Saturday,
May 21, 2011
Dear
Kathy and Suzy,
Javier and I went to see Mom before
a 60th birthday party yesterday, and because of very heavy traffic
we got there just at 4:00, when the sing-along with Peter was beginning. I love sing-alongs and the idea of singing
with Mom, but I’m having second thoughts about whether it’s “disruptive” when I
join in. I felt especially bad that the
staff asked Franz to give his seat to me so I could sit beside Mom. I definitely didn’t want him to have to
move! I hoped to add a chair, not take
his away! Mom was in the center of that
row with Franz on her left and two people I hadn’t met before on her
right. Mom was holding a flower as well
as a song sheet, and she was passing song sheets down to other people in a very
polite, solicitous way. When she saw me, she smiled but didn’t look overjoyed.
Ada, who was sitting in front of
Mom, got up and came over, saying, “For some reason, I just wanted to get up
and give you a hug.” After the hug, I
protested against Franz’s giving up his seat, but he got up and sat at the back
with Javier, and when I sat down, Mom said (wisely!), “When you come, it makes
the others feel bad that they don’t have visitors. It’s a mixed blessing.”
So…we sang “Misty,” “All the Things
You Are, “Getting to Know You,” “Climb
Every Mountain,” “Yesterday,” “Hello,
Dolly,” “Unforgettable,” etc., but for some reason (maybe the accompanist’s
having trouble finding the sheet music for the various songs) we didn’t sing
the songs in the order they came. Also,
the sheets were in plastic sheet protectors, so in addition to having a little
bit of trouble finding which song they were on, the residents may have had
trouble reading through the plastic, which caught the light. But Mom was “game.” She had a very polite, subdued manner about
her, and I thought of the song from the Pulitzer Prize winning Next to Normal, when the bi-polar mother in
the family is on medicine that makes her totally sane for the first time in a
long time, and she sings, “Wish I Were Here.”
Because of the party back in SF and
the delay due to the traffic (an accident?
The Giants’ game?), we had to leave right after the sing-along, so Mom
and I had very little chance to talk. She did ask me about the young man I’d
brought by in a dream she had had. She
said something nice about one of the Indian aides.
Oh, and one time she made a
joke. When Peter the accompanist said,
“You’ll recognize this one,” Mom said, “Okay.
Recognize it or I’ll slap you good!”
She also laughed (in her very
subdued, dignified way) when I told her my friend’s 60th birthday
party was starting at the same time the world was ending. She said, “Oh, is that the report they keep
giving on the news?” and I thought maybe
it was.
She didn’t seem to know many of the
songs, but she gamely sang along and applauded and even once shouted out, “That
was nice. Thank y
Carol, one of the concierges, sang
along too. I like her a lot!
Ada kept telling the woman sitting
next to her, Shirley, to be quiet, that she was talking too much.
Shirley seemed to be saying things
like, “All the hot lovers over there” and “So I put it on because he wanted to
see me in it.”
And Ada kept saying, “You talk too
much.”
Mom was just the picture of propriety
and kindness.
We got to the party about an hour
late, and I think my camera may have fallen out of my bag at Aegis, so I’ll
call them today. But in summary, Mom
looked good and seemed calm.
I’ll go again on Tuesday—maybe I’ll
go in time to eat lunch with her or come close to the end so we can talk but I
won’t interfere with what she has going.
This is the finals week, so I’ll be
giving exams and reading compositions and calculating results. Then the following Tuesday, May 31, we’re
leaving for Germany and will be back June 9.
Mom seems to be “stable,” which I
think is wonderful because she seems to be free of the most nightmarish
fears. I think again of the efforts in Next to Normal to get the bipolar mom on
medicine that works. She keeps
describing the secondary effects in the song “My Psychopharmacologist and I,”
and then, after about 8 visits to her doctor, she says, “I don’t feel like
myself. I don’t feel anything at all,”
and the doctor brightens and says,
“Hmm…Patient stable.” But in the case of
Mom, I think this is so much better, and she may be feeling more at peace
instead of thinking “Wish I were here.”
Love,
Tina
PS Javier and I plan to see David on Thursday,
so maybe I’ll see Mom Tuesday and Saturday.
I have an exam and two retirement parties on Friday.
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