed and set to music, both of us proud. There were three sections; I read one each day. At the end I read:
Death, the stranger who lives high
on the dark mountain and collects things,
old, worn-out things . . .
Joanna S. Sampson
Even with stories, we could not fight off death forever. That very night the stranger came to collect her.
The living trust that Mother had invested in compounded interest all those years and sustained her throughout her entire lifetime. The legacy continues to pay dividends to her children and her grandchildren – and beyond.
