"Take Me Home! I Thought You Were Going to Take Me Home."

This is so painful to revisit.  But I'm plunging right ahead.  Reflection later.

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Dear Kathy and Suzy,

                This wasn’t Mom’s best day, but she gave me more than a minute of her time.

                I called her from my View and Chew French No Brunch Bunch gathering  (which turned out to have brunch today after all) when I saw that we were going later than usual, and she told me she wasn’t sure she’d still be alive when I got there.  When I got there, Dee said Mom had asked them to call me, and there I was.

                She was in her and Kristine’s bathroom when I walked in the room, and she told me, “You’re not supposed to be in this building.”    She told me that we should definitely stop at a gas station right away, and I wasn’t sure whether she was concerned about running out of gas while making our get-away or she just wanted another toilet, but she definitely wanted to get going.

                “Let’s go!” She said.

                “Where would you like to go?  On a ride?  To the garden?”

                She said, “I thought you were going to take me home.  That would be okay.”

                Kristine was asleep on her own bed, and Mom grabbed her own bag and said, “Let’s go.”  But she was wearing her blue Velcro sandals, which were open, so I suggested the pink ones, which can stay closed. 

                She asked me why I didn’t put down my things so I could help her properly, but I had put down my things, so she put down hers.  Once we got the pink Velcro shoes on, Mom forgot about her big bag and, instead, picked up a book on the Beauty of the Seasons and a container of dental floss.

                “Let’s go,” she said once again.

                So I put an arms around her, and she put an arm around me, and we went out the 4,3,2,1 # door.  She then wanted to go to the bathroom again, and after that, I tried to interest her in the garden, but as soon as we were out the garden door, she said she needed to go to the bathroom, so we went back in and to the bathroom, and then she said, “Take me home.”  I tried the door to the Perry section of Aegis, but that wasn’t the home she meant, so I told her I’d take her on a ride.

                “Take me home,” she said.  I pointed out the sights to her—the Public Library right next door, Safeway, the road construction.

                “Maybe she’ll like me better,” she said.

                “Who?”

                “You know!”  And then she kind of stammered.  I really wasn’t sure whether she meant Kathy or Kristine, but I thought she meant Kathy.

                “Take me home,” she said, and I told her that Kathy wasn’t home right now, and I didn’t have the key.

                She said, “Don’t take me home. Take me anywhere but there.”  Then she said, “Take me home.”

                I didn’t take her by the house, but I soon headed back to Aegis.

                “Where are you going?” she asked.

                “To Aegis.”

                “I don’t want to go to Aegis,” she said.  “Unless…Do you think they might have a place for me there?”

                I told her I was sure of it.

                When we walked in, I suggested that we go to the garden.  (What’s with me and that garden, anyway?  I’ll bet Mom’s probably telling Kristine even as I write, “My daughter’s suffering from short-term memory loss.  She keeps asking me about going out in the garden, and I say no, and then she asks me again!”)

               

                Mom asked the woman at the desk (Oui, Suzette today) where she should sign in for the garden, and Suzette just held her French tongue and I said, “You don’t have to check in Mom.  You can go out to the garden without that.”  But Mom said she needed to go to the bathroom first, so we went down the hall, and then I suggested—Guess!  Mom said, “Okay, and then remembered that it wasn’t okay.  “No, I don’t want to go out there,” so I took her to the flowery door of Perry, which looks like a garden, and she said, “No.  Oh, all right.  I guess these are the people I’m going to have to deal with eventually.”

                Most of the residents were in the TV room, so I suggested the dining room, and Mom said she had to go to the bathroom.  But between bathroom visits, I did let he listen to part of a French song on my iPod, and she asked, “Why didn’t you bring me something I could do something with?”  Then she wanted to write something, so I gave her the back of my notebook, and she said, “What do I write?” and I said, “Anything you want to.”  She wrote, “To whom it may appeal.  I’ll be glad to go to any elderly shut in facility.  Honest!  Nadine Martin.  The best for me I know it.  I’ll be good & helpful too.  Nadine.”

                Then she had to go to the bathroom.  I waited but she didn’t come back.  So after not waiting a terribly long time, I went down the hall, and the door was closed.  I knocked, and when I walked in, I heard her talking to herself, but it turned out that Kristine was up and awake.

                When I walked in, Kristine said to Mom, “See what I mean?”

                So I suspected she had just been talking about trouble makers and people who get all riled up like me.

