mom has alzheimer's, and i guess she's now in what could be called the late stage. she's had to give up so much already -- her home, her car, her pets, her independence. she spent over two years in a lovely assisted living with her own things around her. and then, as her dementia progressed, she had to give up her private room and bathroom and her furniture, paintings, books and other things -- most of which she no longer remembered -- and go to a dementia unit of a nursing home. she wore my father's wedding ring on a chain around her neck after he died . . . but the last time i saw her, she'd misplaced it. a social worker tried to comfort me, saying "it's not as if it meant anything to her any longer." while she was right, it wasn't really comforting.
and now she's misplaced her own wedding and engagement rings. she no longer has much -- if anything -- left to give up.
mom got engaged at 17 and married at 18. she's 80 now; those rings haven't left her fingers since she got them except for one brief -- two day -- period in the late 1960s when it was all the rage to have one's rings welded together. she never took them off to do dishes or lotion her hands or even to do messy work like mucking out a stable, grinding meat for sausage or butchering chickens. when we were burglarized a few years ago, my husband's friends anxiously inquired "did they get ruby's wedding ring?" dh was honestly puzzled. "why would they think that? do their wives take off their rings when they go out?" the only time he's seen me remove mine is when he took it to the jeweler to buy me an anniversary ring to wear with it for our tenth anniversary. i was raised to believe you just didn't take off a wedding ring. my ring is almost as much a part of me now as my mother's was of her. i'm sure i learned it from her.
i cannot imagine my mother taking off her rings -- i didn't even realize it was possible. her knuckles have swollen, and although she's lost enough weight to take her from plus-size to small, i didn't think her rings would make it past her arthritic joints. the fact that she took them off means that she's lost more of herself than just those rings.
the last time i saw my mother, she had lost the part of her that gave her interest in me. she recognized me as her daughter; she just wasn't interested in me. i stopped calling her daily when she made it clear she wasn't interested in the phone calls -- not just once, but day after day after day. alzheimer's took most of our relationship away. it took the good parts, leaving only the bad. now it's taking my mother's identity from her at the most basic level. those rings -- and the marriage they represented -- were an enormous and very basic part of my mother's identity. and now it -- and they -- are gone.
