Entry 1 - Pre-Arrival

"Momma will arrive next Saturday at 5:45 p.m. She is on U S Airways Flight 191." Thus said the text message sent to my wife's cell phone two and a half weeks ago. The text was sent by my sister-in-law, Mary Beth who has helped care for 'Momma' for several years now. We received the text en route to a three-day trip to Las Vegas from our home in Litchfield Park, Arizona. We knew this could possibly be the last excursion we take together for some time to come. Momma was coming to live with us. Momma is Frances, my wife's mother; age 81. Over the years she has been creeping toward a state of dementia. My wife, Judy, was the first to notice this when Frances visited back in 2005. During that visit Judy remarked that her mother seemed to be losing her memory. I did not notice and dismissed it as Frances being Frances. Perhaps the fact that visits to Arizona were infrequent contributed to a more noticeable difference in behavior to Judy rather than an imperceptible decline for family and friends who interacted with Frances day-to-day. More recently, the changes in behavior became apparent to family and friends in Virginia. We offered to take Frances last year to care for her and possibly look for a home or assisted-living facility to provide care. However, family back home insisted she stay with them. The motives of others in favor of keeping Frances in Virginia were motivated by greed and other factors which I will not get into here. Suffice it to say that Frances' financial usefulness has run its course back home and she was no longer needed. It took family in Virginia less than an hour to decide to send her West with a carry on and one checked bag's worth of clothing and small personal possessions. The rest of the Frances' house, under threat of foreclosure, contains belongings such as clothing, jewelry, family photos and a favorite sewing machine that we hope to obtain for Frances. We are not holding or breath. Upon return from our Las Vegas stay, our attention immediately turned to living space. When we built our home in 2002 we added room to the house specifically because we thought Frances would be joining us then. She did not want to leave her valley in Virginia. So, the room became a storage and activity room for our family of four. We had one week to convert the room to a bedroom. Actually, less than a week because we still had our 9 to 5 jobs to go to that week. We both managed to get the Thursday prior to arrival off and spent the entire day gutting, cleaning and painting. In one day the room went from clutter to empty with a fresh coat of sage green. Friday was normal work day. As soon as we arrived home from work we applied a second coat of paint. All that was left was to let the paint dry. The following day - Saturday, the day of arrival - We arose early to begin hanging blinds, moving furniture, switching out the ceiling fan blades to match the room and giving the room a final vacuum. We had a brief time to relax before we headed to Sky Harbor Airport to pick up our charge. We knew when we left the house our family life as we knew it was about to change and may never be the same.