November 2014

 November 2014

I drove south on I-35, crossing the state line from Minnesota into Iowa.  It had snowed and everywhere it was bright and flat and white.

My mother, a few months out from being diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment, dozed in the passenger seat.  

We had flown to Minnesota a few days earlier for my cousin’s funeral.   Now we were on our way to Audubon, IA to visit mom’s last living aunt.  

As a child I had made the trip from Minnesota to Iowa many times.  Large family reunions or funerals for relatives I didn’t know.  I most often found myself in a corner, listening to the adults catch up and reminisce.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, that trip in November 2014 was the beginning of the end.  A quiet prelude before the MCI diagnosis, the decline into dementia.  The tension and friction of taking over more and more of her life.  The bills, the car, the house.  Moving her, against her will, to an independent living facility. 

All that was ahead of me.  For now I drove.  I relished the moments when she slept.  I took in the plains, the farmland, the quiet.  I recalled the feeling of being huddled in the back seat, mom and grandma talking and talking as they drove south. I can still see the gentle roll of the hills.  See them stretched before me, three or four rising ahead of us as we dipped and rose, dipped and rose.