Part
2:
When the opera ended, Mom
immediately jumped up. She usually
excuses herself, but she didn’t this time.
I opened my bag of Mother’s
Lemon-Frosted Cookies and offered them to the people who were awake, and then I
went to Mom’s room, where Kay had already accosted her verbally. An aide, Tinzin or something like that
(parents from Tibet, but he was born in India), was there trying to arbitrate
and protect Mom while respecting Kay’s needs (as I’d begged them to do in the
e-mail I sent out), and when I greeted Kay and asked how she was doing, she
said, “I was doing fine until she came In here.”
I tried to gently point out that
this was Mom’s room too (not so much for Kay’s sake as for Mom’s), but I
shouldn’t have tried. Kay then went into
all that our transgressions, and of the
clothes Mom was wearing, Kay said, “She’s wearing my clothes. She saw me wearing them yesterday and she
just couldn’t help herself. She had to
go through my things and wear what she saw me wearing.”
Mother had already taken off her
shirt. She then took off her pull-over,
and I showed Kay where it was labeled Nadine Martin, but I’m sure she figured
that was one more of our transgressions—putting Mom’s name in Kay’s clothes.
So…Tinzin tried hard to get Kay out
of the room. Bingo? A walk?
I led Mom out, and she was totally
rattled. The self-confidence she’d shown
being witty and superior to my bad theatre manners, etc. was all gone.
I reminded her that Kay had serious problems
but wasn’t dangerous, but Mom said everything I hoped she wasn’t feeling.
“It’s against the law to go in there” (dining
room) and “I wish I were dead,” which she said when we were in the bathroom
across the hall from their room.
She had on five padded panties, and the
elastic bands were in various spots, tangling with one another so it was really
hard for the two of us to get them back up in the right order—so as not to cut
off Mom’s circulation and so she could be more comfortable.
She asked me to take her home. She said she hated it there. When I asked her where she’d rather be (and
expected her to say “Home”), she said, I’d like to do something modest in
service like my mom’s doing. This last
year has been just awful.”
Was she thinking that Kathy was her
mom? Was she referring to Kathy’s
volunteer work?
As I mentioned to you, I’d planned
to let her read out aloud from the book Unlikely
Friends, but she didn’t want to. She
tried to work a crossword puzzle, and while she was basically copying the words
from the key into the correct space on #73, Tinzen told her her piano music was
on the piano. I asked whether she would
play, and she said she just couldn’t.
He asked whether he should put it in
her room for her, and she said, “No. She
hates me so much, you’d better not put anything of mine in there. Put it in the piano bench, but choose a time
when not too many people are looking.”
I’m not sure the piano bench has a place to store music. I meant to look. But Mom wound up choosing to do one of those
giant jigsaw puzzles—ones with about six pieces large enough to take up all the
space on a card table—with three other people.
When I kissed her goodbye until
tomorrow and told her I loved her, she said, “Bye.”
I’m sure she felt I’d betrayed her
by not taking her home. (And she did
tell Sarah, the weekend nurse, that it would take two to possibly control Kay,
and “my daughter gets too riled up.”)
I plan to go today and/or tomorrow
around 11:00 and talk to Sonia, but I want to be protective of Kathy,too. I don’t want them to make a room change until
Kathy has been asked.
Love,
Tina Mom
PS It’s taken me ages to write this because of
major computer problems. It stops
“submitting” my sentences every two minutes, and then there’s the blue VISTA
circle twirling for 4 minutes. You do
the math! (I know you can’t because I
haven’t provided the time I started or finished….)
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