Once, Lu Xiaoya asked her mother, "Am I your mother?" The mother said, "Yes." Lu Xiaoya asked again, "How is my mother doing?" Old Lady Lu said, "Not bad."
Lu Xiaoya took her sick mother to bask in the sun. Courtesy of respondents
Text | Beijing News reporter Li Gui
Edit | Chen Xiaoshu Proofreading | Li Xiangling
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A year and a half after her mother's death, Lu Xiaoya had seen her once in a dream: she was lying on the sofa at Lu Xiaoya's house, not speaking, looking up at her with her head up and smiling. Lu Xiaoya jumped up happily, looking for a phone all over the room, wanting to tell her younger siblings immediately, "Mom is alive."
This is not the same as Lu Xiaoya's memory of her mother's appearance: her mother does not like to laugh and is expressionless most of the time; after the diagnosis of dementia, her mother "can't stay" at Lu Xiaoya's house and will not be quiet on the sofa.
In the last 3 years of life, dementia has completely changed the mother's body, she not only gradually lost her memory and self-care ability, but also can no longer walk alone, or even raise her head, can only rely on people holding or sitting in a wheelchair to "move the nest".
Dementia is a disease of cognitive and memory degeneration, and Alzheimer's disease is the most common subspecies of dementia. Dementia is incurable and can only be slowed down by medication and care. From her mother's diagnosis of dementia in the summer of 2007 to her mother's death in the winter of 2019, Lu Xiaoya spent 12 years saying the "longest goodbye" to her mother. In the day-to-day care, Lu Xiaoya, who believes that she has not felt much maternal love since she was a child, has established a close relationship with her mother that she has never had before.
Lu Xiaoya began to understand her mother, and also began to think about the impact of "lack of love" on herself and her family.
Today, 68-year-old Lu Xiaoya has become a gentle and elegant old lady. She did not hesitate to hide her feelings, and talked about her mother again, crying and laughing. Once, Lu Xiaoya was obsessed with finding traces of maternal love, and now, she chose to let go: "I have the ability to love, this is enough." ”
Lu Xiaoya and her mother read picture books together. Courtesy of respondents
"How is my mother?" "Good value for money"
Lu Xiaoya first wrote down the matter related to her mother's dementia on May 31, 2007. On this day, she wrote in the "Efficiency Manual" that she "took her mother to the Sixth Hospital of Beijing Medical University (Peking University Sixth Hospital)" to see a doctor. This year, Lu Xiaoya was 54 years old and her mother was 77 years old.
As early as Lu Xiaoya realized that her mother was ill, dementia had left traces on her: her mother always forgot to turn off the fire when cooking, the pots at home were all burned, and the neighbors complained several times; her mother sat on the sofa and read the newspaper, taking a closer look, the newspaper was "head down" and took it upside down; her mother called Lu Xiaoya more than a dozen times a day, saying that she could not find the passbook, and Lu Xiaoya went home to find that the passbook had always been well placed in the cabinet...
Mother's mind was like an eraser, slowly erasing her memory. In the winter of 2007, when Lu Xiaoya found out that her mother had begun to replace the shower with hot water, she knew that her mother had lost the memory of using the gas stove.
Lu Xiaoya and her sister began to bathe their mother, who had never had intimate physical contact before. Because of the emotional estrangement, to Lu Xiaoya, her mother's body seems to be an object: "We are very strange to each other, and when there is no need, I will not easily touch her." Lu Xiaoya said that for a long time, she only helped her mother scrub her back.
At first, the mother's back was like a young man's, the skin was smooth and elastic. With the passage of time, the mother's back lost its luster and moisture day by day, the muscles under the skin shrank unconsciously, and there were folds on the skin...
Feeling the changes in her mother's body, Lu Xiaoya felt something different: she experienced an emotion called "pity". This emotion became intense when she applied moisturizer to her mother.
My hand touched Mom's body, applying the lotion little by little and gently rubbing it into her skin. It seems that I no longer just apply lotion to her to reduce the dryness of her skin, but also rub my pity into this body little by little. Lu Xiaoya said that at this time, her mother's body is no longer an object of "care", but a kind of existence that can arouse and invest in her feelings.
Bathing the mother is a rare intimate contact between mother and daughter for decades. In Lu Xiaoya's memory, they never hugged, even holding hands was not common. The mother also seemed to resist physical contact. Lu Xiaoya remembered that when her mother was old, she had tried to "pull her" when she went up the steps or crossed the road, but her mother would always shake off her hand.
