Dear
Kathy and Suzy,
This was the first time I ever arrived to a closed door, but Mom was lying on
the bed, and Kay was sitting in her chair, and they seemed to be getting along
when (after tapping) I opened the door. Mom didn’t speak even once of
anyone’s trying to poison her, and Kay said hello instead of “I think that you
should go now.” I sat down in the chair beside Kay, and she didn’t
express any fear that she would get what I had.
I presented the plant I’d brought to Mom and Kay, and Mom accepted it without
any talk of the jealousy it would engender. She invited me to put it
beside the beautiful yellow rose plant Suzy brought her earlier. (The
card was there too!) Mom was very lucid and so much like the self we
consider her “real” self.
First she said, “How many people
would have their daughter visit and then just lie back on the bed the way I’m
doing?”
(This is one good change. On
Poshard, I always felt she was fighting against sleep, but here she’s more
inclined to lie down on her bed—maybe not having a lot of other options, but
still…)
Kay asked Mom whether getting her
teeth fixed had hurt much, and Mom said, no, that they’d given her—what was the
word—something to make her numb all over and she just lay back and slept.
“I can believe that!” Kay
said, and Mom laughed, aware of Kay’s image of her.
Kay said she really wanted to get her teeth
fixed because they stuck out and rubbed the wrong way, but her lungs weren’t
strong enough for her to be given what keeps it from hurting. Kay also said that she wouldn’t be
able to travel today, and she didn’t know where the rumor started that she was
going to travel. I asked her where she’d like to go, and she said, “Maybe
next door.” We then talked about the library, and Mom remembered it was
very close.
You’d told me about Mom’s exercise class, Suzy, so I asked Mom what they did in
exercise class, and she said, “Not much.”
I thought that sounded a lot like
what I do at the Y.
Mom told me that you, Kathy, had been there for a couple of hours.
“Even when we lived together, we
didn’t often spend that much time together,” she said. (I think she meant just
visiting—another plus in releasing you from being the chief care-giver 24 hours
a day!)
She told me that you’d brought
chocolates for Kay too, but Kay had been concerned about her teeth and hadn’t
taken any.
Mom said that you were bringing her
whatever she asked for and said, “I guess the best way of keeping me out is by
giving me what I want from within.”
Then she told me that the place
(Aegis) was fine, but it wasn’t great.
I asked her what she’d change, and
she said, “More mental stimulation as a routine. If I ran the
place, I’d sit down and make a history—maybe just a page—and say that we want
to make you feel not displaced and introduce a range of things for the
patients’ delight.”
(I loved that “range of things for
the patients’ delights.” I don’t always remember the exact words, but I
know that was her phrase.)
I told her she had some really good
ideas, and the person to talk with would be Dee, the one we first talked to
when Mom asked us to find her a place. I told her what Dee had said about
liking to talk to her.
Mom had other ideas to share: “I’d
tell them, before they signed any papers, the best things to bring—a drawer of
things. Games. Because that’s what we did before TV. Card
games like canasta. And some games that weren’t cards at all…I never
thought I‘d miss TV.”
I reminded her that there was one in the
sitting room (and didn’t mention that most of the bodies in front of it looked
half-dead). I asked her whether she’d like to go in there because she
expressed concern that Kay might need to have some quiet now.
By this time Joy, who usually
wanders in and takes all the remaining cookies, sat down, thanks to Mom’s
graciousness. There was an extra chair, and Mom asked her very politely
if she’d like to sit there. Joyce said yes, and then we were a
semi-circle of people at the foot of Mom’s bed!
As you’d mentioned, Suzy, and as I noticed Thursday (but am not sure I
mentioned), Mom’s left eye was drooping. I know she was very, very tired,
as I noticed shortly after I arrived. The first time I offered to go and
come back Tuesday, she expressed surprise that I was staying such a short
time. But after another 40-50 minutes, she once again expressed concern
about Kay needing to rest, and when I asked whether she, Mom, would like to go
into another room or to the garden, she said she was too tired.
So then I did say goodbye, but not
until Mom had told me about the mouse in the wall behind her bed. She
said, “I don’t think I was hallucinating,” which I thought was a consideration
showing pretty good mental health.
Not once the whole time I was there
did she go to the bathroom or even talk about it.
We did read some from the Contrary
to Popular Opinion book that helped her make the transition from paranoid
to much more relaxed with you, Suzy, in the morning. She cautioned me to
choose something simple as she glanced towards Kay and Joy.
When I came to a passage about Pliny
the Elder (who erroneously said that caesarean section comes from Julius
Caesars’ delivery), we weren’t sure how to pronounce Pliny, and when Mom went to
look it up, she knocked over the blue lamp, which I only temporarily put
together again.
“Tina the mechanic,” Mom
said. Uh huh.
She told me you, Kathy, were
bringing over her blue biographical profiles book.
When I hugged Mom goodbye, she
whispered to me that Kay was heart-broken because she’d expected her family,
and they hadn’t come. I know better than to hug Kay, but I said goodbye
in the warmest way I could without giving her what I have.
Then I talked to John Collins and Kingsley about Mom’s drooping eyelid. I
told him it was very important that the Med Tech give Mom the Mestanon every
two hours, and he said he’d call her. But no one came. He then went
upstairs to talk to the nurse because their usual means of calling wasn’t
working. When he came back, he said she said she’d be right down. I
waited about 10 minutes and saw Sylvia trying to go out the door and a small
group of people gathered together for the birthday of someone named Erik.
When the nurse didn’t come, I went
up to Rosmary’s station and saw someone named Sarah Ann Stull (?), who I guess
was on duty today. I told her about my concern, and she checked the
charts and saw that Mother had been due a pill at 3:00 or 3:30. It was
then 3:40. I offered to take it to Mom, and she said, no, that she had to
do it herself. I said I’d go down with her, and she said it would be a
while, and I said, “I’ll wait.” And I did, and we went down together, and
Mom was really friendly to the nurse, but Mom thought the nurse was
Dee, and that I’d brought her down so she could tell her the ideas she
had.
Erik, the birthday person who had followed me in, followed me out.
And I felt really good about the
visit—Mom’s state of mind, her graciousness to and thoughtfulness about Kay,
Joy, Sarah. She seemed pretty content and at peace where she was at the
moment.
I’ll visit her again on Tuesday, but I have to attend to something before
coming, so I might be a little bit later. I’ll be there no later than
noon, though.
Once again, Happy Easter. Hopes have risen!
Love,
Tina
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