At 10:23 AM the phone rang; the caller ID was that of my mother. I had a choice: answer the phone or not. If I choose not, I hang on every ring and listen to the message being poured into the answering machine, it will go on for two minutes, then get cut off;  I will sit there ruminating on what I’ve heard. It will haunt me. If I answer, I pay the price immediately.

I paid the price immediately.

Most of the time when my other calls, there is an air of urgency with underlying fear, if not terror. And, most of the time there is a complaint, about the aide. Or the food, or the dining room staff, or something. She will find the something.There are four aides who rotate and invariably the ones who come on Thursday and Friday are replaced due to a hail of negative input that rains down on the agency supervisor. By my mother.

There is a new Thursday-Friday aide, new to my mother and new to the building. So what is it this time?

“The woman is chewing on something, she says it’s a mint, and it makes smoke. I can see the smoke reflected in the mirror of my curio cabinet. And the smoke smells like fish.”

Friends, if you know the elderly and have some experience with them, chances are you’ve been told that you have to humor their ideations, tell them, “well, that’s just awful!” “Oh I feel for you!” “Yes, yes, yes! Oh no, no, no!” That’s the drill. But something in me gets so angry and I refuse to let the demented confusions of a 101 year old mind get the better of me, I refuse to play that game. I know there is something within my mother’s thought processes that still harbor some semblance of rational-emotive thought. This is a woman who has all of her phone numbers memorized, who can tell you the names of all of her elementary school teachers, who will give you a fast and furious review of last night’s dinner, who will still try to read the contraindications of every prescribed medicine with her “spy glass,” who spent most of her hours doing crossword puzzles up until her vision got much worse; this was a woman who could.

I see my mother as a 40-some odd year old answering her ringing phone. It is her mother, my grandmother, they begin a conversation in Yiddish, I hear my grandmother through the receiver
Hera Monsa!, (listen to this story!) She would call my mother and complain that there was a motor running in the building. Hera Monsa! But was there really a motor? Was that the sound of atherosclerosis? Old age? Dementia?

Now it was my turn, the weird ideation baton of old age had been passed.

What I said to my mother was thus: you have migraine syndrome like I do (sounds better than dementia)…
I don’t have a headache!
You don’t have to have a headache, I know, I have this too: you are having an olfactory hallucination:
Oh, there is such a thing?
Yes, I get them, I smell dad’s cigar or perfume or other stuff. And as for the smoke in the room, there is no smoke, there is no fire. There is NO fish.
You also have macular degeneration and a big cataract. If you look at light it will be hazy, you will think it is smoke. No one is cooking. There is no smoke.
But the yesterday the firemen were in the building and there was a fire, someone was frying fish and the hallway smelled of fish and smoke.
Mom, you told me that yeas ago you lost your sense of smell.
I smell fish!
There is no smoke, no fish.

She thought for a moment and made a connection. Somehow I lifted a burden, from her and from myself, and from the aide who was no longer guilty of setting a smoking-fish-fire by chewing on a mint. I blew away the hallucinations, both visual and olfactory. I brought reason to unreason. The aide no longer seemed to be evil or wrongdoing. In fact, it was admitted that she does a good job. In fact.

Thanks for letting me vent, I need to vent, she said.

To which I answered, I need to vent, too.

But I never will.

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

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