More like that chicken

   Most days I take a minute to read whatever Tom Elliott has written on his blogspot-blog Deepwardly. I feel several sorts of conflict about reporting this because I don't want to pretend to be someone I am not, a follower of Jesus, but I enjoy being invited to think and I grew up reading Scripture, so the stories he writes so thoughtfully about are like old friends. Also, he is funny.
   A recent series of his posts uses human couple relationships as a model for Christian people's one-on-one with Jesus. January 26 implied this challenge, to look at one's friends and notice what it is about them that we wish we could emulate: 

"If we don't want to imitate anything about another person 

it either means we don't know him or her very well, 

or we don't have a healthy relationship."

   I do wish I could be as likable as my husband is. He has a knack for being adorable even when he deserves to have his nose pinched off. Also I wish I had his innate musical ability and, oh, to have that good memory for geography, history and dates! I must have a V chip for those.
   And I wish I was as discerning as niece Song and as humble and earnest as niece Fiona. Also I would like to be as pretty as Fiona. Marie's assured sense of mission; Deborah's patience; Fletcher's calm; Kathy's joy ...
  I could go on name-checking friends, but I'm supposed to be thinking about Mom here, so ... what about Mom would I actually like to emulate? And not Mom when she was MY mom, that's much too easy and anyway she is gone. What about Mom today — the demented scraps of the brilliant woman who made me? I know that I love her still, so what about her would I like to emulate?

   That she is fearlessly playful.

  This week she caught a stomach virus that's going around the home, one her roommate and her roommate's mother had last week. Sunny says it was very rough. Mom got sick Monday night; I saw her Thursday. She was weaker but, as usual, hit me with a mega-watt smile as soon as she realized I was there. 
   Conversations with Mom aren't exactly dialogs. Often they are a loop of questions asked over and over or questions in the form of statements as she tries to hold onto some fact amid the piles of debris in her ruined mind. This time, as we often do, we listed her children back and forth.     
   She went on asking me which of her kids I was and how many kids she has until I got the idea to write the names on a Post-It, because she likes to read words. She got a kick out of reading it over and over. 

   My favorite part was one time when she read through our names, Mary, Joe, Ben, Celia, Lily, Elizabeth, she said, "Mary, Joe, Ben, you, Lily, Elizabeth." And then right away she asked if I was Elizabeth.
   Another time she read the names and afterward asked, "Which one are you?" and I said, "Celia" and she said, "Oh, that's why I liked her."
   A couple of times when she asked which one I was I said, "I'm the GOOD one" and she laughed and laughed, delighted.   

   Another of her repetitive behaviors (seen when I put on the Glenn Miller CD) is holding up her hands and saying, wistfully, "This is all I have left. This is all that's left of me." While that sounds terribly deep, and also true, I have reason to believe she's whining about not having any cash. So this time, I caught her doughy hands gently in mid-air, looked her in the eye and said, "Of course you haven't lost those. They're attached to you. You were born with them."  She actually guffawed and slapped her thigh.

   The day before the snowstorm Michael visited her. He reported that she kept repeating "Celia says it's going to snow?" and then "How many cats?" On our family Facebook page, Michael reported: 

Every time she asked, "How many cats?" I changed the answer. Two. Fourteen. Twenty seven. And finally, "Only one." "Only one?" she asked, her eyes growing wide. Hope she's inside. Celia says it's going to snow."

   If you try to play with Mom, she still plays back. She is alert to the ridiculous and ready to have fun.

   My friend Laura (focus) shared a Jane Mead poem with me a few years ago, about the time we learned that scholastic competitive poultry judging is a thing. The poem is viewable on Google Books, so I hope I am not breaking copyright to repeat it here. It expresses how I feel about what I am calling Mom's playfulness. 

Passing a Truck Full of Chickens at Night on Highway Eighty 

Some were pulled by the wind from moving
to the ends of the stacked cages,
some had their heads blown through the bars—

and could not get them in again.
Some hung there like that — dead —
their own feathers blowing, clotting

in their faces.  Then
I saw the one that made me slow some —
I lingered there beside her for five miles.

