The time has come. Months have gone by filled with weeks of anxiety, days of questions, hours of confusion, minutes of apprehension, and thousands of seconds of stress.

My mother’s apartment in the senior housing building is in the process of being set up with temporary furniture. I spent the day there with my son, two trips with carloads of bags and equipment. Flashlights, bath chairs, wheelchairs, tissues, bedding, stuff and more stuff. Had keys made, bought extension cords, foraged for extra potholders and kitchen towels. We did what we could but the cable/phone still isn’t working so thankfully a worker is being sent over tomorrow. I’ll be on my way to the airport. Hopefully, after a pleasant flight my mother and her aide will come off the plane. My mother hasn’t been in New York City since the 1980’s. Her aide hasn’t been here since the 1970’s. They are both in for a surprise. It is less gritty, more expensive, low on the crime scale, clean, stuffed with food and culture.

It’s hard for me to believe that my mother is going to be returning to her home town. That she survived a fall, a broken bone, pneumonia. That she was seventy pounds and on Hospice care. That she put on some weight and still cares about her hair and make-up. That, quite frankly, she will be debarking from a plane by wheelchair and not in a box.

It will be a new life, full circle, back to the future, a return to New York, for however long it lasts. And we just might have Thanksgiving together for the first time since the early 1980’s.

We are half-way through the countdown.

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

The series starts here

continued here