Her Own Kind of Absence [NYTimes.com]

Samantha Sangenito 9/3/144:00 AM

She lay so still as I approached her bed, I thought she was asleep. Or dead. Her eyes were open. “Mom?” I asked. Her gaze tilted toward me, but she said nothing.

It was 8:30 a.m. Only weeks earlier, she would have been in the kitchen by 8:30, asking me what was on the agenda for the day. Now, she wouldn’t move, her thin, knobby fingers resting on the coverlet.

I didn’t know if my 93-year-old mother was depressed or if her dementia had suddenly worsened. She had been living in my upstate New York home for a year and a half, ever since I had convinced her she could no longer live alone.

[For more of this story, written by Celia Watson Seupal, go to http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes...tntemail0=y&_r=1]

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