After the mother fell ill, the physical contact between the two became significantly more. When Lu Xiaoya and her mother sat on the sofa, they always held her hand. Mothers had lost their normal ability to express and understand, and sometimes they would chat without talking to the horses; sometimes, the two would not say anything, but just sit quietly together.
When going out for a walk, Lu Xiaoya will definitely pull her mother: it will not only ensure that her mother will not fall, but also increase her psychological safety factor. "(I want) to let her know that wherever she goes, she's not going to be left behind." Lu Xiaoya said that every time she walked home, her hands were red, which was the trace of her mother holding her hard.
Sometimes, Lu Xiaoya wanted to pull out her hand to touch her mother's face, help her massage her neck, or free her hands to help her take off her pants and go to the toilet, but her mother was unwilling to let go of her hand. The ring on Lu Xiaoya's hand was also painful because it was held too tightly. Lu Xiaoya felt that "holding hands" had become a way for her mother to maintain a connection with the world.
In the later stages of the illness, her mother gradually forgot About Lu Xiaoya and began to call her "mother" or "sister". Occasionally, Lu Xiaoya would jokingly call her "Mother Baby". Once, Lu Xiaoya asked her mother, "Am I your mother?" The mother said, "Yes." Lu Xiaoya asked again, "How is my mother doing?" Old Lady Lu said, "Not bad." ”
Photo of young Lu Xiaoya and her mother. Courtesy of respondents
"What's there to think about at home?" Isn't it just a room, something? ”
For Lu Xiaoya, taking care of her sick mother at the beginning is "the bottom line of being a person" and "a sense of responsibility". She considers herself a "person who has not felt much maternal love", and the mother and daughter have maintained a strange and polite estrangement for many years: not intimate, not expressing love for each other, and not living together.
When she was more than 1 year old, Lu Xiaoya was sent to live in her grandmother's house in Jiangsu, and her parents worked in Beijing. Lu Xiaoya didn't remember what her mother looked like at that time, only that she sent herself to her grandmother's house. The train was shaky, and the toddler Lu Xiaoya accidentally knocked over a warm water bottle, "still scalding someone's foot."
Then there is the memory of her mother, that is, 4 years later, her parents took Lu Xiaoya, who was more than 5 years old, to Beijing to attend kindergarten. Lu Xiaoya's parents were Xinhua reporters, and the two were learning foreign languages and preparing to go abroad, so they didn't have time to take care of their children. As soon as she arrived in Beijing, Lu Xiaoya was sent to a full-care kindergarten. The kindergarten teacher told the parents that in order to adapt the child to the new environment, they could not come to pick her up for two weeks.
Xiao Lu Xiaoya, who spoke her hometown dialect, did not understand why she suddenly couldn't see her grandmother? How did I get to such a strange place that no one knew? The only way to express loneliness and fear is to cry: crying at dinner, crying in the shower, and when other children sleep, the short and little Lu Xiaoya sits on the top of the children's wardrobe in the next room and cries. The "fierce" parents really did not come to see her once.
Soon after Lu Xiaoya adjusted to kindergarten life, her parents went abroad. Even when Lu Xiaoya went to elementary school, she was taken by her aunt from her parents' unit. Lu Xiaoya remembers that when her father returned to China to visit his relatives, he would pick himself up from the boarding elementary school, and the father and daughter would go to the park and eat fruit together. "Dad took me to the 'Eight Places,' where he brought a book to read, and I played on the side and ate the fruit together." Lu Xiaoya said that compared with her father, she had almost no memory of her mother playing with her.
The earliest and clearest memory of her mother appeared in 1963, when her mother returned to China after becoming pregnant, and 10-year-old Lu Xiaoya accompanied her mother to the obstetric examination. In that era of advocating "hard struggle", her mother wore a sleeveless dress bought abroad and had "exploding" curls, and Lu Xiaoya was reluctant to walk with her mother. ”
Shortly after the birth of her sister, in the turbulent times, 15-year-old Lu Xiaoya went to Shaanxi to join the team, and her parents also went to different cadre schools, and wrote letters to become a channel for family communication. Lu Xiaoya has no nickname, her father calls her "Ya'er" in the letter, and her mother will only call her "Lu Xiaoya" or "Xiaoya"; her father will care about whether she has had a good life recently, and her mother's letter is "like the People's Daily editorial", telling her that "we must accept the re-education of poor and lower-middle peasants", which will hardly involve personal feelings...
