Brenda Marjaniemi

An Extended Stay Brenda Marjaniemi

I felt like my heart had dropped down to my stomach, as I watched my mother walk. It was May 1989. She walked notably slower. She and my dad were visiting us in Arizona. I took her to a small museum on a lower floor in a shopping mall. My seventy-four year old mother could barely get down the stairs, and back up. Yet, she seemed unaware of her slow pace. Five more years were to pass, before she was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in February 1994. I started writing about my mother when she was at the end stage of Parkinson's in 2008. After each trip to California to visit my mother, I would journal describing my mother in the throes of this terrible disease. My writings are interspersed with a history of our family, my feelings, and my insights. Though in her last years my mother was confined to a body that no longer functioned, it was her will, her love, her faith, and her strong need to be my role model that I am attempting to portray to the reader. This is a short memoir but powerful, I am leading the readers down a path that we do not wish to tread by sharing my feelings and my insights gathered along the way.