If you think that looking at the above roller coaster clip is enough to make you ill, here is another one for you.

I was all set to work on this new blog. I was going to tell you that I spoke with my mom late yesterday afternoon and she was so on target, so responsive and open and appeared to be processing information so well. I said to myself, “Self, we are now on a roll. It’s all good. It’s all normal. It was all a bad dream and we’ve awakened to a new day. We are healed!”

I stepped outside of myself and observed. I saw how affected I am by my environment. I felt my heart quake. I felt my stomach cave. All of this in reaction to my mother’s behavior. When she’s good, I am good. When she is “bad,” I am sick.

I had to call her physician’s office to have a fax sent to her managed long term care for something she needed. The aide had been there. Now, I am dealing with two very unhappy aides, aides gossiping between themselves about what my mother says about them. When you are a caregiver and you have to deal with negativity, gossip and miscommunication, when you have a lousy paying job and have to take crap from people, it doesn’t auger well. Today there are a lot of very disgruntled folks who deal with my mother. And judging from what I heard in the background chatter and ranting, my mother ain’t a happy camper.

She thinks there were children running around in the hallway at night; they woke her up. There are no children living in this senior residence. But residing in my mother there are ghosts of her childhood, ghosts of her early motherhood, and ghosts of fears and terrors. She refuses to take her meds and there is nothing I can do. What will happen as a result is yet to be seen.

I write with a pounding heart. Over the years I have dealt with people with whom I have had to work, many people, I’ve known people who were ill and, or out of control. I find it terrifying. When a person near you is out of control, you are knocked off balance.

Years ago when we moved onto this block there was an elderly woman several houses down. Mrs. Brown.

Mrs. Brown was small and her white hair was wild. She’d go from house to house, ringing doorbells and then catch the ear of whoever would listen. She’d ramble. You’d stand there politely and ill at ease waiting for a place where you could assert yourself and disengage. It got to the point where you wouldn’t open the door. You’d hide if you saw Mrs. Brown on the street. It was much easier to make believe she didn’t exist. And, then one day, she didn’t; she was gone.

I have no idea what Mrs. Brown was like in her earlier days. I don’t have a clue. She was likely a wife and a mother who outlived her husband. She was one of the first to live on this block of houses built for the World War 2 veterans in the early 1950s. I bet her hair was dark and nicely combed. I bet she had supper ready at 6:00 pm. I envision her walking her kids to the public school, walking down the winding street, down the hill. I bet she was a grandmother and loved by her family.

And then something changed.

Something happens in us as we age. Except, maybe if we are George Burns or Betty White. Except if we are lucky and remain rooted in relationships and close attachments. Except if our teeth are good and we can get food down and our cells remain nourished and our brains keep firing away in normal synapses. Except. It doesn’t always happen.

When I was young, I never thought about these things. I never thought about taking care of aging parents. My father blessed us by leaving quickly, without warning, one morning in the shower. The only inkling was that he was beginning to misjudge the curb when driving. And then my mother would complain that he was in a nearby apartment “fixing things” for some young female renters. It was 1991. He was seventy-eight years old and though he keeled over in the shower, he went quickly and with grace and was not a burden. I think my mother was relieved. It wasn’t long before she had some gentlemen callers.

Now she is up and down. She takes me with her on bumpy Coney Island rides, up and down the wooden tracks at full speed. What I try to remember are the days when we would take the Canarsie line, the L train, out to Brighton Beach, at the end of Brooklyn, the borough where she grew up and where she met my father. On weekend mornings she would pack the red plaid vinyl hamper full of brisket of beef sandwiches on fresh seeded rolls from the Town Rose Bakery on East 14th Street. Once at the beach we would get a cold drink, a hot potato knish from Mrs. Stahl’s. I have a bunch of photos in an album. I was about eight years old, and for years, as I grew up, I remember a sick feeling in my stomach: That there was school the next day, that I had butterflies, that something was off. I had those feelings despite the cool breezes from the ocean and the warmth of the sun on my sailor hat. I had those feelings no matter what.

I still have them now.

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

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