A Visit With Mom

[sasha]

1:08 PM.

I sign the register and set the pen down. A hand-printed sign reminds me to wear a face mask, but I’ve already donned mine. The receptionist, a pretty young Latina, is smiling at me. “I wish my boyfriend would let his hair grow out like yours!” she says. I smile back, flattered that such a delectable little flower would take the time to compliment this old-timer’s appearance. “I’ll have a talk with him,” I tell her, and she laughs. “Please do!” she says. But by now, another guest is waiting to sign in, so I bid her good-bye and set out down the corridor towards the center of the building.

I pass an orderly pushing a cart filled with soiled laundry down the hall, past open doors revealing unmade beds; past a woman with an ID badge talking to a man with one. An unlit, unoccupied room… an empty dining commons. And everywhere a faint smell suspiciously reminiscent of the toilet.

I arrive at the intersection of two wings, a hub from which three corridors extend. A nurses’ station sits below a skylight at its center – a sunlit glade in this dark thicket. Instead of a fourth corridor, the space opposite the desk is a gathering area for the floor residents, now in full attendance. They line the walls, some in the tired, upholstered chairs provided, some in wheelchairs. My mother is in one of the latter, positioned as usual beside the media console. The video screen is dark, but 1960s-vintage rock is playing – the young staff’s idea of what their charges must have listened to in their youth, unaware that they’re off by at least a generation. No one looks up at my appearance. No one looks at their neighbors. A lot of vacant staring goes on here, where human contact seems to be a lost art.

“Hi, Mom,” I say, lightly touching her arm.

She looks up at me slowly, like an automaton just switched on going through its boot-up routine. “Oh,” she says. I don’t think she recognizes me. “Hi.”

There’s no place for me to sit, and her walker is not among those parked in a row at the desk, like taxis at an airline terminal. I assume it’s still in her room. “I’ll be right back,” I say. “I’m going to get your walker so I can sit.”

She says nothing, but looks vaguely confused, as if I’d just shared with her some rococo plan involving heads of state, shady stock transactions, and latex face masks. I duck away, and return a moment later with her walker. I maneuver it in front of her and settle onto its seat. “So!” I say briskly. “How are you feeling?”

The automatic machinery is still working: “Fine, fine.” After a pause: “How are you?”

Dominus vobiscum: Et cum spiritu tuo. There’s still no glimmer of recognition beyond the apparent misty awareness that I’m someone she seems to know from somewhere, and has probably spoken with before.

“I’m good,” I say, and fill the conversational void with chaff while adjusting the position of the walker and playing with its hand brake; but this quickly exhausts my repertoire of small talk, and the silence starts trickling in, like floodwaters over a levee of hastily placed sandbags. I look around the room, casting about for another topic for conversation. The woman beside her is intently focused on coloring a placemat, using a blue pencil to carefully fill in the foliage of a tree. The woman next to her holds a doll, tenderly cuddling and kissing it, as are two others along the opposite wall – their maternal instincts still functioning long after cognition has ceased to. One man is busily engaged tiling the rolling tray before him with pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, while a staffer tries showing him how they fit together. Another sits apart from the rest, engaged in earnest conversation with himself, while yet another gazes listlessly out the window at the parking lot beyond.

My mother murmurs something that seems to end with a question mark, but she’s long forgotten that one must speak audibly in order to be heard, and Frankie Valli’s admonition not to weep has shouted her down. The game is now afoot.

(“…big girls don’t cry, they don’t cry-yaye-yaye…”)

“What?” I say, leaning forward. “Sorry, I couldn’t hear you.”

Rather than speak up, she merely repeats her mumbled refrain: “Did your… did they find it?”

I’ve learned there’s no point in asking for an explanation – whatever thought has triggered the question was but a transient puff of smoke dispersed by the slightest breeze. It’s irretrievably gone by now, and was hopelessly mistranslated into speech anyway. “No,” I say. “I don’t think so.” I feel as though even this insubstantial lie deserves some kind adornment, so I foolishly add, “It was gone when they got there.”

“Oh,” she says.

I glance at the clock – 1:14. Six minutes already. For a moment I’m actually grateful for the broadcast spilling into the room. The silence would be intolerably worse.

An aide has appeared with a paper cup of water and a handful of pills, which she gently offers in exchange for the doll one of the women is cuddling. The woman seems uncertain, but hands the doll over and accepts the medication without complaint. After washing it down with a few sips, the woman looks around for a place to set the cup. The aide says, “You can keep the water if you like.” The woman just shakes her head and hands it back, but shows no desire to take back the doll. Another transient notion washed downstream by a sip of water and the passage of time.

“When did she happen – will she?” Mom says. I can barely make out the mumbled words over the cacophony from the loudspeaker she so perversely seems to prefer sitting under. She seems unaware that I don’t reside inside her head with her, hearing the same random thoughts ricochetting around, and has no need to speak distinctly. “I can’t hear you, Mom,” I say, trying to be patient, but that’s not one of my greater virtues, and my reply is a little shorter than it needs to be. “You’ll have to speak up.” I lean in and try to ignore the music blaring nearby.

“Did she finish?” she says, as softly as before. Her expression tells me she’s really trying – or at least thinks she is. Not that it matters, I suppose – for me, the words are content-free.

So I give what’s become my default answer to her questions: “I don’t know.” I suppose I could just make something up to maintain the appearance of conversation; but it seems not only pointless, but not very sporting, either. Like trouncing a 2nd-grader at arithmetic, or releasing semi-domesticated birds into the wild so that otherwise incompetent hunters can enjoy the act of killing them.

