For more than seven years, Judy Hogfeldt’s mother spent each day telling staff at her memory care facility that she was going home “tomorrow.”
As crushing as it was for Hogfeldt to know that journey would never come, it was a relief realizing her mother lived out her days with hope.
Hogfeldt, who lives in Homer Glen, is a retired Stagg High School teacher. She has written a one-act play about her mother’s struggles with vascular dementia, a condition that cause memory loss as well as reasoning and judgment issues. It is often the consequence of Alzheimer’s disease, she said.
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“When I Get Home” will be staged during Limestone Theatre’s Local Playwright One-Act Festival April 7-10 in Lockport. Show times are 7 p.m. April 7-9 and 2 p.m. April 10.
Hogfeldt said she wrote the play in a day back in 2019 after she learned Limestone Theatre was looking for short original works.
Her manuscript was accepted and the show was originally scheduled to be staged later that year as part of a one-act festival. But circumstances and then COVID-19 caused the production to be canceled twice.
“It’s finally happening,” she said. “I’m really excited about it. We have a really good cast.”
Luke Janchenko, executive director of the Limestone Stage, said Hogfeldt’s play, written with tender, personal insight, “is among the best one-acts I’ve ever read. Everyone who reads it thinks the exact same thing.”
It will close the show of six short productions, one of which was written by Janchenko.
Hogfeldt was teaching English Language Learners and sometimes biology, and going through a divorce, when her parents started struggling.
The couple lived in Rockford and, though she was a two-hour drive away, Hogfeldt was geographically the nearest of three siblings. So, initially, her parents’ care fell to her. Later, she said, her siblings worked as a team, with one handling the finances and another the medical care.
“I would put in my 12-hour days teaching and then on weekends go to Rockford and take care of my parents,” she said.
“I would bring food, make meals, deal with doctors, hair appointments, laundry, and clean, clean and clean, then leave on Sunday afternoons with meals prepared for the week, packaged and labeled,” she recalled. “I would return the following Saturday and find (the food) untouched.”
After her World War II veteran father took a fall, it became apparent the couple needed daily care, she said. Her father struggled with physical decline and her mother with cognitive impairment.
She and her siblings found a place in Appleton, Wisconsin, that would take both aging adults. Her father, however, died after a few months.
For the next seven and a half years, the siblings watched their late mother decline.
“In the play I talk about how every day there was her first day. She’d say, ‘This is a really nice hotel,'” Hogfeldt said. “She didn’t recognize any of the workers. She would tell everyone it was her first day and that she was going home tomorrow.”
Mary Pierson plays Hogfeldt’s mother, “Harriet.” The local actress, who showed up to the audition with a teddy bear and lap blanket, is “phenomenal” in the role, Hogfeldt said.
Woven into the story are universal, yet difficult, challenges about how best to care for aging parents, how to communicate with them and how to address lingering conflict, Hogfeldt said.
“There are three adult siblings, all of whom have an unresolved issue with their mom and realize it may be too late to resolve it,” she said. “The middle sibling is roughly based on myself.”
“When I Get Home” is directed by Julie Zebleckis, who was inspirational in getting Hogfeldt to join the local theater community in 2017, a few years after she’d retired from teaching. Hogfeldt first landed a small part in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and then went on to perform in “Beyond the Grave” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
Eldercare, Hogfeldt said, is in a state of national crisis.
“We need more people to study this and create solutions,” she said.
Limestone Theatre’s Local Playwright One-Act Festival will take place inside the Lockport Township Building, 1463 S. Farrell Road, Lockport. Tickets are $10. For information, go to 815-905-2789; limestonestage.org.
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Donna Vickroy is an award-winning reporter, editor and columnist who worked for the Daily Southtown for 38 years.