The strangeness of mother and daughter is also reflected in Lu Xiaoya's reply to her parents. Although the letter always reads "Mom and Dad", subconsciously, Lu Xiaoya feels that she is just sharing these things with her father.
In the same batch of Zhiqing, Lu Xiaoya was the youngest, but she was "the most sensible". Every New Year's Festival, other Zhiqing cried and missed home, and Lu Xiaoya felt that the other party was unreasonable: "What is there to think about at home?" Isn't it just a room, something? ”
Lu Xiaoya's memory of home is the house. During my parents' days abroad, the home was a room about 10 square meters in size with two beds and several boxes full of things. Lu Xiaoya lives on campus and hardly goes home, and this room is locked every day. When the parents returned home, the home became two of the three-bedroom rooms, home to the parents, brother, sister and a nanny. Lu Xiaoya came home from vacation and had no place to sleep, and she had to make another camp bed.
Parents always work the night shift, are often absent at night, and the nanny is responsible for taking younger siblings. Lu Xiaoya can hardly recall the scene where the whole family ate together, and she wasn't sure if such a thing had really happened: "Like how a family sits at a table and eats, I don't have a sense of picture." Maybe it was a problem with my memory, maybe it didn't happen. ”
But in communication with others, Lu Xiaoya found that they are "homesick", which more often means "thinking of family".
Lu Xiaoya remembered that there was a boy whose family was particularly poor. The day before the team left, the boy's parents were at work and gave him 5 cents to buy some meat stuffed dumplings. The boy was "particularly sensible" and wrapped two kinds of dumplings with more meat filling and less meat filling. Before their parents went home, the boy and his brother cooked dumplings with less meat filling and left more meat for their parents.
Lu Xiaoya has not experienced such a warm family moment, and this is the first time she realizes that her relationship with her family seems to be different from others: "When you see other people's family relationships, at least you are envious." ”
My mother was a foreign correspondent for Xinhua News Agency and has traveled to many countries. Courtesy of respondents
"She doesn't get enough love at home so she won't love someone"
For the first 45 years of her life, Lu Xiaoya has been thinking: "Does my mother love me?" She couldn't find the answer. After the death of her father, the mother-daughter relationship became a knot in Lu Xiaoya's heart: it could not be declared to the mouth, and there was no way to solve it.
At the age of 45, the knot opened. This year, Lu Xiaoya began to systematically study psychology for work reasons, and one of the important topics was to understand herself. According to the teacher's request, Lu Xiaoya and her classmates formed a "growth group" to share important things that they felt had affected their lives. It was also in the "growth group" that Lu Xiaoya shared her relationship with her mother for the first time in its entirety.
"Saying that your parents are bad is a difficult thing in Chinese culture, and everyone will jump out and accuse you." But in the "growth group" with confidentiality commitments, Ms. Lu said, she can open up and express her desire for maternal love and not her feelings. To this day, Lu Xiaoya can't remember the sharing process, but she clearly remembers that in the process of telling, the change occurred: after the grievances in her heart fell out, this matter seemed to be less important.
Lu Xiaoya began to explore the reasons behind her mother's behavior through psychological methods, and it was at this time that she realized that her mother was "wronged in her original family": "She did not get enough love at home, so naturally, she would not love others."
Mrs. Lu is from Jiangsu, there are 9 brothers and sisters in the family, and she is the third oldest. Mrs. Lu's sisters are twins, newborns that the whole family has been looking forward to for 9 years; shortly after Mrs. Lu was born, her mother gave birth to a younger brother as the eldest son.
Unlike her sister and brother, who grew up pampered, Mrs. Lu did not get much attention and pampering since she was a child: the sisters could sit under the osmanthus tree to drink tea and review their homework, but she could only help work in the sweltering kitchen; her clothes could only wear the old clothes worn by her sisters... The only thing that makes her parents look at her differently is her good academic performance, which has become her way to achieve self-worth. However, after failing to pass the university exam, Qiang Qiang's mother did not want to repeat the study, packed her bags and ran to the Liberated Areas.
Decades later, Lu Xiaoya chatted with her mother, who had been diagnosed with dementia, and her mother told her that the time in the Liberated Areas was the happiest time of her life. The 18-year-old mrs. Lu is the youngest in the Liberated Areas and is called "Little Devil" by the chiefs, while comrades like to call her "Xiao Lu". "She felt seen and loved like she had never had before." A "small" word made her feel the love that she rarely got in the family.
