About Mom (by phone) Monday, August 1,
2011
I talked to Mom last night, when she
said she wasn’t doing very well, but she wasn’t doing very bad either. When I told her I’d be coming the next day,
she said, “I’m really glad to hear that, but I’ve got to get off the phone now
to attend to my bathroom matters.” I
talked to Nan yesterday too, and she told me Mom had not been her best last
Wed. She tried to leave with Nan. She’ll be seeing Mom tomorrow.
(As
of 2013: When Dana tried to send me
three pictures of her in her “halo” after she had hit her head and damaged the
vertebra, there must have been a virus.
The 3 MB e-mail kept coming in and filling Outlook and made it
impossible to send out messages or see much of anything except for that
repeated e-mail. This, of course, is a
topic worth focusing on, but I’m just leaving this time marker so I can come
back to it someday—perhaps in retirement!
This was also the period when Suzy was moving in to her new house.)
About
Mom August 2, 2011
Dear
Suzy and Jonathan,
Suzy, I hope your second night on 50th
Avenue went well! Please let us know!
Jonathan, thanks again for your help
resolving (I think) the problem with the excessive e-messages. I called the number you found for me, and
AT&T blocked everything from Dana’s e-mail
address—not the solution I’d hoped for,
but Dana has other e-mail addresses (and names), and I’ve let her know. I’ve received some nice single messages from
her, so I don’t understand why that one kept (I hope I can use the past tense)
coming in for all those days.
When I got to Aegis, I found out
they were having computer problems, too.
Their whole system was down.
My time with Mom was very
brief! Sonia had asked me to stop by and
talk to her, but she wasn’t in her office at 9:45 when I arrived, so I went on
to the Perry section, and I saw Mom from the back walking down the corridor in
the direction of her room and the bathroom.
She seemed more bent over than usual, and when I said, “Hi, Mom!” and
asked her how she was, she said, “Terrible!”
I said, “I’m sorry, Mom. What’s
the matter?” She said, “They’re going to
kill me.” I put my arms around her and
said, “I’m so sorry you feel that way,” and she said, “I don’t just feel that
way. That’s the way it is.”
I noticed that she was wearing black
bedroom slippers I’d never seen before, and I told her I had some new shoes for
her—ones like her other sandals, which had Velcro straps that had started to
lose their hold.
She was receptive to putting them on.
“Do you like them?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said and after we’d put on
the new ones, she handed me the black ones and said, “Now, I think these are hers, so you’d better
return them, and I mean fast.”
I did.
Kay was in her (Kay’s) armchair but not
sitting with her usual good (rigid?) posture.
She was slouched but talking to herself or conversing with voices that
only she could hear.
Mom told me she
had to go to the bathroom, and then she had to go to bed.
“Goodbye,” she said.
I
followed her to the bathroom, where I saw she was wearing only one panty-pad,
not two, but she really, truly wanted me to leave.
After
she finished going to the bathroom (where she put the toilet paper in the
wastebasket the Mexican/rest of the world/ how we’ll probably do it ourselves
someday way. I followed her to her room. I still had that Unlikely Friendship book to make her joyous! But she entered her room alone, said
something to commiserate with Kay, and then looked back at me at the door and
whispered, “Scram!” I did.
When
I got out I saw Rosmary and Divina in the dining room, and I explained that Mom
wasn’t feeling very good. Divina said,
“She just played for us!” But I had
missed that.
Divina
and another aide led a couple of residents away so they wouldn’t be frightened
by anything I said, and I talked to Rosmary for a few minutes about Mom and the
nature of the disease. I told her how
upbeat Mom had been while watching the opera on Sunday afternoon and then how
browbeaten she seemed five minutes later, after being with Kay. We talked about Kathy’s being away and the
possibility that that made a difference in how Mom felt even though Mom hasn’t
mentioned her.
Then, once out
of 4,3,2, 1 #, I saw Sonia Chahal-Singh, the Executive Director, who turned out
to be the one I’d found in the lobby one day and asked to help me solve an
iPhone problem. She recalled that on her
own, and we both said simultaneously, “But I didn’t know that was you.” She didn’t remember what her solution had
been, but I did (turning the thing off and on).
She invited me
into her office to talk and remained standing.
Then, about five minutes into our conversation, she apologized and
offered me a seat. I know the technique
of having people stand so they don’t get too comfortable and stay too
long. We use that at CCSF with our gabbiest
colleagues. But she never sat. She asked me whether I knew that Sue Capson
(Life’s Neighborhood director) had left, and I got the impression that she
considered this grave. I wondered
(silently) whether she had defected to, say Kensington, but Sonia, who seemed
relieved that I hadn’t heard so that she could tell me her way, said Sue had
gone to another Aegis and that Sarah Jane, the weekend Rosmary Brown, would be
taking her place.
“And she’s a registered nurse.”
I’d notice Sarah Jane in Perry’s more than
usual, checking on residents and commiserating with whoever was coming
through. (Sara Jane was the one who
looked sympathetically at me when Mom said, “My daughter gets a bit riled up” the day I’d shown Kay the Nadine Martin
writing in the pink pullover she thought Mom had admired enough on her –Kay--to
steal it the following day.)
Sonia also said
that they’d been discussing an alternative to Kay and Mom’s rooming
together. Then she surprised me by
saying that they were wondering about putting Mom in the better-functioning
section of Aegis. They’d discussed that,
and staff on the Perry side said she played the piano, and she seemed more
comfortable on the Perry side. She said
that changing roommates for Mom and Kay would also involve changing roommates
on the better-functioning (I don’t think that’s the word she used) side.
I asked whether she knew about Mom’s bathroom
concerns, and she nodded and said, “Maybe we could find a roommate who isn’t in
the room a lot.”
Then I brought
up the idea that Mom seemed to be getting away from the obsession at Aegis—for
a while—and I thought maybe that was because she had to accommodate someone
else. I’d hate for her to return to
having sole rights to the bathroom and having all her meals there. I also recalled Mom’s moving very little
while at home on Poshard (bedroom-bathroom-living room
recliner—bathroom-kitchen to throw out poisoned medicine or make a call for
help—bathroom) and then, once she got to Aegis, I was so impressed watching Mom
charging down the corridors on her mission to secure supplies from the nurse,
as if doing a power walk! I commented
that Kathy would be back in a week, and she should be involved in whatever
decision we made, but it was good that they were discussing it now.
Anyway,
that was the gist of it all. If I
remember anything more essential, I’ll let you know.
Love,
Tina/
Mom
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