Starvation.

It is 7:00 PM on Thursday, October 1, 2020. I am standing in front of the deli counter at Marino’s Market. My son is waiting in the car for me to come out with a load of groceries. We have just come from my mother’s apartment where Candy has greeted me. I have come to get my mother’s wheel chair. For my husband. My mother is bedridden and in and out of reality. My husband has a double MRI appointment the following day and I fear that he will not be able to walk from the car to the elevator at New York Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. He’s been falling almost daily and I can’t risk a hard fall in the street or in the hospital. Besides, he has to show that he needs assistance in ambulation and in dressing once in the MRI department. They make exceptions for us caretakers; if not needed we must leave. And again. like a few weeks ago when we had to go to the ER, my son will be in the car for hours, tooling around Manhattan and checking in every once in a while. “Are they done yet?” What’s going on?”

During a five hour period, my husband will have extensive MRIs of the brain and his legs. These MRI’s are in addition to a large blood panel to glean what is going on in terms of muscle deterioration. My husband, when last weighed, last month, was 126 pounds and can barely stand let alone walk. He looks like he is starving.

So, that’s why I stole the wheel chair. For my husband’s safety and my sanity, which I feel has lately been compromised by my own not eating properly, by being up during the night to make sure my husband doesn’t fall in the bathroom, however, he has fallen about four times trying to get back into bed and in other areas of the house.

I am about to leave with my son for my mother’s and it hits me. Everything. There were two credit cards in arrears due to clerical issues, one card, ours, one card that I manage of my mother’s. A feeling of desperate inadequacy cloaks me. A $2,500 charge is on my mother’s card from her care agency, something which might have been meant from six months ago when she left the hospital with Covid and needed 24-hour care: this has upped the ante on a late charge that the pooled trust claims it didn’t see and didn’t pay. I become overwhelmed by details. Our credit card statement is no where to be found. I spent time on the phone with Chase explaining to a woman in the Philippines, then to have her switch me over to a woman in Missouri, and then to a guy in India who reminds me to pay my bills on time. Those details of fixing issues come later. I am standing by my front door weeping. Something I had yet to do but my body wouldn’t allow me…both my son and husband are shocked, and probably scared.

I enter my mother’s apartment; she is now an even tinier creature from an underworld, with a snaggle-tooth. So small.  She looks like she is starving. She is barely taking in any sustenance. My mother, once the beauty. I greet her, she can’t see me. She says something in recognition about “Susan.”

Her aide, Candy, recently lost her father to Alzheimer’s. He would get up at all hours in attempts to wander the streets. Candy’s father’s departure was a blessing in disguise. Now she can concentrate on her husband who just had a heart attack. “Girl,” she says, “I know just what you are going through. I come to work and I cry for hours.” I want to hug her but it is the era of Covid.

Candy thinks I want to borrow my mother’s walker and is surprised when I say I need the wheel chair. I’m thinking, “Yes, it is that bad.”

So, I say to my mother, “goodbye, ma, I love you!” And she says, “Susie? Is that Susie, my daughter?” And I say, “yes, ma.” “Oh,” she says, “I thought you were Susan the nurse.” “No, ma. it’s me, I’m going now, I love you.”

Her speech is slurred. It reminds me of my step-mother-in-law’s speech before she died. Lung cancer (non-smoker) to brain cancer. I don’t think she reached 80.

Here I am, with a lapis-blue transport chair, making my way to the car, of the same color. That must have been the color of the year, that year, a deep metallic, beautiful blue. We fold it up and put it in the trunk and I am trying to figure out what to make for dinner. “Let’s stop at Marino’s.”

And so we go and on the way my son has an altercation and screaming match with a woman who is trying to come down a narrow street in a huge SUV. She tells him to wait a minute, he is ready to shove the words down her throat. My heart is in my throat. We all react to stress in our own way and it feels like the entire world is stressed.

Marino’s is fairly empty. The lights are bright against the evening. I am led to the deli counter, in my pink mask, like a zombie who is over-tired, over-hungry. It’s hard to get food down in times of anxiety. I feel like I am starving. I am inadvertently shedding pounds. When anxiety has its way with you, you are at its mercy.

Bear with me. I’m over at that glassed-in array of food that extends for yards. The food circus: Cooked food, sliced food, boiled, broiled, fried food. Animal-based, plant-based, mayonaissed, tossed, grilled, baked food.

Nothing appeals to me.

I am so tired I begin to cry. I am a child.

“Can I help you?” says counter man. I later learn his name is Carl. I say, behind my pink mask, I am overwhelmed. He asks if I am OK. I shake my head “no.” You see, I have been here before, I have done this before. I have stood here before in front of a stranger and wept.

It was 1975 in the spring, the internal movie one watches when in mourning, when grieving, began to play. My first husband, a tall, once strong six-footer, starved to death via Crohn’s disease. I watched him sit in chairs and pound them in pain all night. I watched him come home from and then back into Montefiore Hospital, Mt. Sinai Hospital. I saw a twenty-eight year old be diminished to an hallucinating spectre of who he once was. I heard him screaming and dying on the phone the last time we spoke on a Saturday morning. He had pulled out a tube and ended himself.

Sometime after this event I went into a deli on Kissena Boulevard, near my apartment, to buy some food. But I didn’t know that I had also walked into the same movie theater of grief; the show began to play while I was at the counter. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t do anything but weep, without a mask, my identity exposed, my soul exposed, my heart exposed in front of the turkey, chicken, sausages and German potato salad. Food, meaningless food. And of course, the guy behind the counter wants to know if I am alright and I shake my head “no,” and manage to muster, “my husband just died.”

I don’t recall his reaction. But I remember I tried to pay and I tried to round up the money to make the change an even transaction and I did it wrong, and I didn’t understand why. Grief compromises everything. You can’t even compute.

Forty-five years later I am at Marino’s, crying at the counter. “What’s wrong?”

“My mother is 102 years old, and I am watching her die. My husband is fading, too.”

We, are all starving.

He doesn’t know what to do but he wants to help. He tells me to take the rotisserie chicken and some sides. “Why not?” I think. Finally, someone is making a decision for me, someone is trying to help me, to soothe me. Carl. He’s an older guy, but then again, I ain’t so young anymore. He says he knows a nurse, I think he is trying to get me some help for my husband. He takes my name and number and puts it in his phone and says she will call. No call, but that is OK. I wheel my wagon away and down the aisles trying to feel better, trying to calm myself. Trying to feel like it’s an ordinary day.

I am greeted at the checkout counter by a chipper young man who asks me how it is going and I say,
“Day by day.”