Dad's Gaming Addiction

Every time I attempted to come up with a way to start this dedication, I ended up going down a rabbit hole of memories and accomplished nothing.  It’s incredibly frustrating, especially since I’m trying to come up with something perfect to honor her memory.  Firstly, I realized that nothing I write here will be perfect.  I then reasoned that memories are all I’ll have of my mother until the day comes that I too will pass on, so I suppose that approach is not to be dismissed, but embraced.

 

 

Thinking back to my childhood, I can honestly say I can’t remember much about my home life.  I was bullied in school by teachers and fellow students alike, while trying to ignore the screaming matches at home by drowning myself in video games.  Even my pastor, a Catholic Priest, chastised me as an alter boy during a mass because I had no idea what I was doing.  Grade school sucked and the “counselor” I saw for depression was equally as useless.  I ran away from school one day to get away from it all and literally no one noticed.  I’m not surprised that I blocked most of this time period out.

There were good times however, especially the visits to “Nana” and “Pap’s” house (on my mom’s side)…a little apartment on the second floor that sat on the side of a bumpy yellow brick road.  Pap would order us pizza and we’d play cards.  We’d stretch out on his blue blanket and stuff ourselves sick, all the while John Wayne played on the television.  Pap loved his westerns, but on occasion I’d “help” Nana with her word searches.

 

 

We’d also frequent a place called “Pip’s Diner”, a cute little place in Pittsburgh.  Every weekend mom would take us to meet pap at the diner to eat some breakfast.  On occasion, I’d get to watch pap play Pinochle at the “Table of Knowledge”.  It was the first time I had ever eaten an omelette…ham and cheese if I remember correctly.  I was incredibly picky…I mean “adventurous”, back in those days, so adding an omelette to my palette was nothing short of a miracle.

Mom wasn’t a chess player and she wasn’t a fan of board / video games, but she loved her arts and crafts.  While I hated it when she dragged me to Michaels or some sort of hobby store, I have to give her credit as she helped me with those awful, awful art projects you had to do at home.  You know, the kind of art project we do every day as adults, like creating DARE posters, folding origami tesseracts (somehow), or rebuilding The Sistine Chapel with materials that even MacGyver would balk at.  When it came to art class, she was a godsend.

 

 

She worked a lot in the nursing profession, in fact she ended up as a nurse in various roles for over 40 years.  She was a supervisor at one point, worked in hospice, provided at-home care, and did phone consultations.  She helped so many people, despite patients patting her on her head to poke fun at her 4’11” height.  Oh, how she LOVED that.  I would always go to her with nursing related questions and I kind of figured she’d always be around to provide me with that knowledge.  That is, until the day (50+ years later) that I spoke with a hospice nurse about HER condition.  It was a slap in the face when I realized the situation I was in…but I’m jumping ahead of myself here.

My parents divorced and remarried two separate people about five years after my brother was born.  There’s a heck of a lot more to that story but I’ll let sleeping dogs lie.  I do recall the countless car rides though, as my parents had 50/50 custody.  Toward the beginning of that divorce, I remember that my mom would visit in the morning to see us off to school, though as a kid I really had no idea what was going on.  Despite everything she was going through, through this action and others, she proved she was always there for my brother and me.

 

 

Growing up, I knew that I could rely on mom for anything.  She’s the person I called that horrible night when I ran away.  She’s the one that drove me to see my now ex-girlfriend who lived three hours away, halfway across Pennsylvania.  She’s the one that took me to the store because the PC game I got needed a joystick and I didn’t know that until I had started playing.  She picked me to walk her down the aisle for her second remarriage to Karl.  She was a tough mom…but I knew, deep down, she would always have my back.

I eventually got sick of these car rides and stopped going to mom’s house throughout high school.  Looking back, I do feel a bit guilty…to be fair I started working at 15 right after school and didn’t have the time to visit mom in the evenings anyway.  Come to realize, I did what most kids do…grow up, leave the nest, and act like I know everything.  As a parent myself who had to recently let my son go to face the world, I recognize that this cycle of life, and all the feelings associated with it, is normal.

