An Invitation to a Sing-along of 90 Years of Song

I've changed my mind!  Instead of beginning with my mother's obituary, I'm going to begin with the invitation to her 90th birthday party.

Invitation to a Sing-along of 90 Years of Song

                “Look, Mom,” I said after she finished the milk shake I’d brought to her from Jack-in-the-Box.  “This is the invitation to your 90^th birthday.”  We were sitting on Mom’s bed at Aegis Living.  She was leaning back against a brown bear-hug pillow my sister Suzy had gotten for her.  I was sitting at her side.

                Mom looked at the rough draft of the invitation while I read aloud  with what I hoped wasn’t too desperate a cheeriness.

                “You are invited to a sing-along to sing praises to Mom/Nani/Nay as we celebrate her ninetieth birthday in song.”

                I watched her face to see her reactions.  I was supposed to be hiding mine.

                The invitation did not show the rooms I hoped would be in the picture, the rooms in her home of forty-five years.  Instead the words appeared just below the table in the elegant Aegis  dining room, on the side where the better-functioning residents lived.  It was right next to the Aegis’ living room, where all residents—compos mentis and non compos mentis--  were brought for  sing-alongs once a week.    On occasions, Mom was invited to play for the group on the Grand Piano  if for some reason the scheduled pianist  didn’t show up.  She’d lost much of her short-term memory, and she could no longer knit or follow a sentence when it was read (“That’s such bad syntax,”), but she could still play the piano, and she played the songs remembered by people whose memories went back to World War II if not to five minutes ago.

                In the elegant dining room there was a beautiful chandelier with what looked like candles over the table, which was  always set with a white table cloth, folded napkins,  fine crystal glasses, and silverware.  There was a fireplace at the head of the table and blue balloon valences on the windows  looking out on the garden , where mother was usually too afraid to go.

                “A sing-along with you at the piano!”  I exclaimed as I watched her focus through the green-striped reading glasses she used to think were fun but not considered “A bit inappropriate,” by which I think she meant tacky.

                This is what my son helped me to understand:   Not only did I have to give up on the idea that we could let Mom return to her home for her 90^th birthday celebration, but I was going to have to make sure that I didn’t make people feel bad about that fact.  I had to understand that I was the only one who thought it was workable, and Kathy, who had been Mom’s companion almost as long as the house had, was the one who’d been the bravest and the most “there” for Mom during the years of her decline, and Kathy knew best.  Suzy and Jonathan agreed with her.   Besides protecting my mother from the heartbreak of going home and then having to go back to Aegis after her party (couldn’t we sedate her?  Couldn’t we carry her out?  Didn’t they say that even if  people with Alzheimer’s  couldn’t remember, the feeling remained?), we needed to protect Kathy, the one we’d all relied on when the going got tough, the one whose  daily job was to take care of  Mom and maintain her (Kathy's) sanity, something I found difficult to do during two-week stays and something my sister Suzy could no longer do at all.  I knew Kathy was a better person that I was, and I knew that my son Jonathan had better judgment than I did.  I had to fight against what felt right to me.

                I wasn’t even supposed to bring it up again, the idea of Mom’s going home for her 90^th, but I had a plan.  I would show Mom the pictures of the rooms, and if she protested, “But that’s not where I want to have my ninetieth birthday,” I would plead her case.  If she accepted it, then there would be no heartbreak, and everybody would be reassured.

                So now I watched Mom's face.  It was, with all its lines, much more the face I had seen in photographs as her as a very young girl.  Her loss of weight had taken away the pads of fat that hid her features, and now  her features—dark, round eyes, straight nose, full lips with teeth now in mouth—were more prominent.  But her beautiful face took on a “Huh?” as she took in the pictures.

                 “Where’s this place?”

                “It’s Aegis, Mom.”  Why was I hesitant to say "It's here.  Right here where you are"?  I was afraid that she'd remember that Aegis Living, this beautiful assisted living place, which she thought was her workplace at times, was not home, and she'd want leave.

