Honestly, folks, I do not know where to begin. The last few months began a period of tremendous change, all—encompassing change, overwhelming transitions and tasks. Phone call after phone call, fax after fax to deal with the end of my mother’s life and the final vestiges of what made it hers. So many calls that even with notes I could barely recall to whom I spoke and what was said. I was dealing with cognitive over-load. Things are still getting sorted out. Then, there is the apartment. You don’t really feel the impact of a loss until you enter their former apartment and no one is there. Then, you see the disarray of last moments. And the gut gets punched.

I met Candy at the apartment one day. She was miserable in her grief, trying to work that day in the building for another client. Facing cancer surgery. The social worker was with me getting bags and giving advice.

Before the funeral home picked my mom up, her gold bracelet was removed and put on her desk. The aide on duty taped it to a piece of paper. When Candy arrived, I said, “my mom called from heaven, she wants you to have this,” and I put the gold bracelet on Candy’s wrist: she was beside herself with joy. If anyone deserves a gold medal for caring for my mother it was Candy. She worked with her over four years, endured her oncoming dementia and paranoia in between the good moments. She was loyal and loving and thought of my mother as her mother. And as Candy had just lost her father to Alzheimer’s, and is facing so many health challenges, she needed something to feel validated, I decided. She got it.

Luckily I have good friends who step up and run to my aid. My friend (who is dealing with caretaking of her mother who has the same condition as my husband, who has five children and plenty of responsibility), and her daughter helped me pack up and bubble wrap things that need to be saved and dealt with another time. I cleaned out two dressers of so many clothes I couldn’t count: sweaters, tops, little jackets, scarves: the dainty mother stuff from so many decades. Old handbags, disintegrating fabrics.

There were bags of things that were tossed. I had no need to save anything but a pair of black suede gloves that seemingly could fit a child, that belonged to my Aunt Sarah who passed in her 40s in the 1960s. Obviously my mother’s keepsake, gloves I have seen her wear, tiny little gloves made in France.

There were meds and  vitamins that were near the bottom of their bottles, hidden in drawers under scarves to protect them from the  aides whom she believed were stealing them. Half used ointments and the makeup she insisted on wearing, that she’d order me to buy, and that I’d have sent from CVS and Target. My friends packed up the entire closet. All the clothes that were hanging that my mother was so proud of. They came from Macy’s, my mother’s version of Bergdorf Goodman. Her aqua dress that I think she wore to the Catskills hotel in the 60s and then maybe in the 80s for my sister’s wedding. A pleated, Grecian style number that no one would likely want or be able to fit into, that remained ensconced in a garment bag and might be exposed in a rummage sale. Sheets, towels. All the stuff I carted over, went to the stores for, later ordered online. Possibly fifteen bags were hauled down to my friend’s van and  subsequently picked by a church.

The furniture will be given to my friend’s daughter, she is soon to be married and loved it. We are moving it out, hopefully this Saturday.  My son and I and friend and her daughter, worked over two hours…eight man hours of work. The silver (plate) flatware from the 40s, I presume, was given to another friend’s daughter for a wedding present, still lovely, with the tiny rosebuds, held in place in a wooden chest that was decomposing.

I have more to claim and must go back for the reverse move-in of seven years ago, when we re-situated my mother back to NYC and this became her home, in Flushing, New York.

My husband now has an aide and was awarded, beginning in December, seven days, five hours a day of care. I am going to rearrange the hours so that he can have six hours from Monday to Friday and eliminate Sunday. I have to say I get anxious when I am alone, doing the aide’s job. She attends to his personal needs, from bathing to dressing. Today there was a bed wetting episode which really upset me (as we share a bed for now) so there was a lot of laundry, again. She takes him out in the wheelchair for walks to help stimulate his mind. She demands that he wrIte what he eats and if he goes to the bathroom, and she asks him to recall that information the next day. This is a far cry from the days of yore when “Mr.” would go to work carrying two briefcases and boxes of equipment to perform science lessons to middle schoolers for forty-four years.

And what makes husband anxious? That he missed a coupon sale from his favorite food catalog. He always had some judgment issues, but now it is more pronounced.  A melon I purchased wasn’t so great. He advised to use his method of finding a good melon: if it smells good, that is how it will taste. Unfortunately when you wear a mask to ward off the evils of a virus, you don’t remove it to smell a melon. He doesn’t understand how life has changed or how to navigate the changes. He is an observer with no ties to the world as it is now.

I have see some of the soft signs of change in the last year: his inability to figure out a tip in a restaurant, his failure to pay bills on time, disorganization of possessions and papers causing upset and frustration: His and mine. His brain was losing the ability to process information as he used to, to maintain what he could process: he looked confused. And I must look terrified. I cringe at some of his responses, at the time it takes for him to formulate a response, to retrieve information and express it. I am baffled by how long it takes for him to finish a meal. Today the aide brought him to the bakery at his request. He wanted a cherry pie. He came home with enough pie to feed an army. He could use it with the PT to lift weights. Pie, cherry pie, so much cherry pie. It’s a learning experience, he said, when I said it was a BIG pie.

Everything he used to do is now my job: Even with help I get exhausted.

My office is packed with at least eight containers full of files, for the last eight or nine years, reflecting my mother’s life. I am faced with revisiting those years on paper and letting go of what I can of her life in Florida, and the transition to New York, every bill I paid, every account I maintained. Notes on every cll I received in the middle of the night when she would sign herself into the hospital with high blood pressure likely due to a panic attack.

There are all kinds of papers; family papers with my dad’s info that got her survivor’s benefits from the Veteran’s Administration, and the like, will remain in a pared down version of her life in ephemera that intertwined with mine and became my full time job.

Now my husband has taken that spot: A full time life.

I write this as the aide has taken him out. I am at peace without responsibility. I can’t face more responsibility but I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. I have raised a child and now I deal again with pull-ups. With reminding and re-teaching. Some days are better than others. Where he used to have a lot to say, now he is quiet. He responds with shrugged shoulders and a toss of the hand. He wears his reading glasses instead of his regular glasses. But he still reads The New York Times daily, he plays Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. He tries. The classical music CD’s, thousands of them, remain untouched on shelves. Speaking of shelves, one came down and he promised to reinstall it. It has been over a week.

During the last weeks since my mom passed, lights have been going out all over the house and these new bulbs are a pain to change. Forget about that little G4 halogen in the fridge. Or the halogen atop the stairs: one false move and down one can go. I’ve been atop ladders and with my head in the fridge, I do it. Anything tech I have always done, fixing every problem, installing. Not too much different, but getting back to lights: recently I went over to my husband who was sitting in the “reading chair” in the living room. There are track lights above which have those new-fangled variety of long-life bulbs. I told my husband something that my son mentioned earlier and the light above my husband, began to flash.

It must have been my mom, pleased with the conversation.

 

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

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