Tuesday,
July 26, 2011
Dear
Suzy and Jonathan (I’m respecting the fact that Kathy is on vacation.)
Maybe Mom can best sum up how she
was doing today. Before I left, she
said, “If I can get through today, I can get through anything.”
When I arrived today about 11:15,
Mom was in the cafeteria at a table with Carol and Ella Mae, but she was
talking to someone (Bobbie?) at the other table, and when I asked Mom how she
was, she said, “Not so good.” At first I
thought she was in a paranoid frame of mind, but as the saying goes, even
paranoids have enemies, and she was agonizing over Kay (whom she never calls by
name). She said she would be moving, but
“she’ll kill me before it’s over.” Maybe
that was a bit strong, as was her response when I told her that Kay had
problems with reality but that the staff understood that Mom had rights that Kay
didn’t understand. The staff knew that Kay
didn’t own the establishment. “But I
think she has people working for her.
Watching,” Mom said.
Okay. I take back what I said about paranoia.
When Kay was brought in and seated
(by herself as is so often the case), Mom nudged me and said, “There she
is. My ex-roommate.”
Then Mom said, “I wonder what my
dearly departed is wondering.”
By this time, Ada had had her hair
combed and had joined us, so she asked Mom to repeat what she was
wondering. (Ada seems annoyed these
days, and she doesn’t like her food.)
After reassuring Mom that she (Mom)
was a wonderful person we all knew was wonderful and innocent of charges and
with rights to her side of the room (now very well labeled), I tried to
distract Mom with the Funny Times
newspaper I’d brought. It’s a newspaper
of 24 pages, but Mom managed to find the column “How to Be a Burden on Your
Children.” Mom read a few sentences aloud and underlined them, but I saw no
indication that they made any sense to her.
She found a cartoon with a guy just
off the phone telling his wife, “Our broker just informed me that we have to
die in two years.”
I was starting to feel really bad
about what I’d brought in.
Mom wrote “Running out of insurance”
and drew an arrow to the man, which showed a pretty good grasp.
In the frame of another cartoon, she
copied the words below, which were “Whoa, Boy.
Whoa.”
She seemed to grasp the one of a
woman at the computer looking at Genealogy Services: “Find Relatives: $100 + up—Prevent Relatives
from Finding you $1000 + up.” We all
laughed. At one point I accidentally tore a page, and Mom was really
annoyed, as if she couldn’t take me anywhere and couldn’t afford to prevent
relatives from finding her. She took the
page away from me and tried to repair it.
In a few minutes she correctly
identified the funniest cartoon and explained it to the other people at the
table. “There’s a nurse, and she’s
saying, ‘The doctor will see you now, but please try not to upset him with all
your medical problems.’” I laughed and
the others smiled.
Mom explained a couple of the other
cartoons. Then she asked about lunch and
wanted the chocolate drink Carol had gotten, so I got it for her, and later I
got her a refill. I asked her about
playing the piano, and she said, “I don’t usually have much of a concert in the
afternoon.” She sort of announced to the others at the table that she had
wanted to practice the piano, but then when it got so crowded, she didn’t want
to.
She asked me to get her napkin from
on top of the piano, where I also found The
Lazlo Letters and a couple of crossword puzzle books. She mentioned Kay a few more times. “If I had a car, I’d just go,” Mom said.
She told me she’d called Kathy, but she didn’t
think the call had gone through. “I
wanted to tell her that I’d soon be out of my natural habitat.”
They were pounding in the carpet
upstairs, and Ada asked, “What’s that noise?”
I told her, and then she wanted to know, “What’s that noise.”
Franz and Bobbie were holding hands
very sweetly, and then he looked at her and said, “What’s your name? I don’t know your name.”
“You don’t know my name?” Bobbie
asked. “It’s Bobbie.”
He tried to pronounce it and with
her help finally came pretty close.
“Don’t forget my name,” she told him
gently but firmly.
Then she wanted to help him to the
bathroom, but the staff asked them to sit back down. (Like the staff, I
suspected that they were going to make their getaway. Bobbie is half of the sister team that called
a taxi to take them away. They’re always
plotting.) The staff said they’d take Franz
to the bathroom, and Bobbie said, “Thank you.
I appreciate that.”
“I wonder what my ex-roommate has in
mind,” Mom said, looking over at Kay. . “She just brushed me off,”
“What’s that noise?” Ada asked.
“This food is awful!”
“I don’t know where we’re going to
go after lunch,” Mom said.
I told her some of the
possibilities, and then Rocsana came by to give Mom her medicine, and I told
Rocsana how worried Mom was about not having a place to go, and Rocsana was
very reassuring.
“You have your bed and your
dresser. It’s all yours. And if you have any problems you can just
come out and look for one of us. We wear
these blue shirts. We all look the
same.”
And Mom said, “How late are you
going to be here?” And Rocsana said,
“Till eight.”
Then Mom, without finishing her
lunch, wanted to go to her room, which we did.
She said she had to get in bed or Kay would be mad.
“I’m so scared, I don’t know what to
do,” Mom said.
I repeated every encouraging word
we’d tried, and Mom vacillated between wanting me to talk to the people at the
Central Office and wanting me not to say a word because she didn’t want to be a
tattle-tale.
I stayed longer than usual with
her. That’s when she said, “If I can get
through today, I can get trough anything.”
She called my name as I was leaving,
“I love you, Tina.” She remembers all of
our names, but she never remembers Kay’s.
After I left, I talked to Divina,
and she said that earlier in the day, Kay had been packing up, but she wasn’t
sure whether she was packing up Mom’s stuff or her own stuff or both. What if she gets confused and leaves but
takes Mom with her?
Nan will be there tomorrow, and I’ll
go again on Thursday.
Love,
Tina
PS She’s wearing four padded panties. When I asked about that, she said, “I have to
or she says I’m going to the bathroom too much.”
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