Forgetting that She'd Forgotten
Before Mom started calling me to
tell me about Kathy’s plan to kill her, she’d called me regularly to ask about
my sister, Dana, who never returned her calls.
“Have you heard from Dana? I want to knit her something,” Mother would
say, “but I don’t know what color. I’ve
left messages, but she never returns my calls.”
Dana was my older sister, who had told us about Mom’s strange behavior
when she visited her. That was before
Mom stopped leaving the house. She
traveled by plane of train as far as Chicago, where she stayed a week with Dana
and her ex-husband, who still lived with her.
“Mother kept asking ‘When’s Herman
coming home? When’s Herman coming
home?’ I’d tell her, and she’d ask
again, ‘When’s Herman coming home?’”
At the time that Dana first told me
this, I thought Mom just really wanted Herman to come home. Now I saw that Mom was getting
disoriented. It was worst when she was
away from Kathy and the familiar. Then her confusion was exacerbated.
“Have you heard from Dana?” Mother asked again. “I’ve left messages, but she never returns my
calls.”
Mother didn’t mention that Dana’s
message machine had my name on it. She had been using me as an alias for
several years.
“You know, Mom, Dana never picks up
the phone or returns calls unless the spirit moves her, and the spirit doesn’t
move her very often.”
“I guess you’re right,” she’d say,
and then she’d tell me she had to go to use the bathroom. But soon she’d call again, maybe later that
day, maybe the next day.
“Have you heard from Dana? I want to knit her something,” she’d say,
“but I don’t know what color. I’ve left
messages, but she never returns my calls.”
And I’d say, “You know, Mom, she
never picks up the phone or returns calls unless the spirit moves her, and the
spirit doesn’t move her very often.”
“I guess you’re right.”
Then, a short time later, she’d call
back.
“Have you heard from Dana? I want to knit her something, but I don’t
know what color.”
Perhaps the sixth time, I changed our
dialogue.
“Red,” I said. “Knit her something red.”
“Does she like red?” Mother asked,
surprised.
“No, but I do,” I said.
There’s really a very sweet story about
Dana and helping me get red, but that’s for another time. Remind me!
As for Mom and me, we’d been very close
while I was growing up and less so when I no longer returned for summer
vacation but, instead, lived abroad for five years and, once returned, got
together with Mom on a one-to-one to get David and take him out to lunch. But I felt she was so life-affirming and fun
to be with that I once commented, “Mom’s the one person I could imagine living
with without going crazy.”
Daddy, on the other hand, I’d come to
love and appreciate, but I couldn’t imagine his living with my son and me when
he was, in fact, thinking of doing just that in the 1990s. Well, actually, I could imagine, and so I
said, “I love my dad, and I’d rather die than turn my back on him, so if he
wants to come live with us, I’ll kill myself.”
It was a little bit like traveling with
my parents. With Daddy, it was always
roughing it—three thousand miles at a stretch, stopping only to pee and see the
Grand Canyon. Mom was more into
comfort. She liked to stop at roadside
places and would sometimes even let us get a chocolate malt.
But when I started staying with my
mother over more extensive periods of time, I became aware of what a good
person Kathy was—and had to be--to cope with the fretting, obsession of
bathroom functions, the repeating of questions.
That was the case one recent Easter.
Mom had apparently forgotten that she didn’t go out
any more and said she wanted to go out with us for Easter lunch. I had
doubts about her going through with it even though she seemed so confident that
she’d do it. She even wanted to treat.
But she needed a lot of clarification, so we had exchanges like these:
“What’s
today?”
“Saturday.”
“Is
it Easter?”
“No,
Easter Sunday is tomorrow.”
“Then
when’s the big gathering?”
“Well,
tomorrow four of us will be going to lunch.”
“But
isn’t that today?”
“No,
today’s Saturday. Tomorrow’s Easter Sunday. We’re getting together
for Easter Sunday.”
(Then
a few minutes later)
“Is
today Sunday?”
Kathy
had started putting the day on a white board attached to the refrigerator door,
but Mom would forget between her checking it.
“Is this a bill?” She’d ask, looking
at Working Assets Credo pages with all the good causes. “Otherwise, I’m
going to toss it.”
“Yes, among other things it is a
bill.”
“For what?”
“It’s really hard to tell with
Working Assets. I think this one is for long distance.”
Mother, who had once had an iron
constitution and could and usually did eat everything, started saying about
almost every food, “I have an iron constitution, but that’s one thing I
can’t eat.”
As the weekend progressed, in spite
of my excellent cooking of things like instant oatmeal, she had more problems
with her iron constitution.
Later on Saturday, she decided she’d
better not go to the Easter gathering. But she kept asking about it.
“What’s this organization that’s
formed for the lunch, anyway? It’s seems like a motley crew. How
did it all get started?”
I told her that it was usually Suzy,
Jonathan and I who took David out for Easter. But this year Jonathan was
in New York, and Karl was with us.
Javier came by on Saturday and brought an Easter lily. She got wrote
a thank you card for Javier, and then asked, “Why am I thanking Javier?”
“For the Easter lilies.”
Mother, who’d been a very “relaxed” housekeeper while we were growing up, had
raised her standard after living with Kathy for three decades. She spent a lot of time cleaning up.
She kept wanting to wash my cup while I was drinking from it—well, only
when I put it down for a moment.
“Have you finished with that?”
“Not yet.” (Perhaps more sharply than I should have under the
circumstances.)
She did her Jumble puzzle and crossword puzzles as usual. Then she continued
to try to get things straight:
“Everybody—all the people—won’t come here, will they? Hardly anyone’s
coming who hasn’t been here before.”
“Actually, nobody’s coming here.”
“Oh, that’s right. They’re going to the Claim Jumper. So I don’t
need to clean up. I just don’t know what I’m going to serve them when
they get here.”
Later she asked, “Are you going to
give Javier the Easter card I wrote for him tomorrow?”
“Not tomorrow.”
“Why not? Won’t he feel bad if he doesn’t get one?”
“He’s not going to be with us.”
“Is this card for Suzy from me or from you? It seems so strange that I
haven’t written her one. Oh, but this is from me!”
Then
“Now, Suzy’s not coming by. But are the other people?”
“Suzy is coming to stay with you. She’s just not going to lunch.”
This
led to another round of what day it was, and who was coming.
We played Scrabble, but
she didn’t like the letters she drew and didn’t want to continue.
I stressed her out a bit by wanting
to take a bath in her bathroom instead of taking a cold shower. She worried that she made the bathroom
“so disgusting,” but I never noticed
anything unpleasant—no odor or anything. I tried to reassure her.
When she used my Dove, she wanted to reassure me that she hadn’t touched it to
any part of her body directly.
“Mom, it’s fine if you want to
touch my Dove to your body directly. That would be fine! I do it
all the time.”
On the other hand, she didn’t feel
self-conscious about walking around nearly nude when she needed to wash her
clothes.
The greatest blessing was that she could still play the piano, and we
often had a sing-along, she and I, of songs from World War II. She also knew songs I used to sing in
elementary school. She probably sang
them in elementary school too.
“This is the only patriotic song I ever liked.” she
told me that Easter weekend.
This
is my country, land of my birth.
This
is my country, grandest on earth.
I
pledge thee my allegiance, America, the Bold.
For
this is my country to have and to hold.
The second time we sang it, she
changed the last line.
“This is God’s country, and I am too old.”
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