On Wednesday before Thanksgiving, we went on high alert with my mother-in-law, Gudelia Alvarez. I shared that here.
It’s cliché to say the past two weeks have been a blur, but it’s the truth. Providentially, we pre-recorded several podcast episodes just before we realized how close she was to the end. For the most part, we’ve just functioned as normal, but I know my wife and I are both very thankful that those shows were already in the can.
We visited her right away on that Wednesday, then again on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Before visiting Guddy that day, Jennifer and I made initial arrangements with a funeral home. Later that evening, four of our five children joined us in visiting Guddy in her room at the memory care unit. Our oldest son, Sam, joined us virtually with his wife via FaceTime.
Together, the eight of us prayed a Rosary and Divine Mercy chaplet for Guddy, pulled up close in a semi-circle of chairs surrounding her bed.
We each took turns saying goodbye, knowing every time we saw her could be the last.
The next day Jennifer and I visited a cemetery and chose a plot and grave marker for Guddy. We’d done all that we could except for the most important preparation. That happened the next day, on Sunday when our priest graciously offered to meet us at the nursing home later that day. When we arrived, we were surprised to see her more alert. The staff told us she was doing better with getting at least a few sips of Ensure down, and she seemed to have slightly rebounded. We wondered if perhaps we had requested the visit from our priest too quickly.
Still, Father gave Guddy the anointing of the sick, a small fragment of the Eucharist (since she was no longer eating solid food), and an apostolic pardon. After this, we all gave Guddy a kiss of peace. It was beautiful to witness and be a part of this.
Jennifer saw her mom again on Tuesday, and she was still doing better. We visited again on Friday, and she seemed to have declined again. Again, the cliché is appropriate to say it felt like we were on a rollercoaster with my mother-in-law as her state edged upward to improvement before barreling speedily downward again. That day Guddy made even less eye contact with any of us, and her erratic movements and babbling had slowed.
On Sunday we visited again, and her downturn was even more noticeable. As soon as I saw her, it was evident that any improvement we’d seen just a week before was obviously a momentary one.
Again, we hugged and kissed her when we left and told her we loved her and that we’d return again on Tuesday.
Instead, we woke that Tuesday morning to a voicemail that Guddy had died between three and four that morning. I awoke to Jennifer crying out, “Oh no! She’s gone! She’s gone!”
We’d hoped to be there with her when she passed, to be praying the Rosary or Divine Mercy chaplet with her again as she went from this world into the next.
Within a few hours, Jennifer and I were at the nursing home with boxes, loading up her furniture and cleaning out the room. Other than photos and a couple of pieces of clothing with sentimental value — a red cardigan and a pretty jacket Guddy often wore — pretty much all of her final belongings were dropped off at a donation center by lunchtime.
We went home and that was pretty much it.
Less than two weeks. We got that call on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and were told Guddy probably wouldn’t last until Christmas. She was gone in less than two weeks.
And yet, as I previously wrote, we’ve watched Guddy’s decline for the last seven years, ever since she lost her husband, Hector.
Our memories and feelings are raw and muddled and confusing right now. Dementia is a beast of a disease. It strips away the personality of those we love and leaves us still facing those same people, but now radically transformed.
We’ve gone through stacks of photos and countless folders on our computers, compiling a lifetime of images of this woman. She loved to have her picture taken, and was always quick to smile.
I found a video from our short time living in Indiana, probably filmed in early 2018. A month after we arrived, Guddy flew up from Georgia to live with us. We’d bought a house with a room and bathroom just for her, but she spent most of her time in the sitting area of our kitchen.
In the video I found, a bat had somehow managed its way into our kitchen, perhaps through the fireplace. It was flying in circles as Jennifer and I tried to figure out how to catch it. Our dog, Jody, excitedly ran around the room. I kept telling Guddy to leave the room, but she just stood in the middle of it all with her jacket pulled over her head.
It’s a funny video, and yet sad at the same time. She had long begun her decline by that point, but none of us had yet really accepted or begun to understand it. I laugh when I watch that video, but at the same time, it fills me with such sadness.
In some ways, even though we visited Guddy often and had our chance to tell her how much we loved her, the person we said our goodbyes to had left us years before.
The mother-in-law I once knew began to slip away when her husband died.
I think the grief we’re feeling right now is the realization that we’ve been saying goodbye for years, but never really got to say goodbye to the Guddy we knew before dementia started to steal her away.