She had pushed her head through the space
between bars — to get a better view.
She had the look of a dog in the back

of a pickup, that eager look of a dog
who knows she’s being taken along.
She craned her neck.

She looked around, watched me, then
strained to see over the car — strained
to see what happened beyond.

That is the chicken I want to be.

Phone call

   My friend Carla's mother lived six years in hospice.

   Hospice doesn't kill people. If you've got a condition that makes you likely to die within six months, you can enter hospice; but that doesn't obligate you to die. And it doesn't mean you have to be uncomfortable while you go on lingering. Hospice keeps you comfortable.
   It doesn't withhold treatment that would, for instance, bring down a fever or stop vomiting or help you breathe.

   My mom has caught a norovirus that her roommate had last week. The roommate's mother had it Sunday. The lady who checks the trashcans came down with it while I was visiting on Monday. It's going around; there are standing treatment orders for anyone who gets it: liquids-only diet, room rest, the meds hospice approved for Mom.
   She has a fever of 102. When you are 91.5 years old, you don't get a fever like that unless you are going-to-war sick.
   My mother's immune system goes to war with a vengeance. I am in awe of her immune system. Since she entered the nursing home, she has not died of the flu, of multiple UTIs, of vomiting every single meal for weeks, of pneumonia or of falling out of her wheelchair and cracking open her head. All of those things were trying to kill her when we put her in hospice.
   We put her in hospice because she was dying — of the UTIs, the pneumonia, and she was miserable about the vomiting that would not stop. She would say that her side hurt a little or her finger hurt, but really it meant parts of her were in serious discomfort. She had a bedsore. She was on a catheter.

   But then came hospice, and she got better.
   She's been stable and relatively well since March 2015, when we put her in hospice and they changed the way she was handled, literally. Thanks to the nursing home staff, which is a bunch of kind people, and also the hospice regimen which removed almost all of the remedies she was taking, her immune system has stepped up.

   Before the phone rang this evening while I was teaching my class at the arts center, I'd almost forgotten the horrid state of chronic emergency we lived under last winter. It was a sleepless urgency, and there were important documents I was not able to go anyplace without. Also, the phone sat beside me night and day, and it rang, a lot, always with news like that I received tonight: Your mother is very sick. We are doing this. We are doing this other thing. We will continue.

   Since hospice I've had time to bitch about the unhappiness, the sadness of witnessing her dementia. I've had the luxury of an intellectual abstraction, self-study, the trying to observe my grief; and I've gotten ... comfortable.
   It's like I have been in hospice, too.
 

Already

   Do you sing to yourself while you drive? I do, and I look a lot crackpot doing it, too, so when I drive up to a stoplight, I make a point of stopping a few feet back from the line. Whoever pulls up in the next lane won't be able to glance sideways and notice my musical grimacing.

Honora Lynch before her wedding

   Today I was doing this stoplight maneuver while trying to land daintily on the end of a phrase of "What'll I Do" (when you are gone away) when I realized something about the narrator of that song: He already has lost the loved one he's fretting about losing. Already he knows what he will do when she is far away and all he has is the photograph and the dreams that won't come true: because she is gone.

   He's singing about present reality as though it were potential. Is he playing with his sorrow? Is his sorrow self-indulgence?

    Irving Berlin wrote that song in 1923, the year before Mom was born, the year before her father was killed by a drunken driver. Growing up, she listened at night to her own mother's weeping, through the walls of the rooms where she and her siblings slept in the attic of Uncle Eddie and Auntie Minnie's house. My grandfather had been dead for years, and Granny would weep at night. Mom told me she didn't believe anyone dared to talk to her about him during daylight, not wanting her to break down. Mom asked her once, as a teen, and Granny started weeping. "I never asked her again," Mom said.

    I can make myself cry by thinking or talking about Mom's forthcoming death. What will I do when she's gone? But already I know what I will do. I have been doing it for several years already. Why go on talking about it and making myself weepy?