After getting married, Mrs. Lu began to make up for the material deficiencies in her childhood: one year, Lu Xiaoya went to a relative's house as a guest, and the other party gave her a plaid "really good" shirt, and when she returned home, her mother took this dress away; even the apple at home, her mother had to eat the biggest and reddest one... Lu Xiaoya and her younger siblings did not complain about this: "You look at people's mothers, you look at our mothers..."
"I slowly understood what had happened in my mother's life," Ms. Lu said, allowing her to "no longer pursue her mother's personal mistakes." Unfortunately, they never talked deeply about these topics before their mothers fell ill.
In the early days of her mother's illness, Lu Xiaoya wrote a letter to her to try to express her thoughts. In the letter, Lu Xiaoya wrote: "You are a child who has been hurt since childhood... You don't have much affection for your family and it has something to do with these hurts. But you know what? Your children will also be hurt..." "We have hardly ever received your appreciation and affirmation... We all especially hope that when we step into this house, our hearts will be warm, and our mother's eyes will be loving..." "I really hope to be intimate with you... I also especially hope that you can let your younger siblings know that you love them and feel sorry for them. You know that no matter how successful a child is, what he is most looking forward to is to get the love of his mother! ”
Later, Lu Xiaoya saw her mother cut the letter and put it next to the bed, but she didn't say anything. A few days later, Lu Xiaoya asked her mother while giving her a bath: "Mom, have you read the letter I wrote?" The mother said expressionlessly, "Really? Maybe I haven't received it yet. Lu Xiaoya asked, "You must have received it, I saw the letter cut open and placed it next to your pillow." "Really? I don't know your letter. Mother said.
With the development of the disease, her mother was no longer conscious, and Lu Xiaoya never had the opportunity to talk to her mother about these topics again.
Today, 68-year-old Lu Xiaoya has become a gentle and elegant old lady. Beijing News reporter Li Gui photographed
"Evidence" of Love
In the process of caring for her mother, Lu Xiaoya found that her mother showed extraordinary love for her child. Seeing a child in the distance, Mrs. Lu's eyes were like being sucked by a magnet, staring at people; when the other party approached, she would bend down, smile, and say in a mocking voice: "Hello, baby!" Even if the other person walked by, she would turn her head and look at the child who passed by obsessively.
Seeing the mother's eyes following the child, Lu Xiaoya also couldn't help but think: "She likes children, and she should also like me when she was a child, right?" After realizing that the child will make the mother happy, when taking the mother out to visit the park, Lu Xiaoya will also try to search for children while walking, "almost like a personal trafficker." ”
Lu Xiaoya's mother's actions gave Lu Xiaoya a certain degree of comfort: "If the love for children is a human instinct, then there is no doubt that my mother must have expressed her love for me in this way, right?" If there hadn't been a separation from the age of one, I might have been more certain of this love, right? ”
In the autumn of 2013, Lu Xiaoya's daughter went abroad to study, and before leaving, she came to say goodbye to her grandmother. Lu Xiaoya hardly grew up in front of her mother, but her daughter lived in her grandmother's house for a few years when she was a child, "which is equivalent to my mother watching her grow up." When the daughter and grandma said goodbye, they suddenly extended their right hand and gently touched grandma's cheek, and the tears came down instantly.
Mrs. Lu seemed to understand a little, and a little did not understand, she murmured: "It's all like this, I'm also alone outside..." Lu Xiaoya also cried, she couldn't remember whether her mother had ever had such an intimate caress for her: "She must have hugged me, as evidenced by the photos of her childhood." ”
In the black-and-white photo, Lu Xiaoya, who is less than one year old, wears a white hat and a small apron around her chest. The short-haired mother hugged Xiaoya and smiled and narrowed her eyes. This photo also became evidence that Lu Xiaoya confirmed that her mother had loved herself.
Another "proof" was her mother's tears under the lamp when she was 15 years old. It was the night before Lu Xiaoya went to Shaanxi to join the team, she had already gone to bed, and her mother turned her back on her, mending her clothes under the lamp. They were two pure cotton shirts that their mother had brought back from abroad, with delicate embroidery on them, but the sleeves and collar were torn. Lu Xiaoya heard her mother's slight sobbing, "She is sad, I think there is love behind this sadness." ”
In November 2019, after 12 years of dementia, Lu Xiaoya ushered in a farewell moment with her.
