Mom Leaves Home to Rescue Nancy Pelosi

I interrupt the chronology of the weekend march to assisted living to go back to a political call Mom wanted to heed even if it meant leaving the house.

            It was in October, just a couple of days before what turned out to be her last birthday.  She was still at home.

             I’d made her and Kathy both the tortilla espanola (potato omelet) and Nigerian stew while watching the Giants get struck out the night before, and Mom ate heartily.  I was SO tired, so after lunch we turned on Turner Classics for a movie called “The Unsuspected,” which Mom said, “was just a terrible movie.  It was obvious.  It wasn’t convincing.” 

She thought we should always jump up to get the telephone, which of course went against my personal culture, which considered the message machine a form of protection for friendships and against solicitors, but to make her happy I picked up on what the caller called "a political courtesy call.” 

 Mom started sighing and almost hyperventilating because she didn’t think she’d done her duty to help out “when that decision came out  to permit unlimited amounts of money to campaigns.”  She insisted that we look up the mailing she had failed to respond to, and we found one saying EXPRESS MAIL with a plea from Nancy Pelosi. 

 “She says ‘mail it before you do anything else,’” Mom said, as if Nancy Pelosi was speaking directly to her.  “She says for us to support ‘our courageous house members.’” 
Yeah, I thought.  The ones I’d helped to elect in 2006 because they were going to end our war against Iraq and Afghanistan and close Guantanamo.  But I wanted to help Mom keep the faith, so I just nodded when she said, "Nancy Pelosi is such a good person!"
  Then mom told me, not reading, “People have likened this to the transition from Republicans at the time of the Depression.”  But this was going in the opposite direction.  So we got her checkbook, and she started making out the check.

          “Is it the tenth month?” she asked me.

          “Yes.”

          “Are you sure.”

          “Uh huh. “

          She counted on her fingers.   “January, February, March….”

           She made it out for one hundred and fifty dollars.

          Then she read the letter again and, seeing that the instructions were still to “mail it before you do anything else,” she asked me to take her to the post office.

          I couldn't believe that she was going to go through with it and really leave the house, but she did.

She said, “Oh, this makes me feel so much better.  I was supposed to get this off much earlier.”  She instructed me on how to get to the post office and back, and she was right.  She also tried to keep us both safe, saying things like“Don’t turn now!” when the light was red on a left turn.

          At the same time, she wanted to get us home before her five-minute interlude from bathroom visits was up. 

           “It’s a terrible thing when the most exciting part of your day is your bowel movement,” she said. 

          “But wasn’t it exciting getting off the check to Nancy Pelosi?” I reminded her.  Had she already forgotten?

          “Yes, you’re right.  That was more exciting.” 

            When Kathy got home, she said, “But you sent a fifty dollar check in to the DCCC just five days ago.” 

           But I didn't think Mom had any regrets about writing another, larger check, and I was sure the DCCC wouldn't.  

        

                Love,

                Mom

A Phone Call Saturday afternoon

              Saturday afternoon around 4:00 PM, I got a call from Kathy saying that Mom had resisted taking her medicine, but Tom had helped her, and “there’s just nothing like team work.”  She said Mom wanted to talk to me, so she put her o, and Mom told me what she thought about team work.

She told me that Kathy and Tom were “handling me like a piece of garbage…but there are no marks.”   She sounded really very articulate and sort of like the voice of reason as she said that she just couldn’t believe that someone would “keep you a prisoner in a household and not encourage you to contact your family.  I think it has to do with money, the house, but I don’t know.  Kathy went to church. ..I think they’re going to kill me and if I die, I’m going to look up God and tell him to tell the priests where Kathy goes to church.  They are being so brash about it, and it makes me sound like such an idiot, even if I begged them on my bended knee.” 

            Then Mom seemed intent o proving she wasn’t the kind of person who went crazy.  “I lived with a man who was kind of a nut, and I worked with criminals, and I didn’t go crazy…I want to have my brain read.” 

             I told her that she had had her brain read, and they said she had Alzheimer’s. 

             “Yes, that’s what they told everybody, but that man gave me a very good write-up.”  (

            She meant Dr. Ha of the U.C. Davis Alzheimer’s Center, probably.

              “What worries me is something I read in the newspaper about someone who was forced to play the piano, but it’s not a personality change…” 

            Then she stammered some words like “I’m not a piece of driftwood.”

            Then she asked, “When have I ever gone over and bothered the neighbors?  I wish to heaven…I don’t hate these people.  I just hate their reaction.  They’re…I’m frightened.  I can’t stand living like this.”

                Of course, from time to time I interjected something, telling her how much we all loved her and how she was frightened because of the changes in her brain, so she didn’t trust someone who had loved her and lived with her for 40 years, and she wasn’t taking her medication or eating her breakfast. 

             “I’m taking my Methanon,” she said.  “I know I have to take that.” 

            I told her that it was important to take the medicine, the way it was for David and his seizures.  Medicine didn’t always work perfectly (“My psychopharmacologist and I”), but it was important to take what the doctors prescribed.  Then she asked Kathy to show her the doctors’ prescriptions.  (I’m using the plural form of doctors because she’s gotten these prescriptions from various sources.)  At the end of the conversation, she said that maybe she should let them kill her because this was no way to live. 