Here’s the Guddy I think I’ll choose to remember:
I first met Guddy back in December 1994, just a few weeks before her daughter and I started dating.
Jennifer and I had been cast as the leads in the Georgia State University production of Prelude to a Kiss. Auditions were held at the tail end of the fall term, and official rehearsals would begin after Christmas. The way I tell the story of this serendipitous series of events that changed my life forever is this:
I was several weeks in the midst of a horrible breakup. One day in between classes at GSU in downtown Atlanta, I was withdrawing money from an ATM in the student center when I saw a sign on the wall advertising open auditions for the Georgia State Players winter show. This tidbit got filed into the back of my brain
A few days later, desperate for money, I drove to the middle of Nowhere, Georgia where I was fitted into a much-too-small Union Army Civil War uniform and ushered onto a muddy field where I stood in the cold for several hours as an extra for a long-forgotten TNT movie called Andersonville. Midway through the day, after I was instructed to take off my shoes and socks and walk through freezing mud, I decided the money wasn’t that important and escaped from, ironically, the prison set.
I went home (I’d moved back into my parent’s house after four years) and passed out from the day. I woke around 6 PM with the strong feeling that I was supposed to be somewhere, but couldn’t remember the reason.
I suddenly remembered that was the night of auditions I saw on that sign. Other than a bit part in a seventh-grade play, I’d never had any inclinations to be an actor. But as soon as I remembered those auditions, I quickly got dressed, walked out to my car, and drove thirty minutes to downtown Atlanta.
The hallway at the theater was packed with theater majors. I knew nobody. I had no idea how auditions worked. I signed in and waited to be called. That night I read two or three parts and recall being surprised when the director laughed out loud (in a good way) at one of my deliveries.
Returning home, that night I got a callback and was told to return the next evening to the theater. I was paired with several females, more than I can remember, including one woman with jet black hair who I distinctly remember thinking, “I hope I don’t have to kiss her because she is wearing way too much bright red lipstick.” Spoiler alert: I married her less than a year later.
A few days after callbacks, I received the news I was cast as the lead in the play. It’s hard to explain how dire life was a week before — with a previous relationship in crumbles, living with my parents again after several years of freedom, counting change to buy a couple of gallons of gas — and then suddenly this bright light of something completely new and unexpected to look forward to.
It was now the second week of December and David, the show’s director, brought the cast together for an impromptu read-through and a chance for all of us to start bonding as an acting troupe. I remember sitting in a circle of chairs on that stage and how comfortable and right it all seemed.
Then we had Christmas break and rehearsals would begin the first week of January. Jennifer, however, reached out to suggest that she and I — as the leads in the play — get together and read through our lines a few times to get a head start.
I drove over to her house. She’d recently given up her own freedom of several years and she, too, had begrudgingly moved back in with her parents. Guddy answered the door that night. We exchanged pleasantries and then she went to bed as Jennifer and I sat in the living room and read through the script. At some point, she divulged she owned an acoustic guitar and brought down her black Takamine. She played the opening strands of Blackbird and handed it over to me.
For the last twenty-eight years, that Takamine has been the main guitar I play. It’s propped up right now on a stand in our living room.
Jennifer and I started dating in February, just before the show opened. I proposed to her in March. Between then and September, I spend many hours in that house.
Over the summer, Jennifer did temp work in a law firm and often didn’t get home until nearly nine o’clock. I’d often arrive at the house early and spent time in the kitchen with Guddy. We liked each other pretty quickly.
One day I was standing in the kitchen with Jennifer and Guddy and looked at an erasable whiteboard magnet on the fridge. In Guddy’s distinct handwriting were three words:
“Shower Cheese Ball”
Now, I fully knew what this shorthand meant. She was going to a wedding shower and had promised to make and bring a cheese ball hors d'oeuvre.
But something about the way my future Puerto Rican mother-in-law wrote these three words together just struck me funny as if she had written a to-do item for herself to literally shower a cheese ball.
I found this funnier than I know it actually was, but it stuck with me.
For years, long after Jennifer and I were married, and long after we had all of our kids, if I ever found myself alone in Guddy’s kitchen, I’d grab a dry-erase marker and secretly write, “Shower Cheese Ball,” on the same magnetic memo board she used for all those years.
It’s a small thing. But I know I’ll never see a cheese ball without thinking about my mother-in-law.
It’s those kind of small things I’ll choose to remember, to hold dear, to think of as we say our last goodbyes at her funeral tomorrow.
That, and her hiding under her jacket as a bat flew through our home.