Author Archives: sammozart

Look through the window and you will see Moriarty, the Phantom of My Blog, and me sitting on the low, stone wall by the folly, a short walk across the meadow from my blog. We are eating sandwiches and discussing the tulips growing here at the base of the wall. Dickens, Moriarty’s black, fluffy dog, lies in the grass, snapping at bees.

The warm sun and the buzzing of the bees lull me into a reverie. “The colors of the pure white tulips and the deep pink ones make me think of the richness I derived from taking up my first A to Z Blogging Challenge this year,” I say.

Moriarty takes a bite from his sandwich, tossing Dickens a piece. “I thought you didn’t want to go all back through telling your stories of your dementia caregiving for Emma, your mother, yet you went ahead and chose it as your A to Z theme.” He pours himself more lemonade from the thermos.

“I’m hoping to save the maidens,” I say. “You know, like Scheherazade did.

“The tales of the one thousand and one nights originated in Persia and then spread throughout the Middle East, Egypt and India, and were added to.” I offer my cup for a refill. “Tulip is derived from the Persian word for turban,” I tell him.

“A very long time ago, the Sultan, upon learning that his wife and his brother’s wife had been unfaithful, deduced that all maidens once married became unfaithful, so each night he took a new maiden for his bride and then in the morning had his vizier behead her.

“To save the maidens, Scheherazade, the vizier’s daughter, offered herself to the Sultan. Each night Scheherazade told the Sultan a story, but she didn’t finish it; so the Sultan couldn’t behead her because he wanted to hear how it ended. He brought her back night after night, until finally he realized that not all women are unfaithful.”

I take a sip from my cup. “Mmm, this is good. You made this lemonade this morning?”

“Yes,” says Moriarty. “Lots of sugar, lots of ice, made in a metal pitcher — the secret.”

“Like writing the A-Z posts,” I reflect.

I continue: “So, I hope that by telling and retelling my stories here of Emma’s and my journey through her dementia that they will help others in similar situations. In my days as caregiver I didn’t know where I was going or what would happen next.

“It was like that time you came up behind me on the blog catwalk and nudged me over the edge and I fell into a heap of backdrops and I didn’t know which scene I was in, what my role was. I thought I was speaking English to an English-speaking audience, but they did not comprehend.”

Moriarty smiles an enigmatic smile — or is it diabolic…?

“So, anyway,” I say, “I thought that my taking up this A to Z Challenge and retelling my stories would draw attention to my two books on Emma’s and my experiences, but I gained something far richer — the blooming of one thousand and one tulips: new acquaintances, positive support, new knowledge, extraordinary writers from around the world. And, too, for myself I derived a new self-discipline of sitting down each morning for about three hours and writing.

“I thank Arlee Bird and his co-hosts and minions for providing us this opportunity. Additionally, on non-WordPress sites, I learned to copy my comments ahead of posting them before Captcha methodically folded them and sailed them into a black hole, and to include my name and blog URL in my comments. Especially I thank those wonderful writers, who no doubt bloggy-eyed as I, took the time to visit my site and leave the most heartwarming and encouraging comments.”

“Some of them said they liked me,” says Moriarty.

I smile.

“Will you take up the Challenge again next year?” he asks. “Can’t you make less mess with the drafts?”

“With the drafts, I doubt it,” I say. “As for taking up the challenge next year, yes, I’d like to, b—-”

Suddenly Dickens spots a rabbit and takes off after it.

“Dickens!  Dickens, come!”  commands Moriarty. “Dickens!”
Dickens keeps on running. “Dickens!

“He’s saying, ‘I’m not him,'” says Moriarty.

“There goes a character, running off ahead, chasing rabbits without me,” I reply.

Samantha Mozart

______________

Here are some good friends and terrific writers and thinkers I met along the way:

Susan Scott — http://gardenofedenblog.com

Patricia Garcia — http://www.patgarciaandeverythingmustchange.com/

Gwynn Rogers — http://gwynnsgritandgrin.com

Hilary Melton-Butcher —  http://positiveletters.blogspot.com/

Sara Snider — http://saracsnider.com/

Fee — http://weewhitehoose.co.uk/

Kern Windwraith — http://www.oddparticle.com

Annalisa Crawford — http://annalisacrawford.blogspot.co.uk/

Celine Jeanjean — http://celinejeanjean.com

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Going all back through my dementia caregiving experience with Emma, my mother, who passed on three years ago, seemed an unnecessary journey. I hesitated, therefore, to take up the A-Z Blogging Challenge this year and write on that dementia caregiving theme again.

And then I thought, oh well, maybe I’ll draw some attention to the two books I have published on the subject and earn enough in royalties to buy an occasional lunch.

Yet … it may not be what you think it is.

