I am happy to report, that just as I thought, the tirade left with the tide . I sometimes dread calling my mother to see how things are going. With that call on my mind, an ocular migraine came on fast; what does that say? But I called and the aide who should have been off today answered the phone. The usual aide took off a couple of days and “Candy,” as my mother calls her, as it comes close to her real name, was filling in, not only the daytime shift but the evening one as well. THAT, my friends, is a long day.

In sotto voce, she told me everything was alright. At my end, I let out a deep breath. I can’t really talk to her when my mother is in the room. It makes her paranoid to think we must be talking about her. She needs, wants to know everything we are saying.

Candy and I had a telepathic commiseration.

I had already spoken to my mother when she called again in the late afternoon just before Candy returned. My mother, as you know, uses me, and probably everyone in her path, as a sounding board. This was not a day of “dementia.” It was a day of clarity, of memory, of calm. Thankfully. But with memory comes stories and there are always stories and they are almost always repeat episodes of what I have heard many times before, year after year. How she adored her father. How she adored her sister. How there were twin sisters, who looked identical but who were as different as could be. How she often was shipped off to her aunt Libby. (“The one who was married to Peretz/Philip?” “Yes.”)

Where she worked. For whom she worked. Her marriage. The men she dated after my father died.

A return to the topic that she could have been rich because my father worked on Canal Street and she could have put in a claim for 911 reparation because of his death. (My father died 10 years prior to 911.)

“Oh, I have so many stories! I am never bored thinking about my life. It was so interesting! I have so much more to tell.”

She wanted to know about the family, what was going on, how we were doing. She asked what I do in the mornings, if I go out. I told her, again, about my hobbies. She absorbed what I told her superficially. I do this, I do that. She could only “get” so much: My interests could only penetrate her self-interest so far.

Usually, when my mother is on and functioning as close to her normal as possible, she will thank me for what I do. She knows that she owes the last ten or more years to me, the years that were so impossible, keeping watch over her from another state: her falls, hospitalizations, pneumonia, hospice! Eight to twelve hour days on the phone sorting, organizing and dealing with horrendous bureaucracy, the moving her back to New York City which at first seemed impossible. The shopping, the finances, the mediations I had to perform. It seems like she thought about it more deeply than usual and expressed gratitude.

When my mother was going through the episode a few days ago, where she thought the aide was stealing her bedding and replacing clothes in the closet with her own, I had asked her, “what can I get you, what do you want?”

Her response was, “My vision, give me back my vision. I want to read. I want to see. I want my teeth, I want to be able to chew.”

So the theft really wasn’t from the closet. The theft was of her sense of peace, her looming vulnerabilities replacing what she once owned, not only her worldly possessions but her body. Each day a part of her, a part of us, is diminished by time and wear. It is so much easier to think your clothes are being stolen than to think your time is being stolen, fading in front of you.

“Some people who live here are 110!” I am going to will myself to stay alive!”

In less than a month, my mother will be 101 years old.

She sent the aide down to get her the missing broccoli from her dinner. After some thought she said:

“If I had it to do over, I don’t think I would have gotten married.”

s.kalish

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

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