Happy July 4th, friends, it’s been a while and time for an uplifting report during these strange times of
pandem-onium.

I have backed off and away from communicating with my mother as often as I had, or thought I had: it was just too much. For me. I hadn’t spoken to her for over a week; no one called me. I believe the doctor has found the best medicine for my mother. It has calmed her. She is acting more “normal.” There is no more crazy agitation, no more screaming. There is gratitude: “I have the best nurse ever!”

It is amazing what medication can do, how a pill can turn the brain around and tweak it, make it function acceptably;  a tiny bit of a drug can smash through psychosis (likely brought on by Covid: see previous blog).

Aide #2 sounded relieved: My mother was cooperative and better oriented. Hence, I was relieved. Very relieved.

It is the 4th of July and the country, if not the world, has been looking back, looking forward, reassessing, evaluating, wondering. This will be a year we all remember, an exceptional year, not a happy one, but a very startling and scary one. A real one.

In today’s call I said to my mother: Mom, I remember when I was three or four years old. We went to Brooklyn, we were with Uncle Irving, we saw fireworks. It must have been Coney Island. She remembered and said: he used to come to visit he’d be on the couch and I’d pet his head.

Pet his head?

“Ma, I’m talking about Uncle Irving.”

“Yes, Uncle Irving. He had a dog. He’d bring the dog to visit. He had a hard time  in the war. The army gave him a seeing-eye dog.”

And I’m thinking. A seeing eye dog for a man who drove to Manhattan to visit from Brooklyn?

I don’t think the army gave Uncle Irving a seeing eye dog. But, if this memory makes my mother happy, let it be. Uncle Irving, however it happened, had a dog.

Just like the memory of being a little child and going to Coney Island to see fireworks with my two young parents makes me happy. I remember looking up and the spectacle was so large that, as the works descended and burned out, they appeared to be an inch away from my face. I felt the excitement and the terror at the perception of being engulfed by the burning colors. I could feel the vibration of the blasts in my gut. People were dwarfed by the colored, smoky sky; they became silhouettes against the lights that took over.

It was July 4th in the early 1950s. It was the beginning of my life. My parents had survived the flu pandemic of 1918 in their early childhoods. They went on to survive the Great Depression, They made it through the second World War, and actually, they were brushed by the first World War as well.

They survived.

My years of survival were just beginning.

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

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