…That I used to know…

I walked to the local market to pick up a few things, wearing a mask, carrying a tote with wipes, gloves.

The world has changed. I wandered the store, picked up what I needed and got on a line that crept down an aisle toward check-out, a line formed by masked, evenly-spaced beads on a necklace. It was slow.

Then, Goyte’s song came on: Just Somebody That I Used to Know. There I was grooving to it by the liquid soap, singing along, resonating with it. What the heck: I was wearing a mask like on one of those musical masked-singer shows. Singing next to the fabric softener, a masked man six feet behind me.

And then I thought: this is a song about the current state of the unrecognizable world, a world that abandoned us in contempt and disgust for what we’ve done to it.

This is a song about my mother who in some ways has abandoned reality to old age, living in a world of tangled thoughts. She is in fact, physically unrecognizable, but more so emotionally different. Was she secretly like this in her early years, hiding intermittent insanity, or is this a thing with the elderly, do they all lose their “filters”?

She had it out for one of the aides who she insisted was bringing men into the room to sleep with. I purchased a privacy screen to give visual separation between the bed and the daybed: my mother insisted that men were hiding behind the screen, that they were under the aide’s bed. That she was kissing them in the dark corners of the room. She called the aide a slut, a whore. She threw the aide out of the room.

She made the aide cry.

She told the hospice nurse who visits weekly, about this aide and she was so convincing that the nurse called me in alarm, not about my mother, but about the aide’s alleged behavior. I had to break it to her gently: my mother was a good story teller.

That evening, a new medication was to be tried to help her sleep and to stop the hallucinations. She spit it out; but, it seems enough of it went down and infiltrated her system to not only help her sleep, but to sort through her neurons the following day and knock some reality into her. It worked so well that the aide who was verbally assaulted by my eighty-pound mother, had a good day. And then another good day. And was actually happy to be at work.

She said my mother was acting normally.

But what is normal? Were these horrible ideations lurking within all this time, only to emerge through cracks that were forming in her psyche, here, then there, and all over, like contagion?

Who was this person who had fallen prey to aging and its short mental circuits? Who let curses and fury spill forth and out, enough to wound another person? Where did all the anger come from, spewing like burning lava? Moreover, how can a person who is filled with fire ever rest?

It seems that this medication has extinguished the flames; she sleeps more now, on and off during the day. Where she had the television blaring all day she now refuses to have it on, she wants quiet. She can’t leave her bed, she is and probably will be, until the end, physically in infancy.

I have had to adjust to observing every stage of her life, watching her age, noting the changes in every respect. I remember seeing her in her late eighties and thinking how she really was getting old. She was managing on her own for many years. She was alone since she was seventy-two when my father died. She carried on, maintained her independence. Cooked, cleaned, walked unaided. She found a driver to get her to the supermarket. She was herself until she wasn’t. Until change crept up on her and shocked the people who observed her.

I see her in my childhood, my young adult years, and my older adult years. We lived in parallel universes. Now I just trail behind by thirty years and wonder about my own fate as she continues to morph before me and prepare for her last journey.

As for me, I’ll keep my mask on and continue singing, Just Somebody That I Used to Know.

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

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