Telling Mom She Wasn't Going Home

          On Sunday morning, I noticed that there was something new blinking on my phone message machine.  I had picked up for Kathy when she called the night before (just shortly after I'd left and written to Suzy and Jonathan) to put Mom on so she could tell me what she needed to tell me, but I realized there was one that had come when I was at the Y!  It was from Kathy, talking about going to emergency the night before.  Mom had wanted us to go to emergency on Friday night because of her hemorrhoids.    But this was an emergency of the Alzheimer's kind. 

           After Mom had poured soap in her milk and started to drink it, Kathy restrained her, and then she   managed to figure out the back door lock and  started down the driveway.  I think it was then that Kathy called the advice nurses and was advised to take Mom in to emergency.  That was about 6:30, during the time I was writing to Suzy and Jonathan.  But I finished my letter before 7:00.  Kathy and Tom stayed at the hospital for six hours.

            In the message she said that Mom was still there. 

              I called Kathy, and as we suspected, she has been heroically dealing with an impossible situation.  They saw right away that Mom needed to be tested and hospitalized because of her extreme state of agitation.  They said that when she left the hospital,  it should be to a care facility.

               That gave me hope  that they would be able to get her medicine right so she could have a peaceful transition and no longer live the tormented life she’d been living.  

          Kathy said that Mom, given something to sedate her, jumped out of the bed “like a jack rabbit” before it could take effect and headed down the hall.  They put a vest on her--something I was afraid she might still be wearing when I went to see her that day.  It was to keep her from escaping from her captors.

          But Kathy told me that when she talked to Mom the next morning, Mom sounded pretty good.  She asked for a book. 

           She probably wouldn't be in the hospital for long.  But I knew that she wouldn't be going back to her home of forty-five years.  The hospital staff told Kathy they could facilitate the paper work needed for Aegis, if that’s where Mom was going.   Aegis could send a staff person to interview Mom in the hospital.  

            Kathy was there when Javier and I arrived with flowers, and soon Suzy arrived.  Had Mom been given a stronger dose of Seraquil?  Was it a magical drug with this new dosage?  She was absolutely radiant and charming, telling the “sitter” or whoever was within hearing range what a wonderful family she had instead of how determined we were to kill her.  So there we all were, Mom sitting up in a chair—no mention of having to go to the bathroom—sort of like a queen on the throne, with us, the prince (Javier) and princesses (Suzy, Kathy, and I) around her in a semi-circle.  There was a sitter in the middle of Mom's room and a very unconscious patient in a bed closer to the door.

            "I feel so rested!"  Mom told us.

             She spoke of taking up knitting again, and she was so much in her element that it occurred to me that maybe she could knit again.   She asked about Jonathan, about my classes, about Suzy’s job.  It was really as if she were holding court, a model monarch.  
           Then she asked, “So when are you taking me home?”

           Kathy began in a gentle tone, saying I remember not what, but Mom got the message. Her radiance became a terrible darkness, and her face fell, conveying the betrayal she felt-- and the embarrassment.  It was like watching the comedy mask become the tragedy mask because of the folds in her face of almost 90 years--folds that were up and then came down.  I had anticipated pain--we all felt that--but it hadn't occurred to me that this would be embarrassing for her.  It hurt her that she had witnesses to her “humiliation,” her “rejection." 

           But she definitely got the message that this was something she would have to deal with.  She didn’t beg or plead except to say, "Well, just take me home for tonight so I won't have to stay here," and I got the feeling that she was just too embarrassed to stay where witnesses had seen her being banished from the throne.

           Mom looked over at the sitter and shrugged as if to say, “What can you do with family like this?”  

          She spoke in a low voice but one that registered all the doubts she’d ever had while in her right mind—nothing about poison sprayed on food but the idea that she wasn’t much fun, didn’t enhance Kathy’s life, wasn’t who she used to be.  She spoke of Tom, Kathy's brother, and her belief that Kathy wanted him to come live with her, and Kathy assured her that that wasn’t the case, that Tom had his own home. Kathy tried to explain that Mom wasn’t well enough to go home without around the clock care.

          Mom said quietly, “Yes, that makes it easier to take me out of my home and away from all my friends and family and put me in a place where I’ll never see them.  People don’t visit people in a home.”   

          We all assured her that we would—regularly.  

           “Well, just take me home tonight because I don’t think I can stay here now.” 

         She looked around and said, “But I see that no one is offering to take me.”   

         My heart sank, and Suzy, who can still cry, was crying.   (I'll talk about emotional scar tissue at another time.)

        The table in front of Mom was in the way, and I really wanted to put my arms around her (hugs and drugs), so I moved closer and put my arms around her, and when I told her we loved and admired her so much but that she’d been begging us to find her a home and had been terrified that we were poisoning her and had tried to run away from home and had been brought back by the police.
               She said, “What?”  like she thought I was crazy.   

               We stressed that we were concerned for her safety.   Suzy explained that this wasn’t her fault,  it was just the terrible disease she had.  I stressed that the doctor had told her that she wouldn’t be able to go home, that she needed to go into a place with around the clock care.  I think maybe that’s how we should have begun it—with what the doctor said and why.

            “Well, you’d better be looking for a place for me to live,” she said very somberly.  “Have you been looking?”  

              She looked at us with a certain civil contempt, and I felt that she was thinking that of course we’d been looking because we didn’t want her around, someone her age, someone who was a nuisance, no longer fun.  We didn't want her in her own home.   

               We then told her we’d found a place called Aegis Living, and she asked where it was, and her face brightened when she heard. 

                “Oh, it’s that place next to the library!”   

               She smiled, and then there was a kind of transition if not a transformation out of the really dark spell we had cast upon her.   

               She said she was really tired.  She said she had to go to the bathroom, and she didn’t want to use the toilet that was put in the room.   
              We helped her up, and she was a bit surprised to see that she didn’t have a back to her hospital dress, so we helped her get on a kimono type robe.  She arranged things on her table and asked Kathy to take back the book My Life by Bill Clinton.   

               Then we all hugged her again and again, and I commented on how she had remembered all the German and Latin words to Christmas carols sung in Joyeux Noel, which we’d tried to watch with her the previous day.  I mentioned her knowing the words to "La Marseillaise,"  and she began to sing them.  

               "Allons,  enfants de la patrie,  le jour de gloire est arrive."
            The day of glory had come?

            Mom didn’t ask any of us to stay with her, which surprised me.  I thought that was one of the things I could do, even if we couldn’t take her home.  
            She walked us to the door of her hospital room, and we all hugged.
             She seemed upbeat, the way she had been before we told her that we couldn't take her home.
            Had she already forgotten?