Elsie Anne Valentine Plemitscher

Bill's mom died quietly at the nursing home yesterday afternoon. It is hard to feel the overwhelming grief that one expects at the death of a parent, mostly because she left us several years ago due to senile dementia.

Anyone who knew Anne in the past five years or so would not know what a vibrant, curious and energetic woman she was before her mind was stolen by disease. One only has to look at my husband to know her strength of character, her humor, and her practical, common-sense outlook on life.

I met Anne for the first time in the summer of 1981, when she was 52. She was a factory worker at Capitol Records' pressing plant, in the days when they still made vinyl LPs. She was also taking classes at community college, active in her church and many community organizations. She knew things--about gardening, raising livestock, how to use a grind-stone, how to compost. She recycled (before recycling was cool)! She knew how to de-tassle corn and how to get to a chicken dinner--starting with a live chicken. She was an enthusiastic Girl Scout leader; at one point her troop consisted of five blind girls, because, she declared, "they deserve the chance to be Scouts too!"

She read constantly, clipping articles of interest and sending them to friends and relatives. She bought a Nordic Track and started exercising everyday. Her drive was to constantly self-improve, and whether it took the form of canoeing in the deep woods in Minnesota, taking a class to learn how to write a story, doing the vocabulary exercises in Reader's Digest, dressing up as a clown for the hometown parades to entertain children, or playing dominoes with her grandchildren, she was always ready for action.

I remember driving with her up from St. Louis one night, in a car whose radiator leak suddenly became worse. I was all for calling Bud and having him come and rescue us, but Anne insisted we were just fine. We stopped every 5 miles and knocked on doors, begging water to refill the radiator. Anne knew how to charm even the most suspicious farmers in the dead of night.

When Juli was 10 weeks old, I flew out to see her. She immediately plopped us in the pickup truck and drove to Chicago to see the Petersons, then on to Wisconsin to see Aunt Carolyn, then back to Illinois to see her mother, Ruth, all in the stifling heat of summer, without the benefit of air conditioning (which she considered a wasteful, unhealthy invention). She and I hit every rest stop and truck stop for breast-feeding breaks, and she fixed everyone who seemed a little too curious with a gimlet eye, daring them to stare. I learned very quickly to follow her attitude, and became comfortable nursing Juli in public places without embarrassment.

After her retirement in the 1990s, she started her own business. She and Bud traveled the Midwest summer fair circuit, selling hot dogs and shave ice out of a trailer named "My Place." I first noticed something was off in April, 1998. The kids and I were on a driving trip to the West Coast, and stopped at Granny Annie's for Easter. We got up in the dark for sunrise services, but after driving around the cornfields for an hour, Anne announced that she was lost, and couldn't find the church. Bud was working in Florida, and I passed it off as isolated distraction because her husband had been gone a long time.

She started slipping away, and she didn't realize what was happening to her. After many tests and several years, no one knew definitively what was wrong. It wasn't Alzheimer's, it wasn't any other diagnosable dementia, but she was having auto accidents, wandering away in the night and losing touch with reality.

In November of 2005, she became a resident at Golden Moments Senior Care. At first, she recognized and conversed with everyone who came to visit. But over the past two years, she became more reticent, and eventually she stopped speaking all together. Where she had initially gained quite a bit of weight when she came to live there, she suddenly lost it all this year and kept losing. In the last few months, her diagnosis was "failure to thrive."

I knew and loved my mother-in-law. And I know positively that she would have hated the life she was held prisoner in. I would not be surprised if somewhere deep in her limbic brain, she decided that enough was enough.

Rest in peace, dear Anne. You had a wonderful life filled with people who loved you. We will remember you as you were before, and will not despair over your passing. In this case, it was truly a blessing, and I know this is what you would have wanted.