The phone rang after 7:00 PM last night while I was making dinner. The caller ID was my mother’s phone. I held my breath and said, “hello.” It was Candy, the (main, 4-day) aide. I know something is up when I get a call at this hour. She doesn’t like to bother me, she knows I am juggling my caregiving between my mother and my husband. But she is agitated, speaking loudly, quickly, repeating herself during the conversation. It all comes down to two things:

Frustration.

Guilt.

Candy’s father recently died of Alzheimer’s Disease. She would come to work  and take care of my mother who had one leg over the dementia cliff and then go home and deal with her father who was fully immersed in another world and who would wander the streets if given the chance. Candy knows everything about care-giving and what happens on the other side of it. She’s been with my mother for four years. She’s been a loyal servant and has endured my mother’s increasing accusations reflective of paranoia: she’s been called horrible names during horrible moments and brushed them off like the weighty dust of 9/11: If I were her, I would have choked. She’s accompanied us on medical visits, and, like Judy, (the other, 3-day aide) opens her wallet to purchase anything she thinks will help my mother eat better. Judy brings oatmeal upon request. Candy is more than happy to run to the corner bodega (a Korean market) and buy fruit or whatever; my mother was asking for an orange while I was on the phone, but we both know when presented with it, my mother will refuse it, as though it were an alien idea.

I can hear my mother request chopped liver on rye: The food of her younger days, from a corner deli, where Jews would go to sustain their souls. Let’s call it a paté. It had class of another kind. But there are no more corner delis. Coburn’s on East 13th Street and Avenue B is long since gone and like almost all of them, they have disappeared  and have taken the chopped liver with them.

The rabbi had visited and left her some cake.

Let’s rewind.

“Susie, I need you to know we are doing everything we can! I am trying so hard to get your mother to eat. She has a sip of soup. A bite of mashed potatoes. I make them soft with milk and butter.”

My heart is breaking for the soldier on the battlefield. She is the medic, dragging my mother to shelter, trying to sustain her with sips of liquids. Apple juice. Ensure. She should be drinking three servings of Ensure and she is barely having one. She has virtually ceased eating.

I listen. Candy is apologetic for intruding on my time, for calling during dinner, for adding to what I have to bear. And she says, again, she is trying so hard, that she just needs me to know, she needs me to understand that the aides are not the reason for my mother’s dehydration, for her malnutrition.

Her agitation is palpable. I try to soothe her, I tell her that I understand and I know it is nearing the end. I tell her I know that she has done everything she could over the years and that she is very much appreciated, that I am so grateful.

I am the caregiver to a mother, a husband and two aides.

I hear my mother in the background asking for chocolate. She had a bite of the rabbi’s cake and pushes it away. That’s it. My mother says that soon she will be going to the dentist for new teeth. She can’t chew. That’s why she refuses food. I hear her choking in the background. She can’t drink water, she needs that thickener they add to food and water so that it doesn’t sneak past the esophagus into the lungs.

Everyday I wonder how my mother made it this far. I count her days via my blog posts. We are at 199. One hundred and ninety-nine posts, and that is not writing everyday. That is writing when I need to remember, when something happens that moves me, when I am called to duty.

Each day I wonder if today will be the last. As the days pass I feel my chest constrict. I wake up in the morning with stabs of anxiety in my gut and pull myself out of bed and ask for strength, I ask for signs that I am supported.

The smoke alarm was beeping in a pattern, right after I opened the fridge more than 20 feet away. Spontaneously. The battery was new. The beep pattern was not indicative of any signal for attention. Three shrill beeps. I climbed up, took it down. Removed the battery. Put it back up. Eventually it stopped. There was no smoke to trigger it.

One day I went down to the laundry area. I had been there the day before and left it with everything in its place, but this day, I went down and found a large bottle of detergent on the floor. It had a spout and a screw on cap. The opening for the cap was bent into a distorted oval, as though it had fallen on it, however, the bottle was upright; the cap was on the floor, there was some leakage. It was a bottle that was firmly planted on a counter. I bent the opening back into shape with a pliers and was able to screw the top back on. I mopped up the mess, washed the bottle which weighed about 5 pounds and put it back on the counter, against the wall.

Another day, I went down to the laundry room and found the front grill of a small fan, that was intact the previous day, in the middle of the laundry room floor.

My question is this:
Do angels do laundry?

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

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