Stuyvesant Town as it was being built, ca. 1947; our first home as a family
taken from 653 East 14th Street, “terrace” side.
photo: Jack Margulies

Today, Friday, was the day my mother was supposed to go “home,” to her Florida apartment.  My mother is going to be ninety-five years old and has lived in Florida since the early 1980’s. “Home” in my mind, is our apartment in Stuyvesant Town, in Lower Manhattan, which was surrendered years ago. Our memories are stored in the small closets and bedrooms that are now what is called “luxury” and rent for thousands per month. We left our childhoods, our first loves, our schools, our chalk games, our innocence within those walls, playgrounds, and chain fences. We are all left behind, what was.

For my mother, Florida became her exotic new land. She left with the urban nomads after selling her dark, polished, mahogany furniture, and the crystal. Her mother’s dishes are still in boxes in my basement along with the knick knacks and assorted and sundry stuff. She moved into a place that was light and white and airy and that had furnishings that looked cheap and gaudy compared to what she had in New York. The photo above from so many years ago is now but a figment of the imagination, a memory so old I question its existence.

For my mother, Florida is reality though her heart never left New York City. Forgive me, Floridians, but your health care facilities terrify me.  I have seen hell through my mother’s eyes.

My mother was ready to leave the rehab facility, where, I might add, she was not rehabilitated. Where she was not properly attended to, where she was not fed adequately, where she had to wait for over thirty minutes to be taken to the bathroom. She was not cared for properly until I paid for a private aide who looked after her above and beyond my expectations.

She was ready to go home at 10:00 am which was when we we were told Hospice would pick her up; she sat in her bed with her house key in her hand until 5:30 pm.

During this time I sat in my pajamas. All day and into the night. Fielding phone calls as I do on a daily basis, trying to untangle the web of Mercury-in-Retrograde miscommunications and resulting confusions.

• A minimum of ten calls to the assisted living to tell them when she was coming resulted in a grand delay because of a chain of events: a hospital bed had to be moved into the apartment and set up and it wouldn’t be done until after 5:00 pm.
• In addition I spoke to four people, first about saving my mother lunch and then as the time progressed, saving her dinner. It was not there when she arrived. More calls.
• An hour was spent on the phone as I was looking into Veteran’s benefits which my mother doesn’t yet qualify for. She has to go broke before she can qualify for anything.
• A minimum of ten calls back and forth with the aide: we each tried to get information to figure out the delay and what to do…thus …
• A minimum of five calls to the Vitas Hospice office
• A minimum of five calls with a Hospice nurse: my mother’s paperwork was missing at the facility and they were trying to blame it on my aide when the rehab was at fault.
• To further complicate matters, because we had dis-enrolled my mother from Humana and got her onto straight Medicare, prescriptions couldn’t be filled. After calling back and forth I was informed by the nurse that she would have to lay-out the money and I would have to reimburse her as my mother wasn’t in the system and had been getting her drugs mailed to her. These needed to be filled immediately. I cringe at how my Monday will look when I have to unravel all this.

It is now past 9:30 pm and I am dressed for bed because I never changed my clothes. I ate most of my dinner while on the phone. I sat down on the couch to turn off my head and the phone rang five times; I am beginning to hate call waiting. This is why I don’t sleep or eat well: I am a spring about to suddenly be sprung. Sometimes I take a phone off the hook when I try to sleep. I just can’t, can’t talk or think anymore. Except here, when I vent and document– it must be documented. It is Friday night and I have lost many Friday-days, and nights and days and nights by other names.

My mother is home. At her place. She was there with her aide, a Hospice nurse–who told me there would be a hospice nurse with her twenty-four hours, yet I am paying for two more shifts from the agency. I don’t quite get it, but suffice it to say the hospice people can train the agency people in what they must do and look for.

She is home. Sitting in her little cream leather recliner, all of what now must be eighty pounds of her. All of her that I do not recognize in my mind’s eye. All of her that I don’t care to recognize or behold. It’s too much for now. I have become her: overwhelmed, frustrated and depleted. But I will face another day and hopefully I will be able to exhale.

She will sleep tonight in her place. She will exhale because she is safe, because she is out of the hell hole that didn’t give a damn; some workers did, or tried to, but they were overworked and spread thin. Maybe they are tired of the leaky body fluids and bedpans and pain and the old, groaning, senile, wrinkled people–forgetting that one day they may end up in one of those beds; God help them.

We can all end up in one of those beds.

God help us.

[This series is linked: see “continued here.” Also, below the line there will be links for the previous post and the next.]

continued here

The series starts here