March Madness 3 Mom's Last Day at Home

 Before dawn I made pasta sauce for Mom and Kathy, and while I was making them cookies, Suzy called to say that after a really good evening last night, things were worse this morning, and Mom told Kathy that she thought she should go to a home, where she’d feel safe.  Kathy told Mom I’d be coming over, and Mom said, “I’ll probably be dead.”  Cleaning up, I found a letter postmarked March22 from John Olichney, the neurologist at the UC Davis Alzheimer’s Disease Center.    I taught my morning classes and left campus for Pleasant Hill at noon.

                Mom seemed okay except for a part of her body that Cole Porter gets to rhyme with heinous and connects with Coriolanus in “Brush up Your Shakespeare” from Kiss Me Kate.  She wanted us to take her in to Emergency, so Kathy called the advice nurse and got India.  The Indian doctor suggested that we use Preparation H Cream, which we did.  Mom asked, "Isn't this kind of disgusting?"  and I said, "No, it's not" because it wasn't and I worried about her feeling that she was losing her dignity.  "We just hope this will make you feel better."

            We slept fairly peacefully, but when I got up the following morning at about 4:30, mom joined me almost immediately afterwards and NEVER got over her paranoia—accusing Kathy of wanting and trying to kill her.  But we were able to get her to take her medicine. 

            The plan was that I would be back at home in San Francisco at 4:00, when Javier was arriving, but because of Mom’s agitated state, I called Javier to ask him to come to Pleasant Hill instead and right away.  I didn’t want to leave Kathy with Mom—and not because I thought Kathy was going to kill her.  But when I called him, a woman answered.  It didn’t sound like his daughter. 

            The woman called him to the phone, and after I told him what was going on with Mom, I said 

I was taking him up on the offer he’d made repeatedly for the past nine years—-to be on call if I should ever need anything.  I asked him to come over.

                 “When?”

            “Right away!”  I said. 

            “In a couple of hours?” he asked.

            “No, right away.  As soon as you’re dressed.”

            He said okay.

            “Javier’s coming,” I told Mom.

            “Good.  I like Javier,” Mom said.

            We set a place for him at the table.

            He was coming from Fremont, so we figured it would take about an hour for him to get out of the house and to Mom and Kathy’s home.

            We got Mom to play the piano.

            But when Javier hadn’t come after two hours, we ate without him.  Then I called him and he answered his cell phone.  I could hear noise in the background—talking, the clanking of dishes.  Was he eating out?  With the woman who’d picked up the phone?

            He said he was on his way.

            He arrived thirty minutes later.

            Mom said, “Please leave, Javier, because I like you, and I don’t want you to get hurt."

                "It's okay," Javier said.

                "No it's not," Mom said.  "They’ll blame it on me.”

             “No,” I said. " I’ll confess.  I’ll let them know that I  killed him.”

            I offered to stay with Mom, but Kathy said her brother was coming.

            “I can stay.  He doesn’t have to come,” I said.

            But Kathy said he was planning on it, so I left. 

            I didn’t know that that was the last time I’d ever see Mom in her home of forty-five years.

March Madness 2 Finding a care facility for Alzheimer's

It seems strange that I wrote so little in my diary about the Thursday we spent at care facilities--until I think of all the other things I was juggling at the time.

            Early that Thursday, I sent a birthday message to my son Jonathan, who was turning thirty-two.  Then I taught a class in Advanced Academic ESL—using the dictionary (so soon to be defunct) and beginning Kindred, the novel I’d assigned.  I went to my office to meet with a couple of students and found that Bob, my office mate, had written “Hi” with the small pieces of Vietnamese candy I’d brought back for him earlier in the year.

               It was pouring outside, and the weather seemed appropriate for what we were going to do—look for an assisted-living facility for Mom.

            Waiting for Kathy and Suzy at the Pleasant Hill Library, just a few blocks from their house, I watched the story lady and thought of Mom’s love of books and one little dream she gave up gracefully.  She’d wanted to be The Story Lady, but she soon found that children were more interested in using the computers.  She didn’t want the librarian to have to “round up” the children and make them listen.  I admired her for being brave and honest about this.  As a teacher, I was aware of how it felt to be passionately sharing something I want students to enjoy and then see them looking at the clock and realizing that I was not connecting.        

            When Kathy and Suzy arrived, we went to two facilities with assisted living, and one of the marketing directors seemed too much like a used car salesmen, so we tried another facility and were impressed by both the beauty of the place Aegis Living and the person who showed us around.  She looked almost too elegant with her stylish clothes and a hairstyle that was up-to-date.  But she had a very warm and compassionate manner—even as she disabused me of a misconception.  My misconception was that there was a blissful stage in Alzheimer’s.  I got this idea from the documentary Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter, which I’d seen in the mid-1990s.  Maybe Mom had seen it too.  I think I remember her commenting back then when she was totally with us on how fascinating it was.  I remembered that Deborah Kaufman’s mother was happy with Alzheimer’s.  For the first time, she enjoyed Ted Mac Amateur Hour instead of feeling contempt for it.  She enjoyed sing-alongs at the Alzheimer’s place.  I also thought about my next-door neighbor who had become so pleasant after memory loss and going on medication.  She told the same stories over and over again, but she seemed so happy telling those stories.  Before she’d been a little bit cantankerous. 

            So I asked Dee Jones, the woman showing us around, “At what point do they get to the blissful stage?” and she answered with sad sincerity, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a person with Alzheimer’s who seemed happy or at peace.”

           

            We would try out Aegis we decided over lunch.

I wrote to my son and told him that the motto with Alzheimer's was "Hugs and drugs."  I begged him to give me both if my time came--at Aegis would be fine.