                On a couple of occasions, when I’d come to visit her, she’d had her bags packed.

                “Oh, thank God you’re finally here.  Let’s go.”

                “Go where Mom?”

                “Home!” 

                It was so rare that Mom felt she could leave the premises—even the bathroom—that on these two occasions, I walked her out of her room and down the hall and put in the code that would keep the alarm from going off when we pushed open the door, and we even got as far as the car and a few blocks away from Aegis Living. 

                “Mom, you know I don’t have the key,” I said somewhere near the intersection that led both to her former home and her present place of residence.

                “Well, we could go and see if she’s there.”

                Sometimes “she” was Kathy.  Sometimes “she” was  my mother’s mother.

                “I know she’s not, Mom.  Kathy’s at church now.”

                All this was true.  But what Mom didn’t remember was that there was a spare key in case anyone got locked out, and we both knew where it was.

                Could I drive her by the house?  No, that would be too heart-breaking.  I had learned how not to cry in most emergencies—emergencies being when life was most painful and yet you had to go on—but I didn’t think I could see that sweet yellow house without Mom in front of it the way she was two years earlier in a picture I loved.  It was after she’d lost weight but before she’d lost too  much, and she looked fit and content if just a little bit confused.  It was the day we’d celebrated the birthday of her granddaughter Becky, visiting from Tennessee, and other family members had been there.  Mom, who wasn’t completely clear on just who Becky was, had kept most things straight that day and was in really good form.

                On those three excursions out of Aegis Living , after I’d driven around the neighborhood without knowing what to do or where to go,  Mom eventually said, “Let’s go back.  I’ll tell them I’m going home another day.”

                Re-entering the place, she went directly to the desk, “Hi, I'm Nadine Martin, and I’m wondering if you could direct me to the place Nadine Martin is supposed to go.”
                This was the area where she was sometimes brought from the memory-loss area around the corner.

                The person at the desk—always someone compassionate and informed—would point down the hall as I said, “We’ll go together, Mom.”

                And we’d pass the living room with the grand piano where she came to weekly sing-alongs and the elegant dining room—the rooms that were now going to be “home” for her 90^th birthday celebration.

                I had decorated the two rooms already.  In the dining room I’d put on the wall a picture of Mom on her toes in a tutu.
                “There’s my ballet picture,” Mom said.

                I’d also put a picture of Mom at twenty-nine, reminiscent of Ava Gardner, holding her fourth child, Missy, who had died at the age of forty-four.

                In the living room I’d put a picture of Mom sitting at the grand piano even though I’d never taken a picture when she played there.  I’d juxtaposed the picture of her at the other piano in the other section of Aegis Living, the picture I took when Jonathan and Mom, his Nani,  performed as the Jonani Duo at Aegis.  On the walls I’d put other pictures.  Above the fireplace was a picture of her as a bathing beauty—the kind of picture young brides were sending their husbands overseas in World War II.  On a beach, she was the girl he’d left behind—sitting on the sand alone, beautiful legs bent at the knees and fully shown, head  with long, thick black hair thrown back.  In another spot there was a picture of her and Kathy, sitting together  on her bed at Aegis. On the wall between those pictures was one I took of Mom the day we got her to leave the house to go to the Kaiser Neurology Clinic, where she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s but, outside afterwards, against the blue sky with all the cloud formations she rhapsodized about, she had forgotten the diagnosis and looked happy and fit, smiling with her new dentures.

                “Now I have Tina’s smile,” she said, and I felt flattered.  Nothing had ever been wrong with my mother’s teeth or her smile, but even in her right mind she’d never really grasped that she was beautiful.

                “So what do you think, Mom?” I asked after she’d looked at the invitation.

                “And where is this again?”

                “It’s Aegis, Mom.  We’re going to have your 90^th birthday, this sing-along, here at Aegis.”

                Mom looked at me and frowned.

                “I don’t understand your attachment to that place,” she said