                That was when  I left.  I told Mom and Kristine that I’d see them on Tuesday, and then I went home, glad I had the key.

                Love,

                Tina

PS  Rocsana saw me shortly after I got there and said she’d given something to Mom that might calm her down.  Maybe it did eventually.

               

PS  I’m always amazed at what I forget to mention!  One is that I’d like to know how to get to a pretty park if Mom’s request to go out (go home) occurs again.  This happened once before, around Easter—the Sunday after Easter when Mom thought it was Easter.

The other is that when she said, “Maybe she’ll like me more,” and I wasn’t sure whether she meant Kathy or Kristine but thought she meant Kathy, I said, “Mom, Kathy loves you. We all do.”  She didn’t say anything to that—no sounds or contradictions.  No affirmations, either.  I wonder whether she confuses Kristine and Kathy, blending the two.  (That would help Kristine quite a bit more than it would help Kathy!)

xoxo

Cuddling and Reading Biblical Updates

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Dear Kathy, Suzy, and Jonathan~

            You may remember that Mom dismissed me last Friday after an audience of one minute because she was ready to take a nap.  She told me to come back Friday.

            I knew it wasn’t yet Friday (tomorrow’s Wednesday; yesterday was Monday, and Obama’s president), but I went anyway and prepared Carol at the reception desk to let me out shortly, but Mom and I wound up spending a very enjoyable 1 hour and 15 minutes together!         Kay was there but at her best—sound asleep—and Mom was lying on her (Mom’s) bed with her eyes closed but either talking in her sleep or continuing a conversation with Kay when she thought Kay was awake or not deaf.  I heard what Mom said, but I can’t remember what the first two sentences were.  I know the third was, “The cigarettes…just look in every cubicle.  You’ll find them.”

            I wasn’t sure whether I should wake her up to be told to leave or just let her sleep, but after a couple of minutes (2x as long as Friday!), she opened her eyes and said, “Oh!  I’m happy to see you!”   She said, “I haven’t see you for a while, but I don’t hold that against you.” 

            I told her that she’d asked me to leave last Friday after I’d been there a minute, and she was really surprised she’d said such a thing.  

            I asked whether she’d like to go out into the garden or leave the room to go somewhere else, but she said she just wanted to lie there, so I lay down beside her, and we had a nice little conversation while she stroked my arm, which she said felt good.

             She asked me what I was up to, and I told her about my courses—a little bit—and said I’d been in touch with some friends from the South because we were discussing “The Help.”            Mom and I talked a little bit about the South.  At first she didn’t remember Arlene, the “colored” woman who came to iron once a week, but she remembered other things.  She just couldn’t believe we were there after the Supreme Court decision to integrate (Brown vs. Board of Education, 1954), and she was right that there was no sign any such law had ever been passed where we went to school.  I told her we’d been there from 1956 to 1964. 

            Then I offered her a lemon cookie, and she took a bite and gave the rest back to me but said she’d try the other one, which was the same kind exactly.  “I think the round ones are better,” she said, eating the second twin. 

I brought out The Funny Times, which I hoped would be a nice change from Unlikely Friends (though’ I’m not tired of that).   I always start with the Harper’s Index, and I thought that if I used sentences instead of fragments, she might be able to follow it.  (And what is this, Jonathan, Economics major:  The U.S. labor productivity has increased 114% since 1972, but the U.S. labor wages have decreased 6%?  Can that be true?)

 Mom guessed 1000 for the number of man-made objects orbiting Earth, and that sounded reasonable to me, but it’s 22,000 in case you’d like to take a look. 

Mother asked, “Do you think you sometimes see them when you think you’re seeing something else?”

 I told her that, well, those couldn’t all be stars! 

I decided to skip the statistics about the confirmed number of terrorist plots against the United States perpetrated by Muslins last year, but just so you know, there were 10.  There were 25 by non-Muslims.  (Last year was the deadliest year for Afghan civilians since the US invaded in 2001, and the CIA drone attacks killed 607 people in Pakistan last year.  You don’t even want to know the number of the ten most popular prime-time television dramas that regularly feature corpses.) 

We read Garrison Keillor’s “A Parent’s Prayer,” and while we were on religion we looked at the updated Bible stories contest, but I had to explain about Facebook before she thought the winning entry was funny:

 “My God, my God!  Why have you unfriended me?”  (Jonathan, you weren’t brought up properly, or you’d know the original.) 

