As one ages, synapses contort and connections get lost, communicate with the wrong neuron, or venture out on their own. What the hell⎯I am not a neurologist, but I am a gerontologist by observation and I find myself giving mini-lectures to the hundreds of people I connect with on the phone.

“Where did you study?” they ask, in awe of what I tell them.

“It’s a life lesson,” I reply. “I observe everything.”

One does not need a degree to sense, to feel and comprehend. When one ages, as I have observed in my ninety-nine year old mother, things get lost. They also get found. In addition they worsen. Little things get blown out of proportion. Comments get misconstrued. What was, is, but bigger and not always better.

My mother is a tiny woman who orders people around like a drill sergeant. She can be enervating. Yesterday, a transit van was supposed to pick her up in a wheelchair and bring her home from the hospital. It was two hours late despite calls from the nurse’s station. I went from calm to near insanity as my mother got more and more agitated. As she started to bark directions for me to do this and that and ask and call and fix.

hate=fear

During those two hours, the physician from her residence stopped by and did a double-take when he saw us in the room. He is a small, middle-aged man, with spiky hair that gives him another couple of inches in height⎯-he ran in, in his track suit, and knelt at my mother’s feet when he spoke to her, and held her hands. Where was this man when I needed medical reports to arm a lawyer when she represented us at a “fair hearing?” Why didn’t he come by sooner? Doesn’t he make rounds? Well, now he can bill the insurance when he says he visited my mother. But that is OK; the more justification to make a case for more freaking help for her, my full-time job since January.

I left my mother waiting for the van and went to her apartment which wasn’t all that far away, with bags of her “stuff.” Her aide was waiting over an hour, on the clock, and had to leave to see another client but she was happy to stay a bit longer to assist. Finally, my mother arrived. Exhausted. As was I.

This morning, as I had my coffee, the phone rang. It was my mother. A ninety-nine year old, crying, whining. My child. When my mother is like this, in a panic and out of control something in me snaps. I have to go into the mode to be her mother, to assure her, I am the orphan, now, and I get sad and angry. I am tired of being the mother to my mother; she thinks the person in charge of the dining room is against her. She thinks that he hangs up on her when she is giving her meal order. She doesn’t understand she is speaking to an answering device. She thinks that if her food is delivered with water spilled on her tray and if her napkins are wet, it is a hate crime.

A hate crime. A hate crime assumes there is a victim and a perpetrator. My mother is the victim. I am still not sure who the “perp” might be and why. But if there really is a “perp” what can be done? Whenever I call this residence everyone is nice and respectful. I am thinking: my mother’s synapses are going in the wrong direction, heading deeper into dementia and misconceptions. She is in fight-mode, self-preservation mode. She is on guard all the time.

She is terrified. No matter what she says.

She is terrified of D Y I N G. They all are. WE are.

I try to calm her, to soothe her, but the dining room issue is an ongoing issue. It is the one thing that makes her life miserable, she says. Something in the meal order is incorrect, missing, spilled, overcooked, inedible. She feels this is purposefully directed at her because she is hated, because someone is trying to kill her.

When I visited my mother in the hospital, she told me that the woman in the next bed was a man. Well, that could have been assumed as she was elderly with short hair. Because my mother is blind in one eye.  The “man” didn’t communicate but “he” hummed, even in the middle of the night.

“Mom,” I said, “that is a woman and she hums occasionally.”

“There is a man and a woman in the next bed,” my mother insisted.

“Mom,” I said, “men and women are in separate rooms and only one person can be in a bed.” “There is a woman in the other bed.”

“There are TWO people!” she insisted, “I heard them! I heard them talking in the middle of the night, two voices, one answering the the other.”

I began to feel agitated, I asked someone at the desk, and then I asked a social worker what might be going on in the next bed. I needed to verify my sanity, but, in doing so, I was verifying that there was something wrong with my mother.

“The patient is a woman.” (of course).

They could see I was alarmed, “could it be possible that someone slept in the bed with the patient?”

“Well, maybe, sometimes if it is a same-sex family member.”

“Was anyone else in the room last night in that bed?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Mom,” I approached this again. “Maybe, because the woman is senile, you heard her talking during the night, to herself.”

My mother’s life has become a mystery to me.

The elderly have a way with complaining, everyone I speak to who cares for an elderly person says the same thing: it is a hobby, a way of life. Complaining is their way to go. It spills over to family members who can’t get anything right and begin to feel dejected. I try to remember that to complain = to be alive. But at what price is this quality of life?

And at some point, is life itself a hate crime?

This series starts here:
Part 1: And The Band Played On … a mother’s life, a daughter’s journey

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