An Aegis representative would be at the hospital to talk to Mom at 11:00, Kathy told me, as I was working on a collage for Mom—an update and a
summary of tributes I’d paid to her on her birthday and on Mother’s Day but
with a lot of pictures with names attached. So I left the collage
and the house at 10:00 and got to the hospital just as Kathy was parking, and we went in
together. But the Mom we saw was just a total contrast to the one on her
throne the previous day.
She said, “Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come because they’re saying I’m crazy, and I
know it’s because of what I said about Tom killing me. They’re
brain-washing everyone.” She was attached to the bed with a strap, and
she was so delusional that she didn’t want to put her teeth in because “My
teeth…What did they soak them in?”
The Aegis Health Services Director
Rosmary Brown (LVN) arrived, and Kathy went outside to tell her that this was
probably not a good time to talk to Mom, but she did come in and established
immediate rapport with Mom by saying, “I’m here to get you home.”
Mom was very sweet and courteous to her,
but you could see what an effort she was making to get out her words, and the
ones she was getting out weren’t quite the right ones.
Mom said “Oh, thank you! Because I
don’t want to be harmful. I’ve always been a peace activist. I don’t want
there to be war unless there’s something a country does that is just scandalous
and you have to fight.”
Rosmary said, “If there were more people
like you, there wouldn’t be wars.”
Mom said, “ Being afraid makes me…
impotent.”
She tried to explain about her earlier
depression and said something like, “I was feeling depressed, so the
proprietor… What do we call the proprietor…?”
Kathy said, “Your neurologist. “
Rosemary said very consoling things but
almost immediately moved from “I’m here to get you home” to “We’ll get you to
Aegis” and talked about getting Mom back on the road to recovery.
Mom surprised me by having it together
enough to refer to Aegis as the place near the library. Later Mom said she didn’t think they’d
accept her at Aegis, and Kathy was able to tell her truthfully that they
would. Rosmary Brown says that she’s worked with Alzheimer’s patients for
thirty years, and she’s seen it all. I felt very good about Aegis, and
they probably could have taken her almost immediatley except for this turbulent
day.
Mom wouldn’t take her medicine—not even
her Mestanon—though she took it after lunch when we were there, and she was
sure the sitter who had been with her in the morning, an Indian named Al, was
“a demon.”
She said, “There’s no way of frightening
him. He’s a sadist and he’s going to do it one way or
another.”
She also said that they were all going
to kill her and they were too mean to do it quickly. “Someday we’ll meet in heaven,” she
said. She crossed herself a lot.
When we first got to her room at 11:00, a black guy named Derrick was there,
and Mom, perhaps trying to win him over, said, “Race! I’ve always
believed in the amalgamation of races, don’t you know!”
Race. I really believe in an
amalgamation of races.
But we had to keep our voices down
because she knew they were all listening and were going to use it all against
her. At one point she said there was a machine that went around and
around with everything you said in it. It was built by a …a
handyman. The woman who was sleeping so soundly yesterday when we were
all there was awake and talking to her husband.
“They’re talking about us!” Mom
told us. “This is the most interesting thing that’s happened around here,
and they want to know—do they kill her or don’t they kill her?”
At one point the nurse brought the woman
some medicine and said something like, “This kills the bad guys,” and I thought
surely Mom would make something of that, but she didn’t.
Mom said things like, “I don’t want him
to talk. They’re all bent on saving their own hides. “
If I understood her correctly, she also
told Kathy and me, “You should have brought your husbands.”
Kathy and I—but mostly Kathy-- tried
many, many times to get Mom to eat her lunch, but Mom’s response was always, “I
don’t think so.” But at one point, after having a good exchange with one
of the doctors or nurses, she said, “As long as I’m condemned anyway, I might
as well eat the soup.”
Kathy said, “I make a mean lentil soup,”
and Mom said, “I wouldn’t call it mean.”
Then she explained to the nurse, “That’s
Berkeley college language . Kathy, you should wear your Berkeley sweater.”
Was Mom name-dropping?
But she also asked us to leave, and I’m
wondering now whether those Saturday mornings when Mom seemed so anxious for me
to leave were based on this fear that she didn’t express at that time that my life was in danger if I
stayed.
Her way of asking us to leave was
polite.
“I’m glad that you came, but please
leave. They would go to your house. Any investigation into my
death…”
Something or other was a “precursor to
further abuse.”
She kept trying to prove her
innocence. “It’s been my design not to harm anybody.”
Something about cosmetic surgery came on
the TV screen, and Kathy told about someone in Mom’s book club who, about 25
years ago, had had cosmetic surgery and said it was the most painful thing
she’d ever experienced, and yet Kathy couldn’t even tell the difference between
the before and after.
Mom said, “Keep your voice down!
The woman in the other side is old and wrinkled. Maybe she had it done,
and you’re hurting her feelings.”
I
thought that was so sweet!
Another sweet moment was when we came
back from lunch, Kathy and I, and Derrick, the black sitter who got to hear
about Mom’s belief in the amalgamation of the races, was holding his cell phone
up to Mom’s ear “Because she says she likes Easy Listening.”
It also felt good not to be
the bad guys. Al and his team of brainwashed demons got that role.
Now we would wait to hear
from Kathy about when we would be taking Mom to her new home, and I got back to
work on the collage I hoped would keep the link between everything familiar to
her and everything unknown, which of course some of us “familiar” ones were
starting to be to her.
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