I'm sitting beside Mom in her room in the nursing home, and she is sitting up asleep in her big reclining chair. Her right hand is tucked against her face, the heel of her hand below her chin as though propping up her head, the palm and fingers on her cheek. It's a gesture I remember seeing countless times throughout our lives together.
Down the hall, someone has finally turned off a mechanical tone that sounded for all the world like "flat-lining" on a heart monitor. But I know it wasn't. This is a place of medical or random noises that sound dire when they aren't. It's just the building clearing its throat.
She stirs now and then, sometimes arching her back as though uncomfortable. How could she possibly be comfortable? She stopped moving with purpose or even fidgeting three years ago, so I'm sure she has chronic aches from immobility.
When I walked in with this week's flower arrangement and saw her mouth gaping, I was glad. I was ashamed to be glad, but I was glad. If I want to, I get to leave at any time. Set down the flowers, turn around and leave. Not sit for an hour holding my laptop in the air in front of her face, twisting my torso awkwardly to show her the latest or the oldest — any — photos of the happy scenes from what I guess is my life elsewhere, the grandbabies, the kittens. It feels nothing like my life when I am sitting here.
But this has been one of those weeks when my outside of this place life was difficult, upsetting, and I feel sorry for myself. I have seen myself making a mediocre job of lots of things even while stressing out trying to do them well.
Typos, fleas, small acts of poor judgment. Typos are like fleas are like my poor ideas, and it all makes my left eyelid twitch.
"Oh God, There's no way," she said, just now. Quietly, maybe in her sleep.
But maybe not, and so I lean over to give her a kiss, and my nose bumps into her forehead.
"You knocked me out," she says.
I apologize. I offer her some water, a little sip of water from her tan jug with its easy to clean, sometimes hard to pull from giant straw. Today she has no trouble with the straw.
"That's good," she says, nodding.
She closes her eyes again. After a while she starts to snore. And here we sit.
The traveling dentist with the contract to care for patients in Mom's nursing home is now charging us $411 every two months. They clean her teeth, squirt fluoride on them. That's it. No X-rays, because I've directed them to forget that. It's pointless.
$411 every two months to clean the mouth of a dying woman.
The buddy I room with at clay workshops lives in another state. Her very elderly mother lives even farther from her than I do. Her mother has lymphoma and recently finished chemo for that.
My pal suffers agonies of guilt because she's not with her mother. But also she is grateful not to be. And then she feels guilty about being grateful.
Her mother's personality has changed, and she's no longer the sensible, funny, great-with-numbers lady she was two years ago.
The dissonance that creates in their long-distance conversations has thrown my friend back into memories of her childhood. She is ransacking those memories, trying to understand who her mother was. Who is it that she is missing now? That mother, that unique individual, or just Mother, the woman who had the role of giving birth and nurturing?
Is her mother's life small? Is her mother's life large?
Should she care? Why?
Most of the time I think it's a terrible idea to hang out with other mourners and grief-strugglers and anyone being gnawed alive by loss. Avoid the sinkhole ghetto of support groups, right? We don't need reminders that we are suffering, that everyone is suffering. We are suffering. We get that.
What we need is reminders that life is also beautiful, life is also about gaining and growth and wonder.
We need to suffer but also we need the company of kittens and babies.
But having a friend like this to share pain with is OK. She trusts me enough to try to talk through what the hell is happening to us because we have mothers.
She doesn't correct me for "bad attitudes" or try to persuade me that using my analytical mind to interrogate my distress is some kind of cop-out. Or that an "intellectual exercise" is meaningless distraction.
We have our minds for a reason.
These terrible fates might mean something.
It is OK to try but fail to understand them, and to do that in words.
And it is not necessary to weep all the time in order to honor your relationship with a dying, demented loved one. It is not necessary always to be patient, or always to be correct.
I'm sitting beside Mom in her room in the nursing home, and she is sitting up asleep in her big reclining chair. Her right hand is tucked against her face, the heel of her hand below her chin as though propping up her head, the palm and fingers on her cheek. It's a gesture I remember seeing countless times throughout our lives together.