Notes from conversations: Ideations of a mind crossing over.

I was in the movies. I was just on TV.

I can’t come out of my little box with my coverlets. (I bought bolsters to corral her in bed as she constantly tries to get out)

I can sing.

I loved to dance.

When I love it so much I think of dad. We loved to dance.

Mother was with a group of people in the street. She was so tired she made a sigh and she fell down.

I feel peculiar.

I love her, she’s a wonderful woman, our mother.

She wanted to buy, from the bakery, is it?

We must go out together.

I just came home for supper.

My mother loves to talk and at least two days of the week she is up all night having conversations.

I told you in my last post about my “winning” my bid for 2-12 hour shifts of aides. Let me bring you up-to-date:

Nothing has happened. Nothing has changed. No one knows anything. I’ve been calling the managed long term care as well as the agency that supplies the aides. Either no answer, no response to messages, no, no, no. Limbo, still. And, now I have anxiety: you see, with 24-hour care there are two aides spitting the seek. With 12-hour shifts they will have to bring in two more people. Two strangers for several days. This rattles me and is tipping the boat.

 

 

Grandma Sophie

When I called my mother earlier and she spoke about “our mother,” who is her mother, when I heard the disorientation, when I heard her ask where I’ve been, when I heard that she was talking to my father and one of her sisters, a twin, long since gone, when I heard her say she hoped that mother didn’t use up all the money, when I heard this and more the old agitation set in.

Is this what life is like in this strange Universe, when one floats beyond one’s body and lives between realms, when one can see and hear and be part of the past within oneself, when the outside world doesn’t matter?

For my mother to say: “We must go out together,” it hit a nerve. I can probably count the times we went out together, during our lifetimes, on one hand. It was something I always wished for but never had: A theater mother, a shopping mother, a lunch mother.

She was a work mother. A Thanksgiving mother.

And then a move-to-Florida mother.

Not even when I moved her back to New York City did we ever go anywhere but to a doctor. She was never any of those mothers I had hoped for: She never wanted to go out.  In fact, I was always the mother, taking care of things, taking charge. “Our mother,” she says. That would be my grandmother, but, now my mother has become my sister. We are a muddled puddle of confused roles and movie clips that make no sense.

So, who am I?

“Where are you, I didn’t see you?”
“I am home, I am almost always home!” I say.
“No kidding!”

I have trouble understanding what she is talking about. I am wound up in her long threads of thoughts and distorted synapses and they are strangling me, twisting around my throat and I can barely speak. I tell her I can’t hear her and she calls the aide and hands the phone to her. She says she is talking to someone named “T.”

The aide and I speak and try to make sense of the situation, all that is going on or that isn’t. My mother continues to babble in the background. She is holding court, looking toward the door and going on and on. Candy and I continue and my mother demands that Candy get off the phone and sit down.

Twelve people in the building have died, and five of them were on my mother’s floor. Three of her immediate neighbors are gone. Covid.

I tell my mother that her mother’s name is “Sophie.” She asks about her and where she is.

“She’s fine,” I say, she’s with grandpa Sam.

 

 

📌The 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