“Does it… do… around?”

“Oh - I don’t think so, no...”

She nods and looks away. I lean back and sneak another look at the wall clock over the nurses’ station.

“…gonna rock – rock – rock ‘round the clock…”

1:23

A man in a wheelchair arrives, pushed by an older, no-nonsense blonde woman, a veteran sergeant to the younger privates around her. She parks him in front of the nearby mother-by-effigy. “Here she is, George,” she declares in an amiable but boldly declarative manner. “Now behave yourself, we don’t want to send you back to your room now, do we?”

“Not unless Helen here comes along too,” the old man retorts, and the three of them laugh. “George, you stop that,” the sergeant admonishes. “Or I’ll put you on report.”

“Oh, Geez,” he says. “Wouldn’t be the first time, would it?”

“No, it wouldn’t,” she says. She asks the woman clutching the doll, “Is it OK if I leave you with this old troublemaker for a bit while I go tend to Angie?”

“Oh, I suppose so,” the woman answers. To the doll she adds, “We can handle him, can’t we?” She offers it to him. “Would you like to hold her?” she asks.

He shakes his head and focuses his gaze somewhere behind her. “Nah,” he says. “I got my own. Or used to.” She takes the doll back and gently kisses its forehead. The old man seems troubled – but only for a moment. Then, with the mischievous look of a 10-year old using a word he knows he shouldn’t, he makes a suggestive remark, to which the woman responds with mock indignation, and the staffer walks away shaking her head with loudly feigned disapproval.

“…and that’s when I fell for: the leader of the pack…”

1:31. Another 8 minutes have flown by.

A woman in one of the chairs lining the far wall rises unsteadily to her feet and looks around before shuffling towards one of the corridors extending from the hub. She’s only taken a few steps before a young woman looking barely out of girlhood rushes to her side. “No, no, no,” she says, taking the woman by the arm. “Do you need to go potty?” I can’t hear the reply over the din beside me, but from the lack of any gestures or expressions to the contrary, I’m inclined to believe her answer was in the affirmative. “All right,” the girls answers. “I’ll help you, okay?” The old woman steadies herself on the girl’s upper arm, and they disappear together down the dimly-lit tunnel.

1:43

The woman coloring the placemat has finished with the blue pencil, and is now rendering the tree trunk a delicate shade of pink. George seems to be telling Helen about his wife, or ex-wife, or a woman he once nearly married, or one he’d built a life with only in his head; and she’s wrapped her ankles around one of his. She still holds the doll, but casually now, just an object in her grasp she’s forgotten to set down. The Master Sergeant has returned, quickly appraises their situation, and decides no intervention is required. She leans on the duty desk with one elbow, and engages the girl behind it in shop talk. A young black man in hospital scrubs passes by pushing a cart full of juice boxes, and disappears down the corridor opposite. The man gazing morosely out the window is now staring at me. The woman who’d earlier tried leaving on her own returns with the staffer who’d accompanied her from their bathroom break. The woman resumes her seat, the staffer joins the conversation at the duty desk. Mom continues mumbling pointless questions, to which I offer pointless answers whether I’ve heard them or not.

"...must be something else, we say - somehow to defend this place .."

By now, the clock is finally closing in on 2:00, and a green light in my conscience winks on. “Well,“ I say. “I should probably get going…”

“Okay,” Mom says. “Are there… do… did you wash them yet?”

“I think so,” I say. Before I can squelch the impulse to provide context, I add, “I think that was the last one.”

My answer doesn’t seem to make sense to her, but then nothing in her world does, and she apparently just chalks it up to another random throw of the cosmic dice, another koan cloaking deep truth in mystical rags. “I’ll see you next time, then,” I tell her, rising, and touch her shoulder – the most intimate gesture I’ve ever been able to show her. “Be good.” I wheel her walker back to her room, and pass by the Pit again on my way out. I glance her way wondering if I should stop one last time before leaving, but her gaze is on an indeterminate spot on the far wall, and she doesn’t see me. I wonder if she even remembers I’ve just visited, or if I even exist when I’m not here. So I continue, past the nurses’ station and down the corridor towards the exit.

Outside, baked from above by a hazy sun in steamy skies and from below by dull heat radiating up from the asphalt, I pull off my mask and trudge to my car. I feel no elation at having gotten this chore behind me – only relief, a sense of having made one more interest payment on a long-term debt. But as I pull out of the driveway onto Hospital Road for the trip home, I see the afternoon ahead through a fog of vague melancholy, a sorrow tinged with guilt – and an angry realization that her condition has stripped her not only of her identity, her sense of self-awareness, but of her basic dignity that now only death can restore.

And I’m all too aware that in this game of genetic poker, she’s the dealer.
 

[saw]

something I dread
becoming unaware and being a burden to my family
I've watched this happen to ones I know
it's rather tragic as ailments go
one friend visited her mom every day
for 12 years
and her mom didn't know who she was

[sasha]

It's awful. And it runs in the family - it took her brother and her mother. Every time I forget a name, walk to the kitchen and forget why, fumble while opening tabs in Chrome, or just can't summon the perfect word I know exists to describe something, I get a little panicky: Is it my turn? Or just old-timer forgetfulness? My daughter's already held my hand through two major surgeries, and took a month out of her own life to care for her mother. I'm back on my feet, and her mother seems to be in remission... for now.

[saw]

I know what you mean Roy !
how can one ignore the possible signals
my good friend, a brilliant funny guy
is thankful I finish his sentences for him
or at least that is my perception.....
I can't help it when I see the panicked look
in his eyes