The term “here we go again,” seems so trite, but there is something  truly basic and thought provoking about it; the more I use it, the more I get it: nothing is ever finished, complete, resolved in life. Things just get swept aside until they come around again.

I had visited my mother over the weekend to do my usual: pay bills, pick up mail, check her stash of Ensure and pull-ups, on and on. I made note that a vast swath of the area the length of the apartment, behind all the furniture, was blanketed by dust and the lonely detritus of fallen stuff that goes by the wayside. Someone is supposed to come in weekly and vacuum but this area is a Neverland of schmutz. I was appalled but not surprised.

In almost one month, my mother will be 101 years old. One hundred and one. I was relieved to observe over the last few visits that she had become calmer, if you could call it that. Maybe, I should say, at peace? More grounded? I always know in the back of my head that she can “go” at any time. Or, that she can relapse into one of those episodes of strangeness: paranoia.

I have been fighting the bureaucracies behind the scenes, it is an everyday occurrence and I don’t speak much about it, but I will say that between the doctor’s nurse who does all the paperwork and whatever goes on at the Managed Health Care, there is something drastically wrong, unbelievable and untruthful, and I am, alas, THE one who deals with it all, trying to rectify lost, missed or non-communications via phone calls, emails, faxes. It’s all part of the same scene: if you age and are needy you are just another case. Two hours of that nonsense, today. On top of my mother calling me, while I was in the middle of it all. Her claim again is that “everyone is robbing her.” She still claims her clothes go missing and then are brought back. “How do they do it? How do they manage to get it out and then back?” She still talks about the aqua evening gown in the plastic bag. I think she wore it to the Catskills in the 1960s and then to someone’s wedding or Bar Mitzvah. She clings to these clothes in her closet, over and over it is about all the gorgeous stuff she still has that she bought at MACY’S. THIS is her legacy: A wardrobe of petite/small clothes from some Macy’s in Florida, hung precisely by color in her closet. She insists that some aides put THEIR clothes in HER closet and walked off with her stuff, in addition to whatever stuff of hers that has been taken. The content of this conversation, that I have heard thousands of times never ceases to rattle me.

I see what is happening.

She knows what is coming. The BIG END. It scares her to think these clothes, upon which she has placed so much meaning, will be, essentially meaningless. They will be donated. She doesn’t like that. She doesn’t want that.

She doesn’t want to go. I don’t want her to go either.

No one understands the diminishment of the meaning of possessions better than I. My husband died at age twenty-eight after a long miserable disease. He hadn’t had the time to come into his own as an adult, to do and have many adult things. Eventually, after the shock, relief and reality seeped in, after years of terrible illness and hospital visits, (we had just moved to a new apartment), I sold his bike. The rest of his worldly goods were reduced to eleven black trash bags. They lined the long wall of the living room like sleeping bodies and were carted off by The Salvation Army. All the clothes, the pair of ice skates, had become meaningless. I understood the phrase, for the first time, that “you can’t take it with you.”

I think my mother is beginning to think about that. It’s easier to think about where your stuff will go and not what will happen to you, as an essence, as a former being.

OK, so back to the phone call. “Remember when you were here last we were talking about how my blanket is threadbare and then you went to the closet and and said I had three more: a blue, a yellow and —”

I know we had this conversation but I know she doesn’t have three more blankets. I offered to get her a new one and she declined. The conversation got agitated, SHE got agitated and told me that I was losing MY memory. Over and over, she said she was crying, earlier, was frustrated, disappointed, upset, with the people around her stealing, sneaking the stuff out. The aide was doing the laundry while I was on the phone, while my mother was rummaging in the closet which is in a poorly lit area, inspecting her losses. She reminded me that she wasn’t crazy, which ironically makes her seem so. May I remind you that her vision is legally blind from macular degeneration.

I received a text from the aide who said mother had taken a nap earlier, for an hour and woke up disoriented. During this whole time I was on-line searching for a nice new blanket and fresh sheets, in time for Valentine’s Day, whether my mother likes it or not.

“I always wanted to be a dancer and then music called. I could have been something,” she added to this nuttiness. So now we have regret in the mix. It was strange but not really. It was disturbing but I am used to it.

In the meantime, my kitty has been ill as you know, and she is one of the few “things” I have been able to count on to maintain my sanity and have a sense of peace. She, like my mother, is a mother and all but one of her progeny is deceased. She is likely fifteen, maybe more, and spent the last fourteen years with us and her kitty family. Now she has a thyroid issue which is producing a HUGE cyst, it’s not cancerous—yet, but these things tend to go that route. After days in the hospital last month, she seemed to be doing better and then she was showing the signs of this cyst re-filling, pressing on her trachea, choking her. Back to the vet. The options aren’t clear yet, for now we have to watch her and do this aspiration procedure, perhaps  monthly and hope that it won’t get worse, BUT last month 35 CCs were drained and this month, 40. That is huge.

What is there to say? At some point both my parent and my pet will be gone, that is a given. The element of surprise is not comforting. Someone or something leaves or is taken and those remaining are “robbed” of time, time for themselves and time with those now missing.

It’s not about the clothes in the bags lined up against the wall, or the stuff to get rid of— if you can, it is about being robbed, of time. And we all feel it: Those who are at the end of their journey and those who are left behind, who are reminded of their loss by the bags of possessions no longer needed.

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

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