My previous blog ended on a mortifying note; I never envisioned my mother in the throes of a sexual encounter, least not with my father, and it is an event that can leave one laughing and crying at the same time.

I have thought my mother was near death many, many times in our lives. I am amazed at how strong she is and how she manages to sneak out of the grasp of the Grim Reaper over and over again. Somewhere in this series of blogs I have said that my mother’s motto was “life can turn on a dime.” These rapid switchovers have knocked me off balance again and again. Over the last couple of weeks four women I know on facebook lost their mothers. It seemed like an epidemic of matricide, like it was a mass-loss of elderly mothers and I was sure that my mother would be included.

This is what happened earlier today: I was back on the roller coaster making an ascent, because my mother told the aide my phone number and asked her to call me. Yes, my mother recalled my number, the aide had us on speaker and there was my mother with her voice down an octave from the strange high-pitched childlike voice I heard wailing in pain over the weekend.

She went on. And on. For seventeen minutes, non-stop. She was like Dorothy sitting up in bed after she woke up with that bump on hr head and telling Aunty Em and the gang about her strange and far-off trip to a different land. She reported so many ideations I fear I can’t recall them all, but this much I heard: she was told she was dead and then she was told she was not. She was told the date of her death, something about an “02.” (She is 102, and perhaps she got those numbers from her age, and perhaps when she says she was born in 1502 her mind jumbled the wacky ideations, and perhaps she was not fully conscious.)  People have told me that before death there are strange brain jumbles, and that it is common for people to hold conversations with lost loved ones.

She was told she was going home. I suspect by the hospital staff and I suspect she was delirious. The words she heard melded with dreams and permeated her consciousness; she didn’t know where home was. In a dream state, the feeling of being lost is one of the most awful. She said she was put on an airplane. Might she have gone into the sky? She opened her eyes and saw her apartment with her paintings on the walls. And then talk of the virus and how she was on a gondola with my father and the streets were all broken and the virus could live in the water.

She has been eating soup, a lot of soup. She had mushroom barley soup and then she had tomato soup. And she loves applesauce! And V-8 Juice. Where could she get more V-8 juice, would John the pharmacist have it? I am thinking, a week or two ago she was in bed exhausted, unable to eat, unable to taste.

She was sick, she must have been very sick! And her feet looked big! And she must have been in Florida when her father died and he came out of the wall to wave to her! (She has told this story so many times since the first time, about two years ago. She was not in Florida, she was in Stuyvesant Town, in NYC and I was six months old when her father died, so that ideation/memory/fantasy/memory took place in a Stuyvesant Town apartment in the late 1940s, not in Florida in the mid 1980s.) Whenever my mother talks about her father, she weeps inconsolably, uncontrollably. It always gets to me, and I am always so envious, so jealous that I did not have a dad with whom I had that kind of loving relationship. I have heard the stories about her father so many times and each time seems to affect her more and more.

I told my mother she would not only see her father again but all the people she missed. She hoped so. I asked her how it was with an aide sleeping there at night and rather than rant about her privacy and not needing anyone, she validated that it was a good idea because she was always afraid at night, fearful of going to the bathroom alone, fearful of being alone, period. Loneliness is a horrible place for the elderly, or for anyone who craves other humans. My mother has isolated herself over the years, wrapped in a cocoon of fears and anxieties to the point that she feared leaving her apartment lest she hang around people who might be sick, and the surprise was that she got sick from an aide who was taking care of her in her apartment.

One of the first things my mother asked was, “How is everybody, I was so worried?” I always marvel at that, for even though she can be self-involved and narcissistic, there is, within, the ability to step away from herself and go back to being a parent, all these years later.

I don’t remember what it was, one of the wacky dreams or ideations that struck her so funny, something about seeing her size 5 feet as being enormous, but she laughed and laughed and laughed some more. I was so spun around by this conversation, the nonstop chatter, the virtual coming back from the dead, the ability to find some joy, I didn’t know what to do with it. I have buried my mother mentally so many times, and I have resurrected her so many times, that like her, I sometimes question if I am dreaming. I tell myself I will handle the loss but sometimes I find myself choking up. This has been my job for over ten years. So many times I have thought that she couldn’t be my mother: We are so different.

On this day, going home meant to her apartment. The one I rented for her in a senior building seven years ago, when we moved her back to NYC after coming off hospice and having had pneumonia. Her trip to the end of her life was cancelled; she was booted off the plane, her ticket and stamped death certificate were torn up and she was sent back; all the complaints about the food served in the building have disappeared and now she is in love with something as simple as soup and applesauce. Her brain must have been starved and now she is hungry all the time, asking for something to eat, being spoon-fed like a baby. The aide she accused of stealing so many times is now “so nice” to her. She calls her Mama.

The brain is an enigma.

This morning I solved an issue over medication. My mother used to be able to keep track of her meds and take them herself. She can no longer. The aide is not allowed to open a bottle and give her a pill, but if the pharmacist individually wraps them, the aide can open that and hand it to her. That’s the new normal.

The last thing that needs to be solved is the full time care. Another waiting game and pleading in my head for that funding. Please send your best positive energy.

If Dorothy can come back from Oz, we can do this.

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 coming