The stars of Canadian music are in Vancouver this weekend for the 2018 Juno Awards.
One of the presenters this year is eight-time Juno winner Jann Arden, who has recently published a piercingly honest, yet often funny and inspirational book about losing her mother to Alzheimer’s.
That’s an experience Arden shared with CKNW host Lynda Steele, who she joined on Friday to talk about learning to cope, love and laugh through it.
In Feeding My Mother: Comfort and Laughter in the Kitchen as My Mom Lives with Memory Loss, Arden describes how she now cooks for her mom five or six times a week, and how its helped her make peace with the new reality of their lives.
Arden first noticed something was wrong about a decade ago, but said her mom — who is now 82 — seemed more focused then, when she was acting as a caregiver for her now late-father, who also had dementia. But as time wore on the signs began to materialize; eventually, Arden says, her mom was making dinner from a can every night.
“And then one day she said, ‘You’ve got to come over here and show me how to use the can opener,'” she said. “You’re just in denial. I was in denial for years. And I was very angry and very scared.”
After her father passed and her mom’s condition worsened, Arden said she had to get first part-time, then full-time help. Her mother now lives in a nursing home that she said is set up to look almost exactly like her old living room.
WATCH: Jann Arden joins CKNW’s Lynda Steele live in studio
Feeding her mother
Through the difficult transition, Arden said food and cooking, and the experience around it, was a lifeline.
“Food seemed to be the one thing that was quite a calming influence,” she said, explaining that even when both her parents were alive and at home she’d stop by once a week to make something.
“Then it was two, three, five, seven, when I was home. Then it started becoming lunches, then I was helping them with breakfasts. But I could get mom to slice an onion, or stir a pot, or check the crock pot.”
Having something task-oriented to do was the key, she said. Those meals and days spent in the kitchen provide an escape valve, she said. It’s a time when she can have a normal conversation with her mother — and briefly forget how sick she was getting.
“And it was three or four hours in the day where I would feel normal too.”
WATCH: How Jann Arden finds humour in the frustration of life
The long goodbye
Watching a parent slowly transform into another person in front of you, Arden said, is painful — an experience fraught with anger and guilt.
“I feel like my mom passed away a long time ago, like who I knew essentially,” Arden said.
“My biggest problem with guilt is trying to reconcile the person who’s in front of me at the nursing home… but that it’s just not my mom. And I feel just so terrified. I feel like, do I love this person, do I like this person? And I feel like I’m going to hell because these thoughts are crossing my mind.”
But amid the hard times, she said those moments in the kitchen can bring moments of light. For example, she said sometimes she’d ask her mom to mop the floor — only to have her mom forget, and ask to do it again later that evening.
“And you do have to laugh. My mom would get in there, and she was as happy as you like with the mop.”
Arden said she knows it will be a long goodbye. Her mother is in good health, and she expects her to live for years yet — and she says it will be bittersweet when she finally does let go.
“I think I’ll feel a sense of relief. Of course I’m going to be profoundly sad, but I’ve been so sad about this for the last five or six years. But if I didn’t take the time to take care of myself I think I’d be in trouble.”