Mom liked, “And for 40 years the mothers told their children, ‘Yes, it’s manna for dinner AGAIN.’” 

I liked “An iPhone for an iPhone” more than Mom did, but she explained “No schtupping on the side” to me.  (I don’t think she got it quite right.)  The last thing we read was “Curmudgeon,” all about Democracy.  (“What gives every man the right to be his own oppressor….)

            Mom talked a little bit about her 90^th birthday, which she still says is on Halloween, and she still wants to be a witch, and when I asked her why, she said, “To show that not all witches are bitches.”   She said she’d like me to get her an iPod, and I told her we could try it out and see how she liked it, which we can.  I doubt that it will work, but who knows!  She remembered that my birthday was November 15.

            So, she was in a really good emotional and mental state, and it was a very quiet, pleasant peaceful hour and a quarter!

            I started to wish you all a good weekend, but I went back before Friday, didn’t I!

            Love,

            Tina 

Oh, I almost forgot that Mom seemed puzzled about how I got in.

A Hard Week Better than Some

On Wed., August 17 and Thursday August 18, 2011, Kathy went to see Mom with varying reactions, depending upon the time of day.

Kathy felt she was better on Wednesday afternoon than she had been in the morning when Nan had visited her and found Mom playing the piano but “not much in the mood for a visit.”  Nan left after a short time.  Then Kathy went around 3:30 Pm, and Mom seemed glad to see her.  “Not quite as fearful as yesterday.”  Mom played the piano for about half an hour.  Kathy thought it was very observant of Mom to note that Kathy had a new purse, which Mom said she liked.  Mom was very solicitous toward one of the more fragile residents.

“There was more of the obsession about the MS than I have seen for awhile.”

The nurse Sarah Jane said Mom had a hard time at lunch, but Wednesday was still better than Tuesday. 

On Thursday, Kathy thought it was a pretty good day.  “I went in the afternoon, and she was taking a serious nap, so I left.  I returned after dinner and she and Kay were resting.  “Thank God Kay was asleep!  Your mom was in a good space, not fearful and kind of up.”  Sarah reported that Mom played in piano in the morning and seemed improved from earlier in the week.

Suzy was still moving in to her new house and getting her e-mail set up.

Friday Minute with Mom, August 19, 2011

Dear Suzy and Jonathan~

                Kathy already knows about this, but I’ll put her name after the cc

                I packed up Magic Cookie Bars for Mom and, just in case she was tired of Unlikely Friends, I also packed The Funny Times.  (As you may remember a few weeks ago, she was very adept at finding the funniest cartoons and reading them aloud.)

                But when I got there, she announced they she and “she” were taking a nap. 

                I said, “Well, would you like me to leave and come back?”

                She said, “Yes, come again—maybe next Friday.”

                I offered her the Magic Cookie bars, but she said, “I already have some.”

                So I talked to Rocsana, Georgia and Mary (Assisted Living mother and daughter), Sarah-Jane, and Sonia, but really just to say hello. 

            Then I left.  It felt so strange to spend 50 minutes getting there for 1 minute of time with Mom, so I took the opportunity to go by to see Kathy for just a few minutes.  We talked and agreed that this has been a better week for Mom and that it’s good that she has the autonomy to not need us when it’s time to nap and to be able to say so.

                I think my regular days, now that the semester has started, will be Tuesday and Saturday. 

               

                Love,

                Tina/Mom

PS  Glad the conservatorship has been resolved.  {This was in reference to Suzy and Jonathan’s conservatorship for David, something that was begun when Mom could no longer take it on and I was handling Daddy’s “estate” for five years.}

Sometimes around this period, Mother told Kathy, “Well, we’ll be back together.”

"Take Me Home for Just One Night...I've Changed."

                                                            Sunday, August 14, 2011

Dear Suzy, Kathy,and Jonathan,

            This isn’t quite the letter that Kathy needs to come back to, so she may want to wait to read it.

            Mom was lying on her bed when I arrived a little after 11:00 today, and she looked frightened even though Kay wasn’t in the room.  One of the first things she said to me was, “Get me into a program where I can…expand.”

             I was trying to figure out whether she meant she was tired of BINGO and coloring circles or what, and then she explained, “Where I won’t poop all the time.”