When I lived in Los Angeles, we used to play this game called “Guess what was on this corner last week,” for every week, or nearly that often, buildings and businesses came and went; the population increased by the thousands monthly and the dusty pueblo I had moved to in 1967 got a music center and other cultural venues, new highrise buildings, extended airport runways, and it changed and evolved.  All the while, the city was in the process of what it was becoming next.

Didn’t I know by this stage in my life, therefore, that this would be the experience I would undergo writing these A-Zs? Probably I entertained that awareness somewhere in the dusty outskirts of my mind. I am the constant in the change. The music comes from within the process, the playing of the notes of the unfinished symphony, as Sara Snider (Sara C. Snider) pointed out on Susan Scott’s Garden of Eden Blog.

In this A-Z process, I have made new acquaintances, read some terrific writing, gained new thought insights and — yes — developed a new self discipline and dedication towards my writing. I feel enriched and bolstered by the kind support of other writers I have met along the way.

So I leave you today with another Alexandra Streliski performance, which seems to match the sentiment.  Start this video at about 2:15 so you avoid all the French-language chatter, unless you speak French, then you may find it interesting, and stay until you see the snow scenes outside the window. (And, is the singer’s name really Alex Nevsky, as in Alexander Nevsky, and what’s he doing singing in Montreal? No wonder he calls himself Alex:  Alexander Nevsky, Prince of Novgorod, 13 May 1221 – 14 November 1263. Wikipedia.)

This video builds, beginning in one tone of feeling and ending in another.

This minimalist music that Alexandra Streliski and others of her genre compose is defined as “melancholy and light,” and it seems to resonate with the process, the playing of the notes inside the warm café, the comings and goings in the snow, the lifetime departures.  Are we standing on the platform waving our loved one goodbye or are we greeting a warm new turn in a constant relationship?

Samantha Mozart

Emma, my mother, loved giving parties. She spent hours in the kitchen preparing all the food, then sat at the head of the table, serving her guests a gourmet fare set with fine china and silverware on a white linen tablecloth. In the last years of Emma’s life, I gave Christmas parties. Emma loved meeting my friends.

I spent a week decorating the eight-foot tree, but my parties were potluck served on paper plates with plastic utensils.

By December 2011, Emma, 97, was situated in her hospital bed in the living room, in the final stages of dementia. She had four months to live, though we didn’t know how long at the time. My friends asked me if I was going to have a party this year. Now that we had 30-hour-a-week Attendant Services Care for Emma, largely attended to by reliable, capable, loving Daphne, I thought I would have the time and said yes.

The day before the party, Daphne said, “I want to get Emma up and dressed for the party.”

I groaned.

“No, no, I’ll do it,” said Daphne. “I’ll do everything.” And Daphne did. She helped me set up for the party, got Emma up and dressed in red, her best color, hair styled, red lipstick on.

My friends came bearing food, drink, and honey from their own bees. These are extraordinary people — artists, teachers, healthcare professionals, environmental stewards, humanitarians, spiritual leaders, all accomplished in their fields. One friend played his guitar and sang original songs and sea shanties.  My friends look forward to the warm camaraderie of these annual events.

Emma sat at the head of the table, smiled and ate, with Daphne’s attentive care. Then she tired and began to list in her chair, so Daphne took her into the other room and settled her into bed.

Daphne left and the guests left except two couples. The five of us sat in the living room, with Emma resting there in her bed behind us, and talked for another two hours. I think Emma enjoyed that. She seemed peaceful and probably drifting into and out of sleep; I recalled how she used to enjoy sitting with her guests at table or in the living room talking into the evening after a meal.

Christmas is a time for giving and these are the irreplaceable offerings of my friends who came to my annual Christmas party that December night.

Samantha Mozart

My Attendant Services aide had a friend drive her to our house one day when her car wasn’t working. This was seven months before Emma’s passing and just after we had situated her in the hospital bed in the living room. The aide’s young girlfriend had recently undergone surgery that sent a blood clot to her brain, so then she had to have a brain operation. After that she had a stroke (after she was at my house) that left her with limited mobility in one leg. While this young woman was here, however, she was sitting in the dining room with the aide and me and she was very antsy. She had to get up and go wait outside. One evening two weeks later our aide asked me if I knew the history of my house. It was built in 1894. I said, somewhat. She told me that her friend had to get up and leave because she saw in our dining room a woman dressed in a long white gown, “not a nightgown, but a long, white flowing dress;” the woman had dark hair.