   Everyone I know wants to talk about their dying and/or dead parents. They ask about mine and then tell me about theirs, and often enough, we both cry a little bit. I see small children looking bereft in the eyes of these grownup people.
   Sometimes I wish there was a stoplight I could back off from, just a bit, to help us both avoid it.

Divided and conquered

   In the first day after I posted my first item here, visiting Mom stopped being a chore of dread. Instead I packed the car with my knitting in the morning, and all day at work I resented the time for dragging until finally it was OK to leave. I hurried across the river to sit with my new object of study: Mom.
   And she was being fascinating. Perky and pretty, she sat up in bed, alternately exclaiming and furrowing her brow at a National Geographic documentary about the Ganges. All sorts of creatures Mom did not recognize went tromping into the Ganges up to their gazoos.
   "Look at that thing. What is that thing?" she said.
   "Crocodile."
   "Will you look at that? What is that?!"
   "Elephants."
   Yes, Mom, I thought, yes. How interesting you are. Knit, knit, knit.
   Leggy storks flapped into trees.
   "Those are beautiful birds," she said.
   Fascinating, I thought, she's forgotten elephants but not birds. Fascinating. Deep.

Photo by Dibyendu Ash

   Then Mom's roommate — let's call her Sunny — wheeled in from the hall. Sunny is my age and stuck in a wheelchair.

   Imagine a 60-year-old woman whose friends are all 85 or 90 or 85 or 90 and demented. So many days, Sunny's in the front room of the home with her cheek propped on her fist because someone has been taken to the emergency room or someone has fallen or someone has died. Tedious needy old ladies who mumble endlessly or stare with round sad eyes without speaking attach themselves to her and crowd their chairs close to hers. 

   As you might imagine, she is a source of news. The aides are all terrified of her.

   And she's Mom's protector, alert to missing socks and coverlets allowed to become dirty and teeth going unbrushed. So when Sunny announced she wanted to show me her little photo album, I angled myself to glance from Mom to Sunny's photos. 

   Mom went on trying to decode the Ganges, but without my direct attention, she said less and less. 

   Sunny was, "Here's a photo of my cousin at his wedding."

   "What are they doing?" Mom exclaimed.
   Villagers who boat on the Ganges had gathered up a little fleet and paddled to a spiky mangrove forest to slice half moons of honeycomb out of trees. They pacified the bees with smoke.
   "Here we are with my cousin's good friend," Sunny said.
   "They need the honey," I said. "It's important for their economy."
   A tiger with huge feet came padding past the camera, and we heard that 100 villagers a year are killed by tigers.
   "Here's my cousin's pastor and his wife," Sunny said.
   "The tigers want the sugar," Mom said.

   Knit, knit, knit. Smile at Mom. Look at cousins. "They want the sugar." Knit, knit.

   Page after page of cousin's friends later, "They want the sugar," Mom said, and I realized it was suddenly. She had fallen silent, and 20 minutes had evaporated.
   The Ganges was gone, replaced by Rick Steves somewhere in Europe. Europeans were walking on shiny streets.
   "Here's my other cousin's pastor and his wife and their neighbor," Sunny said.
   "They are after the sugar," Mom said.
   I looked at my knitting. A mess of dropped stitches.
   Sunny had reached the last of her photos, and was starting to work backward through them. I gave Mom my best direct and rueful smile, hoping she would see me trying to draw her back out.
   She grinned, but simply in response.
   Just then in came the aides with Mom's lift. It was get outta there time.

   I said, "Time for dinner, see you ladies tomorrow" (although that was a lie). I watched Mom, fearing her crestfallen goodbye face, but instead she said, "And your phone number is ... "

  "My phone number?"

  "What is your phone number?" Mom asked.
   I told her and she repeated the numbers, getting all of them right the first time.
  She asked again and I told her again, and she got only one of them wrong.

   "Great," Sunny said, "now she'll be saying numbers at me all night."
 

Heresy

   Would I risk my life to save the cat? Maybe.

   Would I risk my life to save my Mom? Absolutely.

   Would I risk my life to save what remains of Mom?

