It starts off with small things, like the coat.
Mom looked over at the rack where we'd hung our coats a few minutes earlier.
"Oh, that's a pretty coat," she said.
"Mom, that's your coat."
"Oh, really? I didn't know I had that."
Later came confusion over the prescription medicine she'd been taking for years for a thyroid condition.
My phone rang. That's the way it usually happened.
"Could you go and refill my prescriptions?" she asked. She'd long since given up driving. That was a blessing.
"Mom, I brought your refills over a couple of days ago."
"Well, I couldn't find them, so I took some of Louise's pills." Her sister's prescription had changed months before and was now twice the dose of her own pills.
When the grease fire happened, it was something she didn't call to tell me about.
She and her sister still lived across the street from me. We talked every day but I only went over there a few days a week to cook a meal and check on them.
Mom had been cooking some ground beef and had gotten distracted. The flames from the pan shot up as high as the range hood, singing some of the paint. When I saw the black streaks, I was aghast.
"What happened here?" I asked.
"Oh, we had a little accident but we got it put out." My heart sank. It could have been really bad with both of them having limited mobility, one in a wheel chair and one using a walker.
The day Mom called and said Louise had taken a tumble in her closet was the day of reckoning. I dashed over there to see if she was hurt. I tested Mom's memory when I called 911, asking her for the address at her house. She couldn't remember. I had written it on the whiteboard that hung next to her chair.
That was the day I knew it was time for them to move to assisted living, one of the hardest decisions I've ever made.
Nothing was ever the same after that. They both lived another three years with chef prepared meals, structured activities, entertainment from volunteers, ice cream on demand, church services right down the hall and 24 hour nursing care just outside their room.
It wasn't ideal but it was necessary. Mom never stopped wanting to go home to "her little house."