I said, “Oh, The Woman in White. Everybody’s seen her.” (Most often walking in the yard between the two historic homes a few houses up, in the next block. And for generations. Her story has been published in books.) It gave me goosebumps. That is absolute confirmation of the existence of The Woman in White. This young friend of our aide was not from our town and could have no knowledge of the Woman in White legend. I had seen shadows in the house recently, assumed it was a ghost and let it go on its way. I had seen Emma smiling at or speaking to someone I couldn’t see. I rather assumed it was another of our deceased relatives here to visit Emma: “Cousins Alice and Doris were here today. Did you see them?” she would say to me a year or so earlier when she could still speak. One caregiver said that she believes the dead are more alive than we, because they are no longer inhibited by this tough material world. Many hospice and nursing home nurses have told me that it is quite common for their patients to see those long-deceased loved ones, and these nurses believe that the visitors are actually there.

About 25 percent of the population of our historic town are ghosts, it would seem. We all see them, especially the children see them. Most of them are friendly spirits; some, the children, are pranksters. I ask any who live in a historic home around here and each has a ghost story to tell. The Woman in White is probably the same woman and shadow that my next-door neighbor’s grandsons have seen in their bedroom opposite mine. A workman in one, unoccupied, of the aforementioned historic homes up the street would buy a small box of doughnuts each morning, set it on the kitchen stove and go about his work. When he returned to the kitchen, the doughnuts were set out, one on each of the burners of the stove (not lit). It’s somehow comforting to have this Woman in White. I had only sensed her since Emma began sleeping in the hospital bed in the living room.

My friend Jackie said, “Oh, that is so cool. … It is like she is attracted to people not well. A Caregiver.”

This fits because one of the two houses up the street was a former doctor’s office (with a leather floor in the examining room) and the other is said to have served as a Revolutionary War infirmary and later is thought to have been a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Our Woman in White came to the end of her life long ago, yet kept on. It is as if she digitally remastered herself to continue comforting the ill.

Samantha Mozart

There’s a piano piece called “Le Départ,” “The Departure.” by Alexandra Streliski, a pianist and composer from Montreal.

One commenter of the YouTube video I have placed below said, “This music describes eternity.”

When I stand at the window in the cupola of my blog and gaze out over the tall grass meadow down to the stream and the woods beyond, I think of those I have known who have departed this life before me.

When my grandmother was in her sixties, I remember her sitting in a chair in the living room and saying wistfully, “All my friends are dead.” I’ve never forgotten that. It is one of the reasons I value my friendships so closely. I haven’t forgotten my grandmother; I haven’t forgotten either of them, nor any of my family members that have gone on ahead of me.

Often, near the end, the dying enter a process of departure, still here and already there. I often wondered where my mother Emma’s soul or spirit went in her final stage of dementia. Sometimes I actually sensed her hovering around – usually her former bright and cheerful self getting up in the morning, yellow sunshine streaming through her bedroom windows, and having things to attend to around the house, her toy poodles to feed, or clothes to choose and lay out to wear for a luncheon with her friends, or telling me something. It was as if she got up out of her body and came around every now and then. And this I experienced only in the last two weeks of her life. Maybe, too, it was my letting go, a clearing.

Caregiving doesn’t end with the passing of the cared for. Suddenly, there’s this person standing in your midst, and it’s you. It’s like meeting someone who’s departed on a long journey and has now returned unexpectedly. You have to get to know yourself again; for, although caregivers are repeatedly reminded by the observers to take care of ourselves, take time for ourselves, we don’t. There really isn’t time. So, you begin a new relationship with yourself. And, then, of course, there’s the family to contend with, who may have found fault with everything you did caregiving in their absence, and the paperwork and finances — all the fallout. It takes four years to regain normalcy, say most former caregivers. I am finding it so.

Of course, there’s the grieving. There is no set limit to the length of time for grieving. Some say the second year is harder than the first. Thus so in my experience. Realistically, you never stop grieving the departed; the process just changes. You never stop caring.

Some of my friends have passed on. I miss them very much. I wish I could pick up the phone or turn to them and say something. When I think of them, is that like posting a thought on the wall of the universe, and somewhere they’ll pick it up? I miss many friends whom I presume are still living. The winds of change over the years drove us apart. I have forgotten none of them. Some I connect with on Facebook after years gusting by like lifetimes. It’s like, “So, hey, how’re ya doing in this lifetime?” It’s very cool. A happy reconnecting.

Samantha Mozart

Hello, Roos. In early March 2012, one month before Emma’s passing, I posed this question to a LinkedIn women writers group: “Caregivers: What are your experiences? As a sole caregiver for my mother, 97, who has dementia, I find caregiving to be spiritually life changing, among other things.” I thought it would be a good way to promote the book I had just published about Emma’s and my long journey through these turbulent nighttime seas.

To my astonishment, these writers’ response was overwhelming. I  am profoundly touched by their caregiving experiences and their honesty. Comments flooded in from all over the world, from Camaroon and Kenya, from Turkey, from every continent. The discussion group continued for two years and gathered over 7,500 comments, until LinkedIn changed its group format.

