No! Really? I haven’t posted about my mother for months? Maybe that is because so much wackiness and unpleasantness has been rearing its head. So, let me do what I think I do best: weave. I like to take life’s seemingly unrelated threads and weave them together, somehow. My stories evolve.

We are dealing with three threads:

• a sick, might I say, quite ill pet of fifteen+ years?
• a husband with a neurological issue who has recently come out of the hospital;
• a mother who is 101 years old.

Let’s get out the loom and see how it intertwines:  The husband has been under the auspices of a visiting physical therapist and visiting nurse. He is doing better, probably more like he was doing before, a bit more stable but still can be worrisome. Note to reader: it is important to stay in some kind of shape to ease aging. (I wrote this from my chair and will later retire to the couch.)

Aging sucks. I still have a migraine thing going on which I was hoping to get a handle on, then stress and BOOM, three days of episodes in a row and now the higher dose of meds and CBD couldn’t stem the tide. Just gotta roll with it, I guess, maybe the meds will catch up. Maybe things will calm down. (I just changed the title of this post. Again.)

My kitty. My beloved Caramel. The day after the husband came back from the hospital, two wonderful vet technicians from my veterinarians’ office, brought Caramel home from another stay at the vet. They brought me a cage, food, meds. The only way I can attempt to feed her is in this cage, like at the vet, at eye-level otherwise I am crawling around and busting my knees and knocking my head. She hides. Hiding means she feels lousy. When she doesn’t eat, I feel lousy.

During the last week or so, I was able to feed her, but she is so frail and feeble that she needs to start out with spoon feeding so she can smell what is under her nose. The food must be warmed. After eating she would walk a bit, always use a box, maybe end up in the living room in one of 3 beds or on a chair with me. That’s how I know she is doing better. During that week home, my neighbors who had Cliff, the last of the Mohican kittens who lived to about 15 maybe 16, put to sleep after osteosarcoma finally got him. EVERY one of the six offspring of Caramel, including Caramel, had some kind of cancer. I went through it with my boy kitties twice.

Caramel and the boys, Play and Ampersand, when they were little before I took them in. Both had bad cancers.
Our friend Cliff the cat next door crossed the rainbow bridge. He was from Caramel’s first litter.

Today was not a good day: Mellie had her thyroid meds and hasn’t had her cortisone. I was able to give her an appetite stimulant for whatever it is worth. She hasn’t eaten. The only thing I can get into her without a struggle is organic chicken broth. But I am never fast enough to figure out which cortisone prescription, liquid or pill, she might not detect in the soup. Her eye is running terribly, her mouth is distorted from tumors. But my vet & company say if she is eating it is too soon to let go. And just when I think she will never eat again and THIS is it, she eats. Please, cat, surprise me later.

My son went to my mother’s earlier. There is always a check to be paid, mail to be picked up. She had some extra hospital bed/chair liners that my vet tech thought would be a great idea to line the cage, instead of paper towels. They fit perfectly. But this is what I need you to know: My mother, who is about 4’9″, 84 pounds, who never leaves her room, who is a germaphobe and refuses to be around people, took a look at my son, who is a man, and informed him that she would be accompanying him to the car to push the package he was carrying on her walker. And she did. She took her grandson to the car with his package on her wheels and helped him push it. Then my son took her back upstairs to deposit her back into her apartment. I swear! There must be a planet in retrograde or something, something is going the hell on, because this can’t get wackier. And it was damn sweet. So here is the little ancient woman, the same one who gets paranoid, who accuses the aides of stealing and using too many paper towels, who was moved to face the CHUX package head-on and help. Holy crap. She left the room and it wasn’t for the purpose of getting her hair done in the downstairs salon.

So, here you have a woman from the “Greatest Generation” “helping” her Millenial grandson, son of Baby Boomers, schlep a package, while a kitty of about sixteen or more, who had two litters and was a single mom, has a cage lined with Greatest Generation Chux, because, she too, is old, very old and failing. And then there is the husband/father who the son will never un-see, unable to walk, and then collapsed against a bathroom door while the EMS try to lift him and pull on his clothes and cart him off.

We are all related, this “family” of elderly: This generation, that generation, human or pet, but I am the common denominator. I try my best to keep my sense of humor while I look at life flabbergasted and in disbelief. How did we reach this age? How did this happen, how did all of this happen? Time pushes us forward into this soft pile of old-person-bed-lining CHUX; time tries to cushion the blow of reality.

The reality is, at some point, it all ends and you have to let go.

PS on this day, a total non-sequitur: Evan had another puzzle published, this one in The New York Daily News.

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

The previous post is here

The next post is here