The mother’s Parkinson’s disease and dementia

The mother’s Parkinson’s disease and dementia transform Blanca’s relationship with her from a difficult but vivid bond into an intimate struggle shaped by fear, dependence, and exhaustion. The illness is not presented as a single decline: it erodes the mother’s physical and mental capacities, disrupts care at home, and leaves flashes of lucidity beside confusion and distress. Blanca’s memories preserve both the harm of those final years and the force of the person her mother had been.

Progression and the struggle to remain independent

The mother had always resisted defeat, approaching life’s battles with the expectation that she could win them. As her strength and her mind began to fail, she became frightened, even as her desire to live remained fierce. The people and social circle that had surrounded her diminished, and she once observed that one of the hardest parts of getting old was realizing that nobody was interested in what she had to say. The illness therefore takes more than physical ability: it threatens her place in the lively world she had inhabited and her confidence that she could still command it.

At a residence for older people, her Parkinson’s was described as devouring her brain. The loss of the control her extraordinary mind had once exercised seemed to let the rest of her reality flood in. She was expelled from one residence for what was characterized as bad behavior, but Blanca understood that the explanation was more complicated: her mother was already too ill to live in the luxury apartment-style facility, though she insisted, furiously and desperately, that she was not. Blanca tried to persuade her to accept help and to meet the end with dignity and calm, as they had once hoped she would. The mother’s refusal was not simply a disagreement about accommodation; it expressed the collision between her determination to remain herself and the mounting evidence that she could no longer manage alone.

The demands and damage of caregiving

In the last months, the illness made care at home unstable and frightening. The mother called Blanca in the middle of the night, demanding that she come over and saying she was afraid, including that a caregiver wanted to kill her. Blanca acknowledges that there may have been some truth in the fear, without suggesting that this made the situation manageable. She interviewed possible caregivers, many of whom lasted only a few days. Her mother kept them awake, took her medication, and left pills scattered among her sheets, papers, and books. Blanca even worried about the dogs’ safety. The mother dismissed caregivers two or three times a day and eventually slapped one of them.

These incidents altered the family’s everyday communication as well as the practical arrangements. When Blanca said she could not leave her children alone at four in the morning, her mother became indignant and hung up. Most conversations in those months ended the same way. The phone, once an ordinary means of contact, became a source of dread: seeing her mother’s call made Blanca’s heart lurch. She sometimes let the battery run down, misplaced the phone, or disconnected it deliberately. She hoped a call might bring affection or an apology; instead, it might bring complaints about money or accusations that Blanca had abandoned her. The account does not soften Blanca’s limits: she says she did what she could, sometimes what she had to do, and not always what was best. The strain is shown as part of the illness’s reality, not as proof that either woman had ceased to care.

The final hospital and a changed relationship

The mother’s last illness unfolded through hospitals, doctors, and battles that could not be won. Blanca had wanted her to die peacefully, but the disease took her mind before it took the rest of her, leaving intermittent scraps of lucidity that seemed to bring further suffering. On the last day, in the hospital, Blanca reassured her that this was her third bout of pneumonia, that she would recover, and that Blanca and the children would be all right. Her mother could no longer speak. She looked steadily at Blanca and cried silently; Ana, her closest friend, suggested that the air conditioning had irritated her eyes. Blanca believed the tears were a farewell.

The roles between mother and daughter had already begun to reverse. In the final days in hospital, the mother called Blanca “mother” several times. Blanca reflects that nobody warns a daughter that, as her mother dies, she may have to become her mother. The reversal does not erase the history of conflict or make caregiving easy; it gives their last exchanges a stark intimacy. Even the mother’s surrender of Patum, her dog, became significant to Blanca. When her mother accepted that Patum could no longer stay with her, Blanca understood the decision as a sign that her mother was ready to give up more than the dog, and that the end was approaching.

Memory, uncertainty, and continuing presence

The illness also unsettles what Blanca believes she knows about the family’s past. At a residence, she invoked her father’s dignity in the face of illness and death as an example for her mother. Her mother answered that her father’s death had not happened as Blanca imagined. Blanca did not ask what she meant, and her mother said nothing further. The remark remained suspended between them: Blanca could not tell whether it came from lucidity or madness, and does not want to know whether the story that had sustained her was false. Dementia thus leaves not only losses but an unresolved uncertainty that Blanca must carry.

After her mother’s death, Blanca continues to address her through remembered scenes and imagined encounters. At dawn, unable to enter the locked cemetery, she pounds on its gate and calls softly for her mother. Once the sun has risen, she imagines seeing her mother walking by the harbor with Patum and two other dogs, heading happily toward her boat. In this vision, the mother offers reassurance that everything will pass. The scene does not undo the disease or resolve what Blanca cannot know; it gives their bond a form that can survive its final, painful years. Later, Blanca has her mother’s jacket cleaned and looks for signs of her in the children and in the routines of home. The illness’s narrative significance lies in that tension: it devastates the mother’s independence and strains the daughter’s care, but it cannot reduce their relationship to the symptoms of decline.