The outpouring of comments and loving support is due largely, I feel, to the catharsis of caregivers being able to tell their stories to likeminded, sympathetic listeners – there seem to be not just one story per caregiver, but many and varied, at once sad and funny.

I had thought long that these caregiving stories needed to be told – not only for the caregivers but also for the suffering for whom they care, the ones who were once vibrant, leading vital lives like the rest of us, the ones who have lost their dignity, who feel trapped and that they have become burdens, the ones whose tickets have been collected, those just ahead of us in line. Scary, isn’t it. Lifeboats can sail only so far. But here in our group we had reached a safe harbor of unconditional love and support.

Early on our discussion group journey eight, extraordinary, caring women jumped onboard and the nine of us embarked on a lively, almost daily conversation, beginning with caregiving and writing and evolving into gardening, family, recipes and sometimes just downright silly stuff. Three years later we remain close friends.

The daughter of one of us works with kangaroos in Australia. Some of us sponsored kangaroos, therefore, and we began calling ourselves The Roos. Each of us took a color; for example, I am Turquoise Roo. We are all the colors of the iris, the rainbow, if you will, and the flower that represents spiritual evolution. We are far flung, living in New Zealand, South Africa, Germany, Canada and on both coasts of the United States, North and South.

Although we talk on the phone and Skype, none of us has met in person, but all of us believe one day we will. Thelma & Louise dreams persist even among — or maybe especially among — us women of a certain age: a road trip in a VW bus (multicolored), winning the lotto, meeting in each other’s country as soon as the my private jet gets out of the hangar with the mechanicals fixed. I even thought of swimming to New Zealand from Delaware.

I had decided I was pretty much done with writing about caregiving, I thought. But my Roo friends wouldn’t let me drop anchor in that cove. They prodded me with the stem end of a deep purple iris to join them in taking up the A-Z Blogging Challenge for 2015. I didn’t want to go all back through my caregiving experience, but revisiting it has been enlightening and I have met some superb writers along the way.

I need to give a special nod to my three prodding Roo friends who have taken up the 2015 A-Z Blogging Challenge: Susan Scott, Garden of Eden Blog; Patricia Garcia, Everything Must Change; and Gwynn Rogers, Gwynn’s Grit and Grin.

Thank you, Roos, as always, for your continued unconditional love and support. Truly, without you I don’t know how I could have gotten through those last days with my mother and the months following her passing.

Samantha Mozart

Moriarty has developed a following here at The Scheherazade Chronicles.  He is The Phantom of My Blog. He tidies up, hangs fresh headers, cooks, cleans up after parties, and recently he built a folly with the help of Russian immigrant laborers on the blog grounds. But he doesn’t dust.

Sometimes I bake a salmon dinner with basmati rice and steamed artichokes and we sit at the blog round table, eating and drinking wine by candlelight, tossing morsels to his black, fluffy dog, Dickens, listening to music and talking long into the night.

One time, Moriarty simmered his homemade borscht all morning while he was in the back kitchen sweeping up enormous droppings of Japanese blog spam, bagging it into large, black lawn bags and hefting them outside. “You let this stuff pile up and it gets all greasy,” he said.

In between holding the back door open for him, I sat in an old wooden straight back chair and stroked Dickens. I stroked the white patch under his chin, scratched deep behind his ear, finished by running my hand along his back, ruffling his coat. He shook, then, sending pieces of disconnected Japanese character strokes flying, like loose spider legs.

“He rolled in the spam,” said Moriarty.

I think Moriarty’s and my discussion in the cupola one evening about the masqueraders attracted the Japanese blog spammers.

The borscht is particularly good at lunch with chunks of baguette on a cold, snowy day when Moriarty says he has misplaced the blog snow shovels once again. In any case, visitors observe our discussion and sometimes join in and comment.

On a late afternoon I sat down by the stream until the sun got low in the western sky, and I thought I must go inside. About to arise from my rock, I look up. I see dear Moriarty’s face filling a windowpane in the cupola, Moriarty who would be dismayed to learn he is but an illusion. Wildly gesturing, waving his arm, he is pointing to someplace over my shoulder. I turn, and there is the Blue Deer, the Blue Deer with her blue and white spotted fawn, Batik.

Moriarty hasn’t been around during this 2015 A-Z Blogging Challenge. With his banjo and Dickens, he has taken this time off  and gone to visit his family in Willynilly, Arkansas. His family recently retired to the Arkansas Ozarks although they hail originally from one of those towns in Eastern Massachusetts. Moriarty tells me that during his vacation he has received many fan texts. He is grateful and says thank you.

Samantha Mozart