“Do unto mothers as you would have others do unto
you,” I mused as I shared the agony with Kathy, Suzy, and Mom’s friend Nan that
Mom wasn’t happy at a place we’d choose for ourselves in an Advance Health
Care Directive.
She wasn’t in an agitated state. She was depressed and solemn.
I
thought about the Broadway musical Next
to Normal about a bipolar mother and the attempt to get her medicine just
right. Each combination of pills caused
different side effects until she takes a concoction that causes her
to say, “I don’t feel like myself. I don’t
feel anything at all” and the doctor notes with relief, “Patient stable.”
There
were days when Mom seemed quite sane, but that didn’t mean happy. That didn’t mean Mom.
When I arrived on April 7, Mom
wasn’t in the group room, but she was at the door of her room with Kay, and
they seemed to be having a really nice exchange. Mother looked
beautiful in her pink pullover, with her white, white hair. But as
soon as Kay got on her way, Mom walked to her bed and lay back on the pillow (a
very pretty pillow case that Kathy and Suzy had chosen) and said, “Kay means well, but she is really deaf
and like a lot of people here, she is wavering between sane and not.”
I gave her the card I’d brought
for her to give Kay, but she wanted me to write it.
“You
wrote the one to Ada,” I reminded her.
“You
can write this one,” she said,
But Ada
was still on my mind, and instead of Kay, I wrote, “Happy Birthday, Ada.”
“Who’s
Ada?” Mom asked.
“Uh oh,
“ I said. “Not Kay!”
I made
really attractive little designs out of the Ada to obliterate that error and
put a similar design on the other side of Happy Birthday and then wrote Kay at
the bottom.
“Well, you sure made a mess out of that, “ Mom
said. “You sign it so she doesn’t think I did it.”
She put her head back down on
the pillow, and when I said, “Yes, you need to rest,” she said, “No, I need to
die.”
I just said, “I prefer the world
with you in it,” but I didn’t tell her she didn’t need to die.
“I don’t think I’ll ever again stay at a place
where I don’t know the people for more than, say, twelve hours. I’ve never felt closer to the people in the
Gutenberg Concentration Camp than I do here.”
“Was Gutenberg a concentration
camp?” I asked, stupidly, as if that really mattered.
“Maybe not, but it sounds German,”
Mom said. “This is just a holocaust.”
“I’m so sorry you feel that way
because we all love you so much and this looks like such a pretty place, a
place I would like to be when I get older. “
She said, “I thought it would
be so much fun, but it really isn’t.
She said something about the
“bellicose” people, and then she wanted to explain what she meant by
bellicose.
“Bellicose as in blare.”
She said she just wanted to lie there
“to make them feel sorry for me. They killed me with their
verbosity.”
She also asked me whether I’d help
her pack.
Then Ada came in and told us that
she was just having an awful time. People were treating her as if they
didn’t like her at all—as if she’d done something wrong. Mother then sat
up in bed and commiserating, said that
they must really feel insecure, so the slightest thing made them feel
threatened and they acted not very nice.
Ada then recited her “The peace of
God is my one goal” affirmation.
The first time around, when she
paused and asked Mom whether she wanted her to continue, Mom said, “I don’t
think so.” But then Mom relented and even asked me to write down the
words. “Don’t tell Kathy
what I said about this place because she’ll think I was complaining, but why doesn’t Kathy
want me at home?”
“Mom, you asked us to find you a
place because you didn’t feel safe at home,” I reminded her. “You were running away. You were throwing out your food. You were saying Kathy was trying to kill you.”
“Oh, that thing about circumventing. About going to the neighbors.”
“Oh, that thing about circumventing. About going to the neighbors.”
Some birds came along to eat the bird seeds in the bird feeder. Either
the birds or a chipmunk shook the birdfeeder so that the seeds scattered on the
ground. I thought that was a wonderful sight, and Mom got into for a few
seconds, saying, “We should take pictures and send them to each of the
grandchildren.”
Then she turned to Ada.
“I have to restructure my whole life,” Mom
said.
“Step
back and let God lead the way,” Ada said.
Then she
once again recited the piece about the peace of God.
Mom
said, “I could feel good about being here if I knew for sure that you would be here.”
Ada
said, “I have no plans to leave, but it’s in God’s hands.”
Mother asked about sharing a room with her.
“Would
you give it a try?”
Ada
said that she would really have to think about it because it would be a big
change.
“Do you
have a roommate?” I asked her, and she said, “I have an apartment,” and Mom
said, “Oh, yes. I forgot that. That would be a big change for
you. There really wouldn’t be room.”
I emphasized that they could still be together
most of the day and that they were just down the hall from each other.
Ada
said, “I need a hug,” and she hugged Mom, who hugged back.
“I love you,” Ada told Mom, who said, “Thank
you.” But I think later she said she loved Ada too.
Mom wanted to eat the cookies I made but today she didn’t want to eat the
sandwich I brought in for her.
They
brought her lunch to her room after she turned down their invitation to come
and eat with the others. But she ate her soup. Then she started
obsessing about the BMs again and fearing that the food would create a problem.
“At
home I didn’t have to worry about that, but here I do.”
I didn’t
remind her that at home she worried about it all the time.
She did take her meds, and at least she gave her obsession with her BMs as the
reason not to eat rather than the certainty that they were trying to poison
her.
She didn’t remember that Nan had come the day before. and she wasn’t sure whether Kathy had come but
didn’t seem surprised when I said she’d come a couple of times in the past few
days.
She had
asked her friend Nan why Kathy hadn’t come to see her, and Nan also reminded
her that Kathy had been there.
We needed
to leave something with her to help her remember our visits. Proof we weren’t abandoning her. Proof she wasn’t at the Guttenberg Concentration Camp .
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