Well, friends, I’ve had a short respite and here I am again. The commode still hasn’t arrived, but is finally, due to arrive tomorrow.

[Addendum: I just received a call from the health supplier who was to deliver the new commode:
The driver delivered it, said his job was not to install it, didn’t do it properly, hence my mother refused it. After months of waiting. To be continued.]

So, what’s the latest? Play-Doh. Actually, Play-Dough. Hang on, I’m going to explain.

I began receiving calls from my mother last week about theft. She has been talking about all kinds of theft for years. This time she accused an aide of stealing all her money. (This aide was away for two weeks, her mother died.) Mother sent her usual, most reliable aide down to the office cash a thirty-five dollar check and she returned with several rolls of quarters. This is her best aide who cleans and does laundry and needs the coins for the machines, however my mother withheld them as she decided, after inspecting the bank rolls, that they were wider than usual because they were stuffed with counterfeit coins; she insisted that the rolls from the bank were labelled Play-Dough and that they were silver-like coinage, what we used to call “slugs.” Where this ideation came from, I don’t know, however, when the brain misfires all kinds of strangeness ensues. What I heard my mother say was that the coins were made of Play-Doh, the colorful, sweet-smelling stuff we used to play with as kids. I was baffled.

If I challenge my mother with rational thought, she goes into fury mode, her eyes are still clear and blue-green and they stare through me. I forget that she can hardly see, that her vision has been taken from her leaving her in a constant state of terror, altering her perception and her reality.

She yells—”You don’t believe me!!!” And I know the correct thing to do when an elderly person or a person with dementia is expressing a strange ideation; you are supposed to feed it and agree.

My son was with me.

“Grandma, let me inspect the money.” And he looked through handfuls of coins and validated that she had a huge bag of quarters and then boxes of assorted coins, real coins in boxes that once held eye drops, and that the open rolls of coins from the bank which he dumped out into a plastic bag, were all legitimate. About forty dollars worth of coins.

My mother began to soften.

My mother is blind from macular degeneration, her world gets tinier on a daily basis. My mother gets tinier as well. Her body is shrinking along with her ability to process her world and to reason. Each time I see her I know it might be the last. Part of me wishes she go easily into the night and rest as she has lived her life, she has made it thus far, so very, very far, into a world that is now hostile and terrifying. She fights every day to stay alive one more day, she fights tooth (the few she has left) and nail.

If I let myself tap into my own words my heart will break.

I realize that she is saying that the money looks abnormal to her. That it doesn’t feel  the same, that she has been duped, that the world has gotten the better of her, that whatever she has left of her life is fake and scary and her vulnerability taps into a primitive feeling of abandonment. She breaks into sobs. “They are stealing my money! I have no more money! What will I do?? I called Rick (the agency boss) and told him and he was furious! He’ll call the thieves in and interview them, they have to be punished!”  My mother claims she confronted the aide who had been away for two weeks  and said, ” Why did you do that to me?”she told her she was better than that, that the money should be returned! The next day all my money was back, all brought  back, just like they did with my clothes.”

It dawned on me that the quarters she might have been able to catch a glimpse of with her miserable sight did look different: They are NOT the quarters she remembers. They are not the quarters of my childhood or of her working years. “Mom,” I said, this money IS different. The government (sounds official) issued new coin styles and each coin commemorates a different state on the back.”

My son validated, reinforced, helped me soothe the confusion that her misfiring-wiring created, helped me calm her down: If she calms down, I calm down. “Oh, the government issued new money! ” she was relieved if not joyous that there was some kind of truth from beyond that had eluded her, since 1999, when the state commemorative quarters were issued.

My mother is 102 years old, minus eleven days at the time of this writing. Before my son and I left her this evening I reassured her that “everything was alright, everything was OK.” I nodded to the newest aide who was with her for the day and who was banished to the hall until we finished our business, thinking “good luck and be strong, I hope you survive one another.”

My son and I walked down the hall to the elevator and I noted a bleach spot in the carpet; the bleach spot that appears each time the building puts down new carpet and some elderly person manages, soon after, to toddle to the laundry room and spill Clorox on the lovely new black carpet with the gold braid design.

And here’s the takeaway:

I felt that my mother was bleached away as well; she was fading, her color and pattern were progressively veiled from my memories leaving me back in childhood with a pocketful of dry, crumbling Play Dough that could never buy back what was.

Pink Play-Doh, the color of my heart.

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

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