Shared story: She was my superhero who wouldn’t lay down her cape
Today’s Shared Story comes from Laura Buffington,
a teaching pastor with Southbrook Community Church,
Miamisburg, Ohio
If caregiving was considered a superhero gift, my mother, Sheila, could have been the star of the franchise. When someone needed help, it often felt like my mom slipped away into a phone booth and came out as her best self, ready to serve. When I think of getting colds and flu as a kid, I also remember the piles of comic books my mom would supply, the chicken soup, the cozy healing fortress she would turn our couch into. She always seemed to know what I needed before I knew I needed it.
Sheila and Laura Buffington, December 2019
I have a memory of us driving to church one day and coming across a young woman who had just been hit by a car and thrown off her bicycle. The young girl’s head was bleeding and she looked disoriented. I remember watching my mom jump out of the car and move toward the young girl without any fear or hesitation, shouting orders to the rest of us about what to do.
She always wore it
My mom rarely went without her caregiving superhero cape. I spent most of my childhood watching my mom care for her mother. My grandma lived just ten minutes from us and we wore out the road between her house and ours. I watched my mom shop for her mother, lift her up after falls, and help her transition into a nursing home.
I knew from an early age that caregiving was about more than being a superhero: It comes with enormous costs, and I was watching my mom pay the price. She lived in fear of the phone ringing. She could hardly stand to spend a day away from her mom. She talked often about feeling torn between caring for her mom and for her kids.
I held my mother’s hand the night we drove away from the hospital, knowing my grandma’s breaths were numbered. Looking back, I now understand she must have been feeling a million things at once, knowing she was losing both her mom and a large part of herself. If I could, I would go back and hold her hand even tighter.
Back into the phone booth
There was only a handful of years before my mom was forced back into the phone booth, preparing for a gut-wrenching mission: My older sister was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was just 32 years old.
Laura with her parents and sister at Laura’s graduation from Emmanuel Christian Seminary, 2003
The cancer moved quickly through Kris, to her spine and her liver. My mom, along with my dad and my sister’s husband, walked closely with my sister through her last few years. Mom went with her to chemo, on therapeutic shopping trips, and to lunch at all the strange places my sister liked to eat. She sat by her bed at the hospice center and when my sister died, mom waited around to help give her one last bath.
Fumbling with the cape
When my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2018, I found myself in the phone booth, fumbling around trying to put her cape on. I struggled to learn the specifics of caring for someone with dementia: when to remind her that I was her daughter and when to let her think I was just her friend, whether to let her think her parents were still alive, whether to correct her when she said she lived with multiple men, all of whom I knew were actually my dad.
My dad and I stumbled through together, getting her to surrender her drivers’ license, making sure they always had food to eat, and making sure she knew she was safe and loved.
But my mom wasn’t done caregiving yet. Later the same year, my dad, Tom, was also diagnosed with an incurable disease, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. As he adjusted to life on supplemental oxygen and his own grim prognosis, I moved back to my hometown, thinking all of their care would fall on me.
I moved back to my hometown,
thinking all of their care would fall on me.
But the reality is we became a triad of care, all of us with varying awareness of just how fragile our little support system was. My dad would make sure my mom took her medicine and answer her questions about their life together. My mom would make coffee in the morning and keep my dad supplied with snacks. I would run myself ragged doing everything else. And they would notice that and comfort me. We all somehow made each other laugh and stayed close on the days when it hurt.
Last, fragile breaths
When my dad took his last fragile breath in July of 2020, my mom’s middle-stage Alzheimer’s almost immediately became late-stage Alzheimer’s. She told her sister she no longer felt like she had a job to do. Her legs weakened and she recalled fewer and fewer words. She died just 37 days after my father.
She died just 37 days after my father.
It’s hard to say for sure what happened inside my mom over those days. Perhaps the trauma of watching him suffer and die did too much damage to her tired mind. Perhaps she had been holding on and waiting for him to go first before she fell apart. I worry all the time that I added to her stress as I tried to solve the puzzle of how we were going to keep going as two instead of three.
And I often wonder if her surrender was her last mission of care, and her way of finally laying down her cape.