             I told her that I really understood how worried she was about her BMs, but that, in fact, she didn’t poop all the time.  Her activities really were more expansive.  She played the piano for people.  She—

            “Take me home,” she said.  “For just one night.”

            I reminded her that one Christmas, when she was at my house, she didn’t feel comfortable because she couldn’t get close enough to the bathroom.”

            “But I’ve changed,” she said.

            She seemed so distressed.  I hoped that if we left the room, she might feel better, and she was willing to go out to the garden, but not for long. 

            She told me she wanted treatment so she wouldn’t have to go to the bathroom all the time.  She didn’t seem sure exactly where she was, but she wanted to see doctors and experts. 

            “What happens here if I need a doctor?” she asked.

            I explained that there was a nurse right upstairs, and we took her to see her neurologist whenever the time came.  She wanted to know when the next appointment was, and I told her that I’d check, but she’d had an appointment back in June and now it was August. 

            She was behaving a little bit as if she’d just arrived at this unfamiliar place and needed to get her bearings. 

           

            At that moment we were sitting at a table in the dining room, where she sometimes goes into an “act” that helps her focus on something besides her fears.  I’d started reading the Women’s Wit calendar, and Mom said, “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve read that?”

            Her point was well-taken.

            I got out the Unlikely Friends book, and once again Mom’s memory was sharp.  “Oh, we’ve read that!”

            “But not ALL of it,” I said.  “There are 47 stories, and we’ve only read, maybe ten or twenty.”

            I read about the orangutan and the kitten, but Mom didn’t enjoy it, and she told me to put the book away, which I did. 

“Who can I talk to here, besides you?  When you’re not here?”

            May and Bobbie were at the table, but I suggested the nurse, Sarah Jane.  She asked me to go get her, and I headed off, but Sarah Jane, now in a higher position, isn’t there on Sundays.  Someone named Ryan came to our aid.  He said he’d talked to Mom once before when she was playing the piano, and it was really nice.  We checked for Sonia, who was giving a tour.

            Ryan went to talk to Mom, and Mom told him about her worries that she wasn’t getting the right treatment to get over her BM problem and she didn’t know where to go.  He said he could take her to the bathroom, or he could get a female aide to take her.  Mother made an exasperated sound that said this wasn’t what she meant, but she said she’d go with me, and Divina said she’d bring prune juice.

            Once again Mom asked me to take her  home, and once again I reminded her that she hadn’t felt comfortable in my home because of her worries about needing the bathroom.  She said, “It’s clear that you’re trying to…me.”  (I know the word she used means get rid of, but I can’t remember what word she used.  It was something like “ditch.”

            All I felt capable of doing was trying to acknowledge her feelings and remind her that we looked for the best possible place for her, and this was it, and it was where I wanted to go when I had her concerns.  (Got that, Jonathan?)  Then I’d go get people who were “higher up.”  I spoke to Sonia  when she was through with her tour, and she said she would talk to Mom.

            I have a workshop tomorrow all day, and on Tuesday, I have to be home until the washer-dryer comes.  But if it comes early enough, I’ll see Mom after it’s installed that day.  Otherwise, I may not be able to go back until Friday because of my classes. 

            Love,

            Tina/Mom

PS  I did see Kay for a moment, but it was when she was in the hall.  I complimented her on the pretty woven scarf she was wearing, and she said It was from her daughter.

            “Donna?” I asked.

            “No, Cathy.  She works really hard.”

            “Oh, yes.  She lives in the mountains.”

            “It’s hard for her.  It’s hard for a lot of people.  That’s the way life is.”

            (Note:  Jonathan and I have read books that show that people don’t remember things accurately, so I’m really not sure how much of this she said and how much I said.  But I know she started it, and I know what  she said when I made some trite comment about how, “Yes, life is that way.  Sometimes it’s pleasant, and sometimes it’s really hard.” 

            She said, “Well, this place is rotten to the core!”  She and Mom seemed to be in agreement on that today.

            Oh, I forgot something really important!  (See how unreliable memory is, how Being Wrong I am?)  I think Carol’s family (Lauren, Madeleine, and Zak), who were with Carol at a nearby table,  must have heard the conversation I was having with Mom and how unhappy she was, and  they tried to help her feel better.  It was really sweet.  Lauren said, “Your mom really plays the piano well!  And she was telling us about her work as a probation officer.”  Mom smiled and said, “Yes, I wrote some good reports, and they received praise, but I didn’t get a raise or anything.”