My mother is descending into that shadowy valley of Alzheimer's Dementia. For the past 15 years she's had "trouble remembering" some things. In the past 10 years it's become apparent that something is definitely wrong. And in the past 2 years I've seen her "forget" who I am, where we are, and what we're doing. And then, in an instant the confusion clears and she's overwhelmed with embarassment and shame.
When we talk on the phone she sometimes doesn't connect me with my family - my wife and children. Her memories are highly emotional and often are complete fabrications of the mind. Her illness at first made some of us angry. We thought she was faking memory loss to avoid taking responsibility for things. My brother, Paul, died believing that she was playing a game of "convenient amnesia."
I wondered, but now I'm convinced he and I were mistaken.
One of the dearest women in the world has been a friend to my mom for 40 years. Now she spends Fridays talking with my mom. She asks her to tell stories, prods her with questions, records the interview and has transcribed some of them.
I'll put one of them here, with my input in (parenthesis).
"My father (Jack Frampton) grew up in Los Angeles, in the city
of Los Angeles. They were poor people
and lived in a small house. His dad left
the family and so my grandmother is the one who brought the children up all by
herself.
(My grandfather used to meet his dad, Eugene Frampton, at the end of each work day. Jack would run to the streetcar stop where his dad got off and they would walk home together. One day when Jack was 10 years old he ran to meet his father, and his father never got off the streetcar. He left no note, no reason and no support for his family. Years later, Jack's children heard a rumor that they never verified - that Eugene had moved to San Francisco and started a new family there.)
"She was a schoolteacher though,
and she was very bright. My dad had a
younger brother who was killed in World War II – Douglas was his name, Douglas
Frampton. That hurt the family a lot but
I guess they got over it. I never heard
the thing explained but I didn’t hear of them being sad about it.
(Douglas Frampton was lost at sea while flying in a bomber over the South Pacific. His body was never recovered. Among his personal effects was a leather bomber jacket with his name inside that my grandfather kept. His children loved to wear it.)
"My dad’s sister was married to a really,
really nice gentleman – a very intelligent man – and so my dad and Iris’
husband were good friends. They talked a
lot together, those two. They were the
around the same age. So that was how my
dad’s family grew up. They were in Los
Angeles.
"My father never
even finished high school but he always could work and he liked his jobs. When my dad got out of school he got a job
to depend on, money wise. He joined
the military (United States Marine Corps) when he was about seventeen – I can’t remember what level he was
at. He probably stayed in for four
years.
(He served abord a Navy ship in the Pacific before the Second World War. He got hookworm walking barefoot on the beach in Guam. While on board ship, Jack attended Protestant worship services and learned the hymn "Let The Lower Lights Be Burning," which became his favorite song.)
"Before the children came along I’m not sure where he worked. He was a carpenter and in the military he
built things. That was right in Long
Beach.
"When he was
older, he came home from work and he just sat in the kitchen in a chair and had
us kids running around. It was
wonderful, just wonderful. There were
six of us kids, very close in age. We
just loved being near him. I never
really asked him about what things were like though he liked to tell us stories
about what he had done.
"He was
twenty-four years old when he married.
I’m not sure where he lived when he met my mother.
They met one evening in a – I would call it
a saloon now – but it was where they came and had a drink and talked.
Wow – they both liked each other, so that was
the beginning of their life together and about six or seven weeks later they
married.
"My mother was twenty–six.
She was two years older than my father and he thought she was beautiful
and I think my mother felt the same way about my dad. She thought he was very handsome. I have the pictures of their wedding – nothing
very fancy. My dad wore a tie and a
coat. They were very, very happy all
those years.
"My mother came
from (Remsen,) Iowa – that’s where her roots are.
She was maybe twenty or twenty-one and she needed to get some money. She
also had asthma. Asthma bothered her chest all the time and so her folks, who
were on the farm in Iowa, they said, “Marion, you’d better go out to California
where the air is better for what you have.”
So that’s what she did. She went into these homes and they brought her
in, gave her a room and board and she was the one who cooked all the food to
eat. She was not the maid. The families were very pleased with my
mother’s food. They thought she was a
very, very good cook. So she did that
all those years.
"When my mom and
dad went out on a trip in the car that was their opportunity to go out by
themselves. Then they finally got
married and then started their family.
It was bing, bing, bing – six kids after about eight years. (John, Mary, Anne, Douglas, Peter, and Donald) It was good.
My mother worked after she was married but not after the babies
came. I never asked her, but she was a
teacher too and maybe she quit when the children came. I never paid much attention to that.
"My dad had work
down on the ocean and so they moved to Long Beach into a one- bedroom
house. They had four babies in that
small home until they got a new house.
They saved up enough money to get a house with three bedrooms about
three miles north of the water in Long Beach.
So they got that larger house and I was in a good school district and we
all went to a Catholic school that my mother wanted us to be in. My mother was Catholic – very much so. My dad – he was a very good man – just had no
faith. But we all went to a Catholic
school about a block from our own house.
All of us kids went to that school all those years. We were there for eight years."
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