Author:Zhang Jie
The three sisters grew up in Hunan, and when they grew up, the eldest sister Qingya stayed in her hometown, the eldest sister also painted in Guangdong, and the younger sister Xiaojing danced in Beijing. They have an originally gentle and kind, omnipotent mother. However, because of Alzheimer's disease, my mother gradually became an ignorant old man who was indifferent and irritable and could not take care of herself. Little by little, her memory, emotions, and normal cognitive abilities were also deprived of her disease.
"I Remember"
The three sisters began to take care of their mother's body and memory like children: weaving, cutting and pasting, turning rope, drawing, reading, writing calligraphy, writing a diary, saying tongue twisters, and reciting "Kasa wong to rhyme" every day: "Heaven to earth, rain to wind, continent to long sky..."
Although the three sisters have different divisions of labor, they always maintain an honest and smooth communication between them, and each does his best to help the mother slow down the deterioration of brain function as much as possible and spend each day fully and calmly.
In the process of caring for the sick mother together, the three sisters are also re-understanding family and affection, thinking and exploring the concept of life and death, and gradually understand that the essence of love is interdependence, taking care of the elderly, in fact, is also helping themselves.
When sick mothers become "little children," they do
There is a saying that "there is no filial piety in front of the bed for a long time", although it is not 100%, but it also shows that the disease that lingers on the sick bed is a great loss of patience and family affection. Confucius said that "color is difficult", that is, it is difficult to be pleasant to parents and face. For parents and faces that have become incomprehensible due to disease infestation and mental degeneration, not everyone can do it.
The manifestations of Alzheimer's disease are particularly complex and strange. For example, "Mom" suffers from bulimia and fills her mouth with any food; "Mom" is addicted to watching TV and can't stop... When all kinds of strange illnesses appeared, it was a huge test for the three sisters. For ordinary families, the withering, degeneration and even demise of life is not a short process, but a period of time that slowly disappears, and it is also a process of slow consumption and despair for the material resources and emotions of the caregivers. After all, to accompany the sick elderly is equivalent to walking with disease, aging and death, and the pain is indescribable.
In order to reawaken his mother's memory, Yi Lin began to look back on the past by painting. She painted the story of her parents' love for each other, painted the funny stories of the three sisters when they were young, and also painted the ideals of her mother, and then reviewed the scenes in the painting with her mother.
Seeing that her mother was recalled by the previous scenes in the painting and saying "I still remember", Yi Lin was deeply touched, so he insisted on painting his mother a picture every day to help her mother resist forgetting and backup her memories that were roughly erased by Alzheimer's disease. She also painted the scene where the eldest sister Qingya took meticulous care of her mother, and the younger sister Xiaoxuan used dances, nursery rhymes, tongue twisters and other ways to help her mother exercise her mind, and each small painting was so vivid and vivid.
Yi Lin also encouraged her mother to pick up a paintbrush to paint, and her mother sometimes copied Yi Lin's paintings, sometimes sketched, flowers and plants in the painter; when she was in a good mood, she also raised her pen to draw portraits of the three sisters when they were young, and painted a picture and the story of her grandparents. The graffiti of Alzheimer's patients is clumsy, twisted, and messy, but Yi Lin sees the changes that art brings to the increasingly desolate mother of the spiritual world.
In this way, Yi Lin recorded the details of the three sisters working together to take care of their mother in the form of pictures and captions, and produced a comic book "I Remember", which was planned by Lefu Culture and published by Beijing United Publishing Company.
How do family members deal with the collateral "sense of sickness shame"? Doctor: Find a spiritual way out
When Yi Lin's mother was young, she was a pentathlon pacesetter: she could step on the sewing machine; she could make Lenin suits, sachiko clothes, and sea soul shirts; she could embroider flowers, hook flowers, weave clothes, dye cloth; she could grow vegetables, raise chickens, and make wine; she could make bacon, chopped peppers, sausages, tofu balls, moldy tofu, ba bean, and capers.
My mother was also very literary: she liked to read novels, tell stories, sing, act, and dance. Gradually the mother "became like a child, and was the kind of unlikable child", gluttonous, liked to steal, and ate large pieces of meat, even eating raw mushrooms and wontons in the refrigerator until diarrhea; later, even urination had to be taught by hand.
"Laughing so hard that I can't stop." The abnormal behavior brought about by brain degeneration is absurd and abrasive, incurable and irreversible. The mental torture like falling into the abyss once made the three sisters exhausted and emotionally broken. At first, the changes of the three sisters to their mother were incomprehensible and even difficult to accept; after the mother was diagnosed, the three sisters still doubted from time to time whether the mother was really ill; later, in the face of various abnormalities in the mother's behavior, their hearts were only left with heartache and worry.
Women's expression of emotions will be more explicit, but also more delicate, the eldest sister Qingya in the process of taking care of her mother, day after day nursing pressure is not the heaviest, the heaviest is another "evil thought" born in the heart: "How do I feel less and less love for my mother." It is also a reminder that the home care dilemma of Alzheimer's patients and the psychological pressure of their families are also big problems.
Yi Lin once revealed to psychiatrists and general practitioners Hu Bingshuang that although he was mentally prepared for the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, he faced some abnormal behaviors of sick mothers in public, especially in our education, such as asking strangers for something to eat, wolfing down meals with relatives and friends, and dragging the food he liked to eat to himself, "I will have a very bad mood, it is difficult to describe clearly in one word. I don't know if this is the associated stigma of the so-called patient's family. On the one hand, I feel sorry for my mother, such a delicate and beautiful person has become like this, on the other hand, I feel very embarrassed in front of everyone, and I feel a little humiliated. There's a question of face, but it's not all. Although I know that this is all a disease, my mother can't control it, but the embarrassing emotions will still bubble up, so I keep asking: Does my mother still have dignity to live like this? ”
For this kind of psychology, the answer given by Hu Bingshuang is: "Abnormal behavior like your mother's raw eating scribes is a pathology brought about by the disease, and you need to tell everyone that you can give everyone a preventive injection, especially a preventive injection for young people, those embarrassing states, everyone may not be able to avoid, either their own encounters, or relatives encounter, you and I may become like that." The pursuit of a high-quality, high-density spiritual life is very important, beneficial to the body and mind of hobbies, can start earlier is the best. If you let your life and life have a point of attention and meaning earlier, you will have a spiritual way out, and you can get a little farther away from Alzheimer's disease. Taking a step back, even if it cannot be escaped, that meaning can still be a support, a way to preserve and improve the quality of life and the dignity of life. (Zhang Jie)
Source: West China Metropolis Daily