   I worry that distant relatives are offended that I write about "the sweet little person who used to be" my mother.
   But I'm trying to be truthful.
   People should be offended — everyone should be offended — if I were refusing to use the word "person." Mom and also other demented people I've met where she lives are manifestly still persons. She has an emotional presence and awareness of herself as an individual. She claims the word "I."
   Being demented doesn't make her a nothing.

   In March last year, just before we put her in hospice, she was vomiting and vomiting, and as the  aide held her head, she stopped saying, "I'm sorry, I can't help it" and looked directly at me and said, "I love you. So. Much."

   Her dementia isn't any more profound today than it was last March.

   Does Mom's dementia make her something less than human, the equivalent of, say, a pet animal?
   Now there's a suggestion that stops me: I might even call that an obscene thought.
   But let's dare to think about it.
   Pets, at least all the cats and dogs I've known, are distinct personalities. Each one has value ... But how much of that value do I invest in them? Biologists say that we layfolks anthropomorphize like crazy, reading into pets a reciprocity of feeling that they can not truly share.
   And yet I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that our cat Mackey would mourn Michael's absence were he to vanish. That cat would be crushed, bereft.

   If I died, Mom wouldn't remember I was dead long enough to mourn me. Mom doesn't suffer.

   She might have a blue moment, and she can be weary and regretful about being "old"; when she realizes she can't remember something, her face contracts in what looks like pain. But give her a smile and very quickly she's grinning. She's eager to be happy and cheerful.
   I have seen her break down one time in the past 16 months: The afternoon I foolishly answered her request that we go to my house by saying that we couldn't, ever.
   That day she wept. And I bawled.
   I woke up the next morning weeping again — because it had occurred to me as a possibility — and then I realized it was true — that she had been crying in reaction to my crying. In trying to be truthful, I had been cruel.

   "Let's go to your house now."
   "Sure. What do you want for dinner?"

Handy things

   In the nursing home my mother stares at her hands as though she has been shopping for hands. She turns them over, considering.
   She lives on a permanent incline, in her bed or in her chair, immobilized by what is likely a vascular dementia.
   She has thin but doughy hands, as soft as unbaked biscuits. Restless on the arm of her geri chair, my hands look young, compared to hers. And so they should. She is 91 1/2 years old; I am 60.

   I have short-fingered, boxy hands with aggressively trimmed nails. I used to think mine were fancy hands, so agile and smart; but other women my age have creamy porcelain digital elegance. They make my knuckles look like dried-apple granny dolls.
   Compared to Mom's, though, my hands are healthy, decisive and so firm — more firm than I feel. They feel more capable than the rest of me, and I wonder how I lucked into such young hands.
   I notice that feeling. But I don't spend hours just staring at my hands, as my mother does. It's like she's wondering how they attached themselves to her.
 
   The hospice chaplain called last week to remind me he's checking on Mom.
   “Your mother says some wise things," he said. "She just told me, ‘When we grow old, we grow.’ She said that several times. ‘When we grow old, we grow.’”
   I didn’t have the heart to ask if Mom had been studying her hands when she produced this wise observation.
   Sometimes the aides dress her in blouses with three-quarters-length sleeves, and she thinks her arms have suddenly sprouted and are growing right out of her clothes. If her body’s turned so that one sleeve pulls down closer to her wrist than the other, she will ask that arm, “Why are we getting so short?”
   I think she sees her arms as not quite her. And I would say, “Well, of course. She is not herself anymore” … except for the fact that I, also, feel an odd estrangement from my busy hands.
   And I think it might be normal.

   In college I was supposed to read a small psychology book, about bodies. It was an example of phenomenology. Possibly the title was "Things." I didn’t read it, but I do remember the class discussion. Our professor described how the writer sits naked in the bath and looks at his body.
   He notices that the farther a part is away from his head, the more it seems to be merely attached to him.
   His toes are less part of his “self” than are his hands. Hands are less “him” than his eyes are. In fact, only his eyes seem to him very much to be, essentially, him.

   Of course we are our bodies, but parts of our bodies are less us and more ours. We don’t usually notice this, though, unless we are idle or, like my mom, waiting.
   Waiting for whatever comes next.