October
2011
October
1, 2011
Dear
Kathy, Suzy, and Jonathan~
This wasn’t Mom’s best day, but it
got better—if never really great.
When I went in around 11:25, most
people were in the cafeteria, where Doris was, but Mom was in her new room with
the door shut. I knocked, and when I
went in, Mom said, “You’re here just in time.
Help me clean this up.”
Apparently she’d shaken a bottle of
Boost (an appetite augmenter?), and it had splattered on the carpet. So we cleaned it up (superficially—my way to
clean a rug when I can’t sweep dirt under it), and Mom seemed really
anxious.
I loved the new sofa, and I got Mom
to sit down on it for a minute, but only for a minute, and she wanted to move
on—to the bathroom. (Or is Boost a
laxative?)
I’d brought the latest version of
the invitation—the one with the date and place—but Mom really couldn’t
focus. The music she’d said would be her
favorite birthday gift had come, but she didn’t like that either. “Those are the wrong ones” she said of Oklahoma, South Pacific, and the Sound of Music—the musicals she’d sung
with me on Tuesday.
She wanted to go to the bathroom
again.
Then we went out into the dining
area, and she thought she needed to go to the bathroom again, but I tried to
convince her that she’d just gone. She
said she wanted to sit down. I led her
over to the piano, and she played a couple of songs from Oklahoma, but it wasn’t her best playing. After three or four pieces from Oklahoma, I put “Bali Hai” in front of
her, and she said, “Get that out of here.”
Then she said, “This is enough.
I’m getting out of here.”
We sat down at the table with May, Doris,
and Joy. Mom seemed really hungry, and
she was less polite to the staff.
“Are you bringing the breakfast?”
she asked.
One of them answered, “You’ve
already had breakfast. This is lunch.”
Mom called out to them one or two
other times, and when Sarah Jane Scull came by, Mom asked her “When are you
bringing the food?”
I asked Sarah Jane about Ensure, and
she looked in the refrigerator, where she didn’t find any and went away and
came back with a lot.
I helped the aides serve lunch
because Mom just couldn’t wait.
May said she couldn’t chew with her
teeth, and Doris didn’t just droop her head; she ground her forehead into the
table. Joy ate a couple of the cookies
I’d made, and so did Mom. When Mom
coughed, Mary said, “Can’t they give her something for her cough?” I said I thought they were giving her
something, and they said they were. I
thanked May for her concern and acknowledged that maybe she was worried about
catching it herself. She said, “I don’t
want to catch it.” I’d already asked her
where Bobbie was, and May said Bobbie was sick and in bed. (She remembered.)
Mom wanted to leave the table, but
only after she’d had one Ensure, two glasses of milk, half of an egg-salad
sandwich, potato chips, a pickle, strawberry ice cream, and a couple of the
cookies I made.
Doris raised her head long enough to
eat the strawberry ice cream with her fingers, and Joel directed her to use her
spoon, so I helped her a little bit with that.
We marveled at how much warmer her fingers felt.
Joel told me he thought it was Carol
who taught at Berkeley.
Once we went back to the room and
Mom lay down, she seemed to feel better.
We cuddled just a little bit, but we didn’t sing. She commented on how muscular I had become,
and I told her I did weights at the Y in Strength and Conditioning. She asked me to make sure to show her my
muscles next time I came, but I thought, “Why wait?” So I flexed my biceps
right there and then, and Mom said, “That’s amazing.”
What can I say?
I said, “I love you, Mom,” and she
said, “I love you, too. You’re my
representative in the bigger world.”
She asked me when I was coming back,
and I said, “Tuesday.” She asked me what
day it was, and when I told her, she said, “Saturday, Sunday, Monday,
Tuesday.” I told her, “And Kathy will
probably come tomorrow.”
“Kathy? Why?”
“Because she loves you.”
“Well, I mean, will she stay. Like will she spend the night?”
I told her, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. But maybe she can take a nap with you.”
Sweet dreams!
Love,
Tina
No comments:
Post a Comment