Last year at this time, my mother had a strange series of events which led her to the hospital and then to rehab where she was fading. In a month’s time she was no longer the same person. Rehab did nothing but make the situation worse and I demanded she be released to her home, in Florida; she was subsequently put on Hospice care. She was dwindling fast, seventy-five pounds. She got pneumonia. It was found that her assisted living facility (where she had been living independently for four years) was infested with rats, the biggest one was probably the facility’s director; her apartment was full of rats that appeared at night. They scratched around in the air ducts then came out and ate through cans and boxes of food. They were brazen enough to take a bite out of the aide’s finger.

I got my mother the hell out of there and back to New York, her home town, by the end of July. She was tiny, fragile, perhaps eighty pounds when she arrived. I found her a nice senior residence not far from me; I have seen her more in the last eight months than I have in the twenty-five plus years she was in Florida.

 

 

This has not been an easy adjustment for anyone, especially for my mother who can’t take the cold and who was stuck inside for months during a brutal Winter. It was all downhill from September where a month-long cold kept her house- bound. She has not left the building at all. She has spent most of the time in her room.

Just as she was beginning to feel better she got the shingles. At first it was a relatively small area on her hip that was affected and it seemed like no big deal until the neuropathy set-in causing excruciating pain especially during the night. This is now going on over a month; it is hard enough for a a younger person to deal with illness but this horrid pain causing her to scream in agony, lose sleep and her appetite, was dangerous.

But, one day she began asking for Chinese food. When an ill, elderly person asks for food you run fast and bring it. The area where my mother resides is a China Town of sorts; it is filled to the brim with many denominations of Asians but primarily Chinese, and they serve “real” Chinese food. Her aide lives on the stuff and mother decided to join her for a change only to find the food repulsive. Chinese-Chinese food is not like Americanized-Chinese food: it can be tough, grisly, strange tasting and downright stinky. My mother hated it but asked for it again. Go figure, the food served in her residence is excellent, fresh, organic when possible but she goes toe to toe with the chef and tells him the elderly can’t eat all that sugar and salt and hard to chew stuff. She tells him she doesn’t care if the food has fancy names. She just wants it plain.

She looks at me during visits and tells me dramatically that she is starving. OK, that’s not good.

So when her birthday came around this past Sunday, the plan was to bring her and the aide a Chinese meal and hope for the best.

 

During the the previous week the aide took off almost four days to go home to her family which left me not only on stand-by but on duty. In addition I had to meet with someone I engaged to do the paper work for enrollment into Community Medicaid and a Pooled Income Trust; this would hopefully keep her financially afloat a little longer and New York is one of maybe a handful of states that realized it is cheaper to keep the elderly at home if possible than to put them in a nursing home.

Her meals were delivered from the dining room and I believe my presence helped her regain her appetite. All of a sudden food tasted better, looked better. All of a sudden I was the mother, taking the plate, cutting off the stems from the baby spinach which I don’t think she had ever had before, I poured on some raspberry vinaigrette and when she discovered the flavor she was somehow transported; happy, hungry, safe.

I sat nearby as my mother-child fed herself. The arm that she fell on last year was healed, she could raise it, manipulate the knife in tandem with the fork slowly bring the loaded fork to her mouth which waited agape like a baby bird’s. She sat there, at her small table, like a ten year old, more, less. Eighty-ish pounds, back to where she was when she came in the summer. She was tiny, so very tiny. I couldn’t make sense out of our reversed roles, how I was once the child, she the mother. It was as if we were now just two people transcending age, one helping the other.

With all the stress of running and doing and meeting and calling and shopping and checking up and helping I suppose I got run down and ended up with a cold and all the good stuff that goes with it from hacking cough, sneezing and subsequent sinus infection. It was time for an anti-biotic and to take a break. I realized, that even if my mother could function without an aide as she said, she would be alone; have no one to bathe her, no one to bring her the tea, to cut the stems off the spinach, no one to take out the garbage, no one to reach up for the bottle, make the bed, turn off, put on, make calls. Fill the humidifier. Do the laundry.  No one to be there. No one. No one is not a good thing. I was the aide for a moment here and there and I saw first hand: Although I was not there day and night, taking care of another person 24/7 is not an easy job.

 

By this time I was a little better. Birthday plans had to be made. Nothing fancy, just a little celebration. A Chinese meal (as Americans would know it) including food that was chewable and well cooked and tasty: wonton soup, chicken with broccoli, lo-mein noodles, white rice. Two lovely mini cakes from the French bakery to be eaten whenever with happy birthday candles, (which wouldn’t be lighted due to fire regulations),

 

 

a bouquet of flowers (I brought a vase tall enough to hold them), something like so, and

 

a few really nice cards.

Simple. Oh yes, also a package of mashed potatoes: she keeps asking for them and they are never served at dinner. She can keep these in the fridge.

It didn’t take much to make mom happy: she devoured the soup, sitting at her little tray-desk by the window with the TV on. She drank almost every drop. She picked up the small brown glass bowl with two handles and drank the broth. I saw a child with a sippy cup. The television was glued to channel thirteen, (New York City Public Television) our PBS, where Pavarotti sang and she was moved to tears. Right into the soup.

She took a break before she downed the small plate of the chicken with broccoli, rice, lo-mein. Then she just ate and ate. But you have to understand: it’s a slow process. Her mouth is already open and waiting when the food arrives on a slightly shaky fork. There is a barely audible vocalization of ecstasy and delight. In fact, the delight was more on my part than hers: She was happy. She was really happy with something as simple as a little company and a meal, flowers and cards.

There was no room for cake, maybe later, maybe tomorrow.

For a while she forgot that she was in pain, that she hadn’t been sleeping and that she was so uncomfortable.

 

 

For just a while she was somewhere else, somewhere in the land of wonton delight.

On her ninety-sixth birthday.

 

 

 

This series is linked: see “continued here.” Also, below the line there will be links for the previous post and the next.

The series starts here

continued here