Good morning. As tired as I am having been up since about 3:00 am, my wheels were turning and so were my mother’s.

To fill you in, yesterday was quiet, and I stepped out of my comfort zone to contact the aide and learn the latest:
My mother has a voracious appetite and is eating and eating. She is likely now under eighty pounds and maybe making up for the weeks she was ill. Or, Is that due to meds? Or has she been burning up all of her energy from so much self-induced agitation? She was up all night, again, this time rummaging the entire night in the drawer of the nightstand next to her, looking for her stockings. Rummaging like a mouse looking for something familiar. The aide was unable to sleep with the noise, knowing my mother was up, catching the contagious jolts of electricity emanating from my mother who couldn’t rest. At one point my mother threw her pillow at the screen between their beds, almost knocking it over on the aide.

What do I think is going on?

My mother is fighting to stay alive.

She accused the aide of holding her hostage and not feeding her. She demanded breakfast in the middle of the night. Her night and day are one continuous sea of blackness; she has a tantrum if the shades are open, will not allow the window to be open, for years. She insists on a minimum of light in the room, that it hurts her eyes; this is really not new. Just imagine working there in semi-darkness. Her doctor wants her to stay up during the day, to let the light in, to get her into her chair. I don’t know how this will play out, but as nothing seems to make my mother happy, I just observe from afar; people’s words create pictures in my mind.

I am blind to the true reality.
I don’t want to see everything that is happening. I can only mourn so much.

My mother told the Hospice nurse that she can’t wait for “all this to be over so she can go back downstairs and see her friends, go the the in-house movie.” But my mother’s mind had hyper-spaced through the last five years or so: she stopped leaving the room years ago in fear she would catch something if she mingled. She has held herself hostage. No more downstairs movies or activities or dining room.

Around 6:30 am the aide finally pulled herself out of her sleepless day-bed and went to take a shower. My mother, in her childlike diminutive state, hit her hand on the nearby lamp, got a small abrasion, and actually got out—fell out of the bed, onto the floor trying to follow the aide to the bathroom. The aide found her, trying to get back into bed. My mother reportedly hurt her hand.

It was too early for Hospice, the doctor, or whoever else the aide tried to call to get on the phone.

At some point an x-ray machine was brought to the apartment to view her hand. The doctor reported that there was nothing wrong with it. Thankfully.

In front of my mother’s building a car was honking its horn; there’s a lot of traffic in my mother’s neighborhood. My mother told Candy (aide#1) that her boyfriend, Thomas, was waiting for her to take her to dinner.

Who the hell is Thomas?

After listening to the list of events that the aide had dealt with over the previous twenty-four hours, and hearing her say she was so tired from not sleeping, again, I asked aloud if this was too much for her, if my mother needed a “facility.” I think the thought of losing the job was not in her agenda and she insisted she will see this through. Continue caring for my mother who is somewhere in age between an infant and a terrible-two.

Her doctor had added another med to keep her calm. After two days it no longer worked. It now can be used “as needed” to quell the agitation.

Candy was so afraid to leave my mother unattended and get her lunch in her agency’s office, one floor up, that she waited until very late in the afternoon to eat and asked that another aide come in for a few minutes.

Is my mother cogent? Sometimes, in between these strange bouts in a strange world. In between the desire to see her long-gone parents again and her desire to remain earthly.

Candy said that my mother looked at her, through her eyes filled with blur and age and partial sight, and asked, “who are you?”

“I’m Candy, I’ve been with you for four years.”

“Oh, Candy,” said my mother, “what has been happening to me?”

Sometimes we are hostages of our own minds.

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

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