For many years now, early in September, I think back to a small scrap of paper with childlike handwriting, tucked away in a drawer at my late mother’s home. It read, September 11, The Bad Day, a memory that my mother did not want to forget and was neatly rubber banded together with a few torn photographs and greeting cards. The various special occasion cards had a ? scribbled next to the sender’s name which initially left me puzzled. I later realized that my mother kept the cards only because they were pretty but had no idea who sent them to her.
This took place in January of 2003. Two weeks earlier, my mother was found wandering, early on a frigid and snowy morning by the local police, dressed in just a nightgown and slippers, holding a New York Times under her arm. Outside temperatures, at 2:30 a.m., hovered at 16 degrees which did not factor into her stopping the incessant banging on the door of a house located not far from her apartment. The homeowners, obviously terrified at the sight of this tiny, elderly, woman armed with a newspaper, called the authorities and cowered behind their door as my mother kept knocking.
Let’s face it, the phone ringing in the middle of anyone’s night is never a sign of good news waiting to be shared at the other end. As my husband answered the call, I heard silence and watched him shake his head as he looked in my direction; “yes, that’s my mother-in-law, uh-huh, I see; thank you for calling, we’re leaving now to come pick her up”.
Frantically, we both dressed for the fifty mile trip, rushed out the door and my husband attempted to fill me in on the details as we pulled out of our driveway. He was talking but it was impossible to focus on anything he was saying until he mentioned the address of the home my mother had been found at which was 131 Church Street. That address had been my mother’s childhood home and suddenly I realized that it could only be Alzheimer’s; nothing else could be responsible for her midnight stroll, attempted home invasion and so many other incidents that I had too easily passed off to the woman’s advancing years. What I couldn’t figure out is where she got the New York Times from as my mother never read anything outside of the local paper and that was just to check the obituaries each day. I cringed in my seat thinking that she must have lifted it from someone’s doorstep as she roamed the streets early that morning. Whatever the situation, one thing could not be denied, my mother continuing to live alone was now out of the question. There was nowhere else for her to go other than to come and live in my home; all I kept thinking about was how much my life, and that of my family, would be impacted.
A few days later, that concern changed as I stood in the midst of boxes, packing up her belongings. I kept glancing down at that scrap of paper which recorded my mother’s one brief written touch with reality more than two years prior. I thought back to that horrific day when so many innocent lives disappeared into huge, wailing clouds of smoke and dust. Life as each of us had come to know it, up to that fateful day, would never be the same. What I was facing, as I became the caregiver to my mother, was totally insignificant compared to the events of September 11th, 2001.
It was a bad day.
