Pablo Picasso, Black Jug and Skull, 1946

I hadn’t spoken to my mother in a few days; I was too overwhelmed, too drained and too secure in the fantasy that she was improving. It wouldn’t have made much of a difference; had I kept calling each day I would have lapsed into a state of sadness. So let me do that now. Except to say that I feel nothing. I am standing on the edge of the cliff of depression, somewhere in a world that has changed so drastically that I don’t recognize it. Nor do I recognize myself. I see the tree outside my window. It lost its pink blossoms and now is developing burgundy leaves: It is going on with its life, I, am stuck.

This morning, the sanitation men came and did their jobs, hauling away people’s detritus and tossing their bags into the truck…included in the pick-up was whatever my neighbors from a few doors down, threw out: The young father who lives there is still recovering from the Corona Virus: Life goes on. In a repressed state of confusion, fear, the kind that makes you bite your lip and pull it to shreds. Something I have take to doing.

My mother has a “newish” aide, who, unlike the previous one, doesn’t call to text me. I didn’t know she was unable to do the laundry because my mother refuses to give her the money, the coins she called, “PlayDough,” a month before. I didn’t know my mother refuses to change her clothes or to allow the bedding to be changed. I didn’t know my mother was still coughing violently, a congested cough with no other symptoms: I thought things were a bit better. That was my choice of illusion. I told my mother that she had to take the antibiotic; it seems she hid it or threw it away. When I called earlier, she could hardly speak. Her articulation was progressively deteriorating, slurred, devoured by an unrecognizable voice. When the aide told me she was just drinking tea, if that, but couldn’t keep the Ensure down, that she was “coughing it up,” I knew I had to alert the doctor. But first, I spoke to my mother;

“You have to take the antibiotic.”

“There is an antibiotic in the cough medicine,” doctor-mother declared.

“No, there isn’t,” I countered.

“I am doing my best to stay alive.” She tried to disengage but didn’t press the off button on the phone. “Nazireen, ” I called to the aide, “the phone is still on.” End of call.

I called back and told my mother that the laundry had to be done and to give Nazireen the money. I heard a vague, “OK.”

I called the doctor and spoke to his lovely receptionist. I informed her that my mother was unintelligible, weak and not eating or drinking. To please send the doctor up to see her, and then to call me. I thought she was ready to cry.

The doctor called.

He said from his experience she would likely pass in a few days. That she wasn’t in pain or uncomfortable. She was ready to go. Something we both knew was on the way: an ending.

I asked for instructions. Who to call, to inform: The administration: They are NOT to call 911, instead, the doctor must be called, he would sign off on THE certificate. The funeral home.

I knew for years this time was coming, but it fooled me over and over: My mother survived pneumonia so many times. Her spirit never gave in. When she was in Florida, alone, in and out of hospitals, she never gave up. She had fallen several times, had a fractured pelvis, a fractured arm. She survived. She’d get panic attacks and would call an ambulance with her racing heart and enraged blood pressure, and scoop up her little black pocket book with the health cards and a tote bag with her hospital stuff. She’d sign herself in. She was in her 80s. Then her 90s. Fiercely independent. On a blood pressure pill and a thyroid pill.

The worst thing a child of any age has to deal with is the call in the middle of the night. I’ve lived through this many times, it is the most horrendous. “Your mother was taken to the hospital. She fell and broke her___(arm, pelvis—you, dear reader can fill in the blank.) I was over a thousand miles away in NYC, my mother’s hometown, orchestrating calls with agencies day and night for years, giving in to my own stress. becoming ill myself, choking on my own fears and anxiety, compromising my own existence.

There are nights I fear going to sleep. I have the phone next to my bed turned off and still my mind plays its song in my head, that ringing, that demand for attention. For years, each time the phone rang, I would cringe. Most of the time since we moved her back to New York, she would be at the other end of the line,  “Hi, it’s mommy, how is everyone?” But, many times it was, “listen, carefully I have something to tell you: and a dramatic play would be staged with words and intonation, she  would recite a catastrophic ideation of how an aide was stealing from her, staring at her, endangering her. Or that there was smoke in the room, or that her clothes were wet in her drawers because the aide was pouring water on them, or that people were absconding with her things from Macy’s, the clothes that she had for years, in sizes so small you’d think they belonged to a child; clothes she valued so highly, that meant so much to her, that she was so proud of owning that you would think she got them at Bergdorf’s.

Over the last couple of years, as her world shrank, you’d see her in the same outfits again and again. With less and less adornments. Her drawers would be neatly lined with her sweaters and tops. Her coins would be hidden under a scarf. The new sandals bought years ago in Florida could still be found next to her bed in a drawer. Saved.

I doubt she has had her hair done in weeks. Having perfectly coiffed hair was very important to her. You knew how the theater of her life would play out the scene: she’d come on stage, to the center, and ask, “how do I look, do I look too bad?”

I suppose they closed the little hair studio in the building. I will never forgive the woman who worked there for dying my mother’s hair black. Never. My mother was a young blonde who morphed to brown, then to red for most of the years I knew her, and the color suited her spitfire spirit. But now, it should have been gray. Her hair should have been gray. It should have been old-mother-gray.

While on hospice in Florida, someone stole the gold hoop earrings I had brought back from Italy years ago. People just helped themselves. I wonder. One “boyfriend” who was in her life, one of her three platonic relationships with men after my father died in 1991, I don’t know which one, gave her a watch. Not an expensive one but a watch. And then there was a gold bracelet with those “hugs and kisses,” xoxo that were big at the time. She took her wedding and engagement rings off long ago, but never removed that bracelet.

I wonder if I will see it again.

I wonder if I will see her again. I hope she’ll be wearing those black high heels—most probably what gave her horrific bunions, and the swing coat. I hope she’ll be carrying those two usual shopping bags of food she’d pick up on her way home from work, stopping at D’Agostino’s. She’d walk in the door at 6:00 pm and start cooking. After working all day, and walking about a mile in those shoes, she’d use the broiler and the pressure cooker. By 6:30 we’d be eating. And she just might be typing briefs for the lawyer on East 14th Street into the night.

I hope she has an easy transition, out of this little battered body that has served her well because she served it well over the years, watching her diet and what she put into herself. Keeping her treatments natural.

I hope she finds all the people she’s missed, mainly her dad who meant the world to her, and the siblings she hasn’t seen for years. My mother is the last of the four, and was the sickest of the bunch. Maybe she would find my dad and there would finally be peace and calm between them. She would be safe from viruses and macular degeneration. She would be whole. She’d be wearing that fancy aqua colored dress she has in a garment bag. The one she has worn to weddings—maybe even my first and second. Maybe to my sister’s. I remember she wore it one night while in the Catskills, visiting us at Camp Sunrise in Ellenville, staying down the road at that crappy little Woodbine Hotel. That must have been in the mid 60s. Could she have the dress that long?

I hope that when she goes, she is wearing that dress and doing what she always loved to do and hasn’t in years: DANCE. I hope my youthful dad picks her up; she’d be blonde, she’d change into a white satin dress, he’d give her a gardenia corsage and off they’d fly off to The Copa.

I hope they dance for an eternal night.

Dad and Mom maybe in their 40’s

To be continued…as of this late afternoon she was taken to the ER, we don’t know who called the ambulance. She has not passed.

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

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