Written over several days.

I wish this post would just write itself; right itself. I’ve been writing it in my head for days and have been distracted, tired, unable to sit down and plug away. It is a rainy Monday morning and the house is quiet, empty, except for me and the humming, sloshing of the dishwasher, downstairs, a calming sound of presence and work taking place. Something in my house is doing its job and now it is my turn.

My mother is gone thirty-eight days. That is a permanent gone.

My husband is gone fifteen days. That is a semi-permanent gone: But I am not even sure of that.

My mother will never return. My husband might return. There is no sense at this time of what his future will be in the rehab facility. He wants to come home but I can’t take care of him. The staff have not had their discharge meeting and nothing happens until there is a plan. To wit, later in the day I called to check-in and learned he had two massive bathroom accidents in bed. He is not allowed to walk unassisted and is taken to the bathroom for showers, etc. in a wheel chair. The rest, I suppose is done the way toddlers do it. (I am trying to be kind here). He insists that no one comes when he “rings” the red button. That the Ukrainian guy in the next bed has music piped into the room and it is driving him nuts. He cursed the same old view of the ceiling. He has lost his sense of time. True, some of this might be due to the disorientation to a relatively new place, but he is becoming agitated and angry. I can’t blame him: his entire life has been reduced to a strange bed, diapers and another man’s iPhone music.

He is not the person I knew: strong in mind and body and constantly reading. Now he “can’t” read because “there isn’t a continuous block of time in which he can concentrate.” I am still trying to figure out that statement  in the scheme of things. No blocks of time? He confuses lunch and dinner, timing, based on the light from the window. He thinks his roommate gets calls in the middle of the night.

I was living, for months, years, in a time zone that never gave me respite. Now, I live in a place of being present and sometimes in fantasy-land. I am alone. I imagine perfection, normalcy, the way things were. Though imperfect, the ever changing perfection, has reduced us both.  Then something shakes me awake and I am in a place of how? How will I do this? How did this happen? A place of what-if and where will this all end up? I mourned my mother long before she left. I have been mourning my husband for about ten years, possibly more, when I began to suspect something was different.

 

 

 

 

 

My mother is gone thirty-eight days. She left behind a legacy of odds and ends, wall hangings, tchotchkes—values unknown, and the equivalent of about one hundred+ pounds of paper that I generated since 2012 when I began caregiving from afar, while she was in Florida. Add to that, paper; every time I visited, there was more waiting for me: Receipts for deliveries, notices, mail. She never believed me when I told her that her life was taking over my room. It was unimaginable to her, and as long as her apartment was tidy and uncluttered, she was happy. I’ve known that since I was little: Clutter couldn’t live in my mother’s house, but it took over mine. Her clutter.

The paper, possibly the equivalent of a small forest, resided in plastic bins, about six of them, in my small office. As one bin filled to capacity, that bin became the base for another bin. They crowded my room, my space, my thoughts, my life. How it began: They were filled with brochures for the apartment in an assisted living building in Florida which started out wonderful and soon became a rodent infested hell-hole. Every bill I paid from that time on, every check I wrote, every bank memo and statement, rent payment, correspondence with agencies, care takers, hospitals, Hospice, (She had been on that too, in Florida); every notation: about bills, phone calls. Every fax I sent. Every note I took on every conversation…

Records of the furniture I bought, and of my friend Joanne’s magnificent help in the purchases, she was my right arm in Florida. Every fight I had with insurance companies: Long term care. Managed Long Term Care. Building managers.

I watched her bank accounts dwindle from a small  legacy to poverty as I wrote checks for aides to stay with her. $200/day for care doesn’t go far. Eventually she made use of her long term care policy. By the time she needed it, it only covered three hours/day, for three years. It ran out long before she did.

I found her the apartment in New York, purchased her household necessities, paid her rent. Visited, inspected, delivered, shopped. And I was  reminded, that for years, I didn’t eat or sleep well seeing the last of her money decline as she hung on to life and said she was content. I feared I would have to dip in to my own social security.

 

I went through every folder in two days, hundreds of folders holding thousands of papers. I purged them of information that could lead to one of the few active accounts that would soon be permanently closed. I shredded. For hours. Piles of statements which had both our names. I shredded until the little machine was overflowing. I shredded until sentences shrank, words disappeared, letters remained. I shredded until the machine was overheated and jammed, over and over. One page at a time. Sometimes two or three pages but that always ended in catastrophe; an hour of needed cool-down, cleaning and picking shreds out of metal teeth. I did this for almost two entire days, I was driven, I wanted my space back and I wanted my mind back. I wanted her out. I shredded until my hands were bleeding from paper cuts and my back was broken from carrying and bending.

There were scraps of little notes she wrote to herself; how she felt, her toothache, all the details, what she did and how she eventually ended up on an antibiotic and her “cells salts.” (The stuff she found in a London apothecary in the seventies and swore by ever since.)

I found my application for her Veteran’s benefits: Had she known about this years before  and been proactive, she would have had more in the bank and saved me hours on the phone and filling out applications. There was my father’s discharge papers, their religious marriage document from 1944. Initially I couldn’t find these: I panicked. I had taken them from the plastic bin and put them in a special folder. Hence, in my fear that they were lost, so I dumped out every bag of folders I had prepped to get rid of and began again, page by page, just in case I missed something.  Once I began cleaning out the area where the bins resided for years, I found the red folder in which the valuable ephemera had been placed. So much for my memory. It was overworked and overwhelmed. But I didn’t fail myself.

In the process of this task which proceeded faster than I expected, I wrenched every joint on my left side. Isn’t the left side the “female side”? Shoulder, elbow, knee were all compromised and exhausted from lugging bags that were about fifteen pounds each, climbing up and down stairs with boxes, dragging bags to the back of the house to the shredder and then back to the front.

In addition, because my husband is not here, I dumped a ton of hoarded papers that I had been after him to ditch for at least thirty years. This was just the beginning. The cabinetry over the desk was covered with ancient detritus: articles, names, numbers, all collecting dirt, dust. Boxes of articles that had to be saved for the future which we all know would never be looked at again. And, would never be looked out again because with that kind of volume you couldn’t find what you were looking for if you wanted to. The file cabinets were a mess: he wasn’t paying bills, he wasn’t filing important papers, he was throwing things into the drawers on top of the old files. It was reflective of his disorganized brain. It is reflective of a sad situation.

This is what happens when the mind is cluttered and rarely rests: One makes Nespresso coffee without a cup. One roasts chestnuts in the microwave, gets distracted, and starts a smoke storm unlike I have ever seen: billows of white steamy, acrid smoke enveloped my entire house, a veritable haboob without the sand. It took days of running an air purifier (readout: SEVERE) and cleaning to begin to rid the odor that  lurked in corners like the Seinfeld episode with the stinky car.

I still don’t understand why the smoke alarm didn’t go off.

November was once my favorite month, but this past November was the strangest, the scariest, the most ragged and painful in events.

I have shredded it in efficacy, diminishing the toxicity of the memories, the work, the stress, the sadness that drowned me for years.

A November in shreds in a year that changed everything.

 

 

 

 

 

Photos: iPhone 11 Pro Max
S. Kalish

 

 

 

 

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

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