Part of the story are the reflections of others. I am not there to see what is really going on. But I hear. I hear through the spoken and written word. I might as well be in another country. I am a coward. Now that visiting is permitted for a short time, two at a time, I still refrain. I can’t handle it. I can’t handle the heat, the summer, the ghastly threatening virus. I can’t handle my fatigue that always controls me. Instead, I think about how I am going to disband my mother’s apartment. What is important to take and what will be given, what can be donated. There are some things that are of value, from my childhood. I don’t even know if I could bear to touch them. Here I am focusing on what can be controlled.

My mother’s life has a life of its own.

So I keep the notes, the conversations. The negativity enables me to cope: Negativity helps me to fool myself into thinking that it will be easy to let go when the time comes.

Thursday

Hi, Susie, I don’t want to bother uI know u have alot to do it’s been nights she is not sleeping she keeping on trying to get out of bed the doctor scare to keep raising her pills and because of her age.

Yesterday she sleep most of the day today she sleep on and off
Right now she asking me what to tell her boss.

She said she dream a lady name is Rose and the lady want to hit her because she sneeze and cough.

GM Susie. She did not sleep all night 5am she sleep I wake her to eat breakfast and she went back to sleep.

All night she talking.
I’m up I can’t sleep during the day. She is snoring. She said she is tired.

Friday, 2:43 am

Hi Susie since 11 oclock your mom is talking and screaming all night.
The time is now 243

Friday, 9:22 am

She keep screaming and she was calling for Jack (My father, dead since 1991) and papa and another man and two woman she was talking to I didn’t know what to do I thought she was dreaming I tried to wake her and she started to scream and say Rose want to beat her.

[I ask, who is Rose?]

She went to sleep 530 I wake her up and clean her and feed her 7 am

She drink juice and Ensure she do not want to drink water.

There you have a sampling of the last five days’ bounty of night terrors, hallucinations, wrecked sleep cycles. When I think about it, my mother’s strange thoughts and hallucinations remind me of those of children who have anxieties, fears, terrors.
She is aging in reverse.

Perhaps due to pending separation anxiety. Perhaps based on The Boogy Man. Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Halloween costumes. Childhood horror story replays, like the time my mother, when a little girl, was entering her building in Brooklyn (396 East 96th Street?) and was grabbed and pulled by a man who lived in the basement. He tried to drag her into his apartment.
She fought and got away. Or maybe the horrors are based on memories of the time she worked at The Brooklyn Army Base and was hit and knocked down by a runaway truck driven by a kid soldier. Everything comes out at night: Every fear, every compulsive rehashing of events that we thought we could have done better or differently or controled. Everything we wanted to change. Everyone we’ve longed for. Every regret. Every failure. They all become larger than life in the dark and they loom, threatening.

And then, there is life, just life, that we see ebbing from our grasp, that we feel fading. We call upon those from the past to help us, the ghosts of what once was, because we know it is too much for us, so puny are we. Death looms from the basement and grabs the wrist, drags us. The fight ensues. Some get away intact. But the mind hangs on and remembers.

The mind that recalls a childhood tonsillectomy with all the neighborhood kids, the Pitkin Movie Theater and how the organ was played within, the end of World War II and how everyone danced in the street. The marriage. Children. The summer in a ramshackle bungalow in Coney Island. It all floats to the top, mixed and matched with other memories, intertwined and sometimes twisted:

It’s the memories that survive.

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

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