 

 

Fast forwarding several decades, mom and I kept in touch semi-regularly.  She was there for me when my 13 year relationship went south and she was there for me when my medical issues began around the same time.  It was at this point that I noticed something odd about mom’s memory.  I figured it was just age, until I received a call from her in a panic asking me to pick her up.  She was terrified.  Suspecting Karl and her were fighting or something, I swung by to pick her up and what transpired next was surreal.

She couldn’t remember what had happened, claiming this was all some sort of weird dream.  I was preparing to investigate more into Karl (my step-dad) when it hit me that mom was not in the right state of mind based on the things she was saying.  After confessing to Karl why I had really picked her up, he sighed and admitted to me that he had been shielding her condition from us.  She had dementia for a while now and the pieces started to fit.

 

 

Dementia is a cruel beast.  It takes you, bit by bit, over the course of several years.  It strips the person you are away from you until there’s nothing but a shell left.  At this point however, mom was cognizant of who she was but had these unpredictable emotional swings of fear.  As months passed, I would get calls from the police saying that they had picked up mom wandering the road.  Still, Karl would make the effort to get us all together for our weekly visits.  The Chinese buffet we frequented was a favorite of ours even if the overhead music was stuck on a thirty-second loop.  They’d come back to our place for movies and dessert.  These blissful get-togethers happened weekly for about two years.

In July of 2024, something unexpected happened…Karl passed away.  It only took a day or two with mom living with me to realize just how bad her dementia was getting.  For her safety and ours, along with the recommendation of social services, we had her placed in a facility specializing in dementia.  I watched for a year and a half…this sort of slow burn…as mom became less like mom with each passing visit.  She’d call me crying almost daily, asking to go home.  It was torture for the both of us.  In the last few months the calls stopped…she couldn’t speak or recognize us anymore.

 

 

Days before her passing I received a call from the hospice nurse telling me that she had stopped eating or drinking.  The plan was to keep her comfortable in bed until her passing.  I went up to see her that day and privately said what I had needed to say to her.  It was one of the hardest things I had ever had to do and what’s more, I couldn’t show it because I needed to remain strong for my immediate family.  Like I did with Karl when he died, I tucked my grief and sorrow away until a better time.

Speaking with the hospice nurse about mom’s condition hit me harder than I thought it would…for reasons I’m having trouble both processing and describing.  I KNEW mom would continue to get worse and I KNEW she would pass, but speaking to a hospice nurse reminded me that mom was no longer the person that I was holding onto.  She was more of a patient now and less…”mom, the nurse”.

 

 

Then I got, “The Call.”

Finding out about her dementia when I did gave me ample time to cope with her eventual passing. I had been mourning for years at this point, so I suppose that helped me to cope with the lifeless look she gave me as I walked into her room for the last time.  Then came the guilt.  There’s a part of me that felt guilty over feeling relief that she’s no longer suffering and rotting away in a home somewhere.  I felt guilty every time I had to put down a dog or ferret due to illness so you’d think I’d learn and get better at it.  I’m not sure these are feelings you’re supposed to get used to for the fear of being dehumanized.  I’m told that all of these feelings are normal.

Valerie…Mom…was a headstrong and dedicated woman.  She was compassionate and full of empathy, evidenced by her 40 plus years of nursing.  She loved and cared about her “boys”.  Her weakness was her inability to relax and enjoy life, though Karl helped with that throughout their lifetime together.  She loved to crochet and made blankets for what seemed like everyone…I have at least three here laying around the house.  She was a sucker for Neil Diamond and loved the movie, “Somewhere in Time”.  She played the piano and loved power-walking.

 

 

I can only hope that in her eyes, I did everything I could to ease her journey through the stages of dementia.  I visited every week, took every phone call…I did for her what she did for me growing up…I was there for her.  She taught me empathy and compassion.  By extension, that’s just the kind of person mom was.

Thank you, Mom.  Thank you for giving me life.  Thank you for helping me with my art projects.  Thank you for that awful tuna casserole you made me eat when I was a kid.  Thank you for the McDonald’s outings.  Thank you for our trips to the mall so that we could play at the arcade.  Thank you for taking me to my chess tournaments.  Thank you for being there when I needed you most.  Thank you, most of all, for all of those wonderful memories.

Rest easy.

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“Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. But I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment because they’ll never come again. What [things] we leave behind is not as important as how we’ve lived.”

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