Her mother was sent to the intensive care unit for a heart attack, and Lu Xiaoya went to see her. When she gently stroked her mother's forehead, her mother opened her eyes and "looked at me with a wink" and made a "grunting" sound from her mouth. Lu Xiaoya wasn't sure, did her mother recognize herself? As usual, Lu Xiaoya opened the bed, found her mother's hand without a needle, and put her hand in the palm of her hand. Her mother grabbed her.
Lu Xiaoya bent down and said softly into her mother's ear: "Mother, I am Xiaoya, I am your eldest daughter, I have returned from abroad, can you recognize me?" Your daughter is by your side, don't be afraid..." At the end of the visiting time, Lu Xiaoya wanted to gently pull her hand out, but as usual, she felt that her mother did not want to let go. "I don't have a lot of strength, but I can still feel her pulling me."
From the first heart attack to her death, the mother spent a total of 10 days. After being told by the doctor that "there may be no hope this time", Lu Xiaoya looked at the monitor at the head of the bed, and the high pressure was gone. She stroked her mother's forehead again, and her mother did not open her eyes. When she held her mother's hand without a needle, the nurse was surprised to find that her mother's blood pressure had become higher.
"Is that how my body reacted when I took my mother's hand?" Lu Xiaoya sighed the inconceivability of life, she knew that the last thing that people turned off when they were dying was the auditory system, she gently lay on her mother and gently said to her: "Mom, you have worked too hard all these years, if you are too tired, you can go with confidence, go and reunite with your father... Thank you, thank you for giving us life..."
Not being able to understand her mother's experience earlier and not being able to express her gratitude to her when she was awake has always been Lu Xiaoya's regret. She always felt that if she could understand her mother earlier, would she be able to make her mother feel more happy in her old age?
A year after her mother's death, Lu Xiaoya published the book "Mother to Mother", which contains 35 notes on caring for her mother. Courtesy of respondents
"I have the ability to love, and that's enough"
Dementia has a genetic predisposition, and after the death of her mother, Lu Xiaoya began to think about her old age. Unlike her mother, who has 3 children to take care of after her illness, Lu Xiaoya has only one daughter, and she hopes that she will not become a burden to her children.
Studies have shown that learning a new language helps keep the brain alive. At the age of 63, Lu Xiaoya began to learn English. She enrolled in an online English learning course, starting with simple speaking. Today, Lu Xiaoya has formed a reading group for English reading, including novels and biographies, and in 2020 she read 6 original English books.
Recently, she was reading The New Book by Japanese writer Kazuo Ishiguro, Clara and the Sun, a novel about the relationship between artificial intelligence and people. Lu Xiaoya likes to learn these new things, and with the help of young people, she began to listen to various interesting lessons on a knowledge service App, such as cryptography.
Lu Xiaoya also allowed herself to maintain a certain amount of exercise. She taught at Capital Normal University and Beijing Normal University, sharing stories of travel and growth with students. She had to go out at least twice a week for classes, and the necessary exercise became a means for her to avoid physical degradation.
Her daughter is also a teacher at school, and sometimes lu Xiaoya will go home with her late at night. Once, after Class, Lu Xiaoya was already 9:30 p.m., the two could not get a car, from the subway station to home there was more than ten minutes away, under the street lamp, the daughter tightly pulled Lu Xiaoya's hand, "I can feel, she is holding me, because it is dark, she is afraid that I will fall." ”
Lu Xiaoya enjoyed her intimate relationship with her daughter. It is also the relationship with her daughter that makes Lu Xiaoya realize that she has not actually lost the ability to love.
Some time ago, Lu Xiaoya sorted out the computer and found a video file called "I Love You Forever". The video was taken in 2014, when the mother's dementia was already severe, and she was unable to read and communicate normally. In the video, Lu Xiaoya is reading a picture book of "I Love You Forever" to her mother, and the two sit on the sofa, close together.
When reading "Mom, I love you", Lu Xiaoya reached out and put her arm around her mother's shoulder and gently asked, "Do you love me?" "The mother did not respond, Lu Xiaoya withdrew her hand, and continued to read the next page as if nothing had happened." I was hoping for her response, but I was disappointed, even disappointed. Lu Xiaoya recalled that she was too persistent at that time, and insisted that her mother personally say "I love you."
Now, watching this video again, Lu Xiaoya is relieved: "Why am I so persistent, I have to ask her to say that sentence?" I have the ability to love her, the ability to love my loved ones, and even the ability to help many people. I have the ability to love, and that's enough. ”