Feeding the Animals
By Cyndy Cendagorta
I twisted my fingers through the bars so that I could feel a bit of my mother’s hair and twirl it in around my fingertips. She was confused and seemed not to realize I was trying to connect with her. Her eyes were mercury pools of unknowing, anchoring onto mine for a second, then wandering again. I felt like one of those idiots feeding the animals at the zoo, as I reached for her, pushing against the fence. I remembered reading about a woman who jumped over the lion enclosure at the zoo to feed the cat. I thought this was so selfish and stupid when I read it. What possessed someone to do that? Why would anyone put their own life as well as the animal’s life at such risk?
Before August of 2020 when I touched my mother through the bars, I was only allowed to see her through the window of the memory care facility, where I stood pushed up against the window so I could see her face without the glare obscuring her features. I would splay my fingers against the glass and pantomime to her to do the same. She would look down at her hands in her lap, unable to respond in kind, and my handprints were left as solitary markers of our lost connection.
If dementia was a thief before the pandemic, it was a cruel joke during it, when a loved one in memory care was locked in, and families were locked out. “For the safety of the patients”, the staff said, family members were not allowed in the facility. I knew they were right in a clinical, public health sense, yet it seemed so inhumane and unnatural to deprive the dying of human contact, to take the remaining time together from us all.
My mother went into care for early onset Alzheimer’s at the start of the pandemic, in February of 2020, after it became too difficult for my father to care for her at home. He wanted to, so badly, but the situation had become unmanageable, just like my once so capable mother.
The facility she lived in was a good one, with kind staff and clean halls and she had a best friend she slowly walked the halls with every day. Right after she moved in, the facility locked down due to COVID. Our visits morphed with the pandemic and the CDC over the next 18 months. Visits were first by Zoom, then through glass, then through the bars of the courtyard fence, then six feet apart in the courtyard, then finally in the back dining room. An unholy survivor’s guilt came with these visits, as we walked away—into the sun, to our houses and the world, and she remained shuffling through her 12,000 square foot world of soft foods, locked doors, masks, and policies.
I was elated when the facility opened for person visits, masked up and COVID vaccinated, in spring of 2021. COVID persisted, but was no longer the absolute barrier to human connection it had been. Instead, it was not unlike an alley cat that could be fed, and pet tentatively, outside, but still not allowed in the house. I sat in the back room with my mother, and marveled at the stray hairs that twisted down the side of her neck, her weak but present smile. The staff didn’t want us touching even then though, and when they walked past, they would say, softly, “six feet”, which struck me as about the size of a coffin. Six feet of solitude on the march toward death, six feet that felt at once like miles and millimeters, six feet of dementia and COVID’s brutal realities robbing me of the last tangible bits of my mother.
When the staff wasn’t looking, I jumped up, tore off my mask and kissed her cheeks. I did this quickly, afraid I would get caught violating the CDC’s policies, that the staff would think I was obsessed, stupid and reckless. I understood in that moment, more of what the woman who fed the big cat at the zoo was thinking. She just needed to be closer. I needed to be closer too. In the greatness of my need, I became comfortable risking my mother’s demise by COVID or my own—just to feel her next to me again. I was left with these choices- hold my mother or hold my distance.
My mother passed away five months after I touched her check in the backroom on that spring day in 2021. I was with her when she passed, along with my father and brother. The facility let my family and me stay with her during the day and let me sleep with her at night for the twelve days she lay dying, physical time for which I will be eternally grateful.
I lay with my mother over those nights in a cocoon of my memories of our lives together. I told her the stories I remembered for both of us and plotted the checkpoints on her way from her childhood to this particular end, as carefully as she wrote developmental milestones in my baby book.
I rubbed lemon-scented lotion on her face, brushed her hair, and read to her as she had read to me when I was small. I tried to fill her with the humanity of touch that she had been denied for 18 months of living in care. Those moments were some of the most precious and sacred that I have ever known- spiritual even, for an agnostic.
Nine months after my mother passed, I threw a surprise birthday party for my father. It had been a difficult year, and I felt that we needed something joyful, something very much alive, to celebrate. My father’s 76th birthday seemed like the perfect excuse to gather, vaccinated and outdoors.
Thirty-six of his friends waited in the cul-de-sac on a Saturday afternoon to surprise him. I cried when my daughters drove up with my father in the front seat. He, too, was wet eyed and visibly overwhelmed with gratitude. He stood, swaying slightly, with his hands palms up as if he were being physically presented with the souls before him. Slowly he made his way to greet everyone—many crying along with me—friends from grade school, from college, from the fifty-three years he was married to my mother. The way so many in his life showed up for him was a promise that there was life after loss, that true friends don’t disappear when your spouse does, that COVID and dementia and growing older can’t take everything. As I stood watching the party move inside, I felt my mother there with us. Inexplicably, even though she is no longer with us, I have felt her with me ever since she passed, a soft whisper of all that she was to me in each of my own breaths. A promise of its own, that we are forever connected.
I used to cry over the eight years my mother was deep into her illness, because I could only see her in that state, as dementia slowly took her away. I struggled to remember what she sounded like in the before times, how she laughed or how she told a story with her hands. Dementia took not only her mind, but my memories of her, while it had her in its clutches.
My aunt had promised me that after my mother passed away, I would get her back. She knew this because my grandmother died from dementia, too. I didn’t understand how this could be true until it happened to me, and my mother came back in full relief, and I could see her once again as she was.
If I am grateful for anything in losing her, it is this—that I don’t have to struggle to reach her anymore. No more hands pushing through bars. No more fingerprints left lonely on the glass. She is now the mother of my memory, glorious and living in me and with me- a part of me that no manmade policy or barrier can take away.
I stood for one more moment in the driveway the day of my father’s party, taking it all in. There were hugs that spanned decades and jokes that were just as old, arms around shoulders and glistening eyes. There was so much life.
I realized that I couldn’t stay in that space of shared memories, and memory making for long. I had drinks to serve and fruit to get plated. I had dishes to pull out of the oven and appetizers to serve. No more feeding the animals, I thought. For the first time in years, it was time to party like one.
Photo courtesy of Cyndy Cendagorta.
Cyndy Cendagorta is working on a collection of short stories about broken things, including bodies, children, faith, and love. She runs a policy consulting company in Reno, Nevada, that specializes in social innovation, and she is a special needs mother and advocate. She holds an MA in Political Science from Washington State University and is a past Women’s Research and Education Institute Fellow who started her career working in the United States Senate. Her work can be found in Cagibi, Barely South Review, Memoir Magazine, The Spectacle, Salmon Creek Journal, The Dillydoun Review, The Dewdrop, and Please See Me. She lives in Reno, Nevada, with her husband and three children.
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