Visitations

   A TED Talk I listened to in the car a while back advised people who use social media that social media is not a good place to “process pain.” That made sense to me at the time. As I motored along feeling OK about my driving and the face I present to the rest of the traffic, I thought about how often the remarks I leave under my friends’ posts about their ordeals and broken hearts are less heartfelt than they appear, a dutiful exercise whose perfunctory execution is, I hope, well disguised. 
   Sometimes it even annoys me a little to have to respond to the posts and look at the photos — so many, many posts, all crying from the core of people I should suffer with but don’t want to. 

   At St. Mary’s decades ago, a religion teacher had us write little essays about what kind of women we wanted to be. I wrote that I wanted people to see me as kind and so I was trying to be kind to them. The sister wrote in the margin of my paper that, someday, I would learn to be kind to the people because they needed help.
   Sister, I’m not quite there yet. 
   But at least I don’t expect to be the center of all attention. Since my mom died, social media has become such a source of unexpected comfort that I am overwhelmed by how grateful I feel to the people who post. Even the formulaic phrases, the “thoughts and prayers,” are like being tapped on the shoulder and handed a daisy. 

   They feel good. I feel a part of a community, and I am fine with the thought that it is a dutiful community. I think that belonging with people who are willing to do the duties of friendship is real friendship. Social media compassion is real in its own way. Different, but helpful.

   Also, the social media contacts are less exhausting than the face-to-face condolences because they are less intimate. Exerting their kindness in person, my friends pull from their own well of sorrow and there’s always danger that the weight of that sympathy gets the better of them, and they are pulled down. Then we have to cling to one another, weeping under grocery store lights, surrounded by cabbages and jars of nuts. I value that intimacy because it is real — don’t misunderstand, we know one another better as we walk apart. But all this intense emotion leads to dehydration. Dehydration creates kidney stones.
   And we will pass one another again, in another part of the store. That’s anticlimactic.

   I think my kidneys benefit from my attempts to process my pain through social media. So, TED Talk, thank you for your input, but you are not correct.

Today

   The nursing home finally lifted the flu quarantine that turned me around at the front door before and after Christmas and before and after New Year's, and I was able to go in. Not that it was something I looked forward to; the long break, added to the interim between Arts Center sessions, had been an emotional vacation. No struggle to prep something to teach; no struggle to force myself over to the home; no struggle to recover from visiting. An ease of time in which to focus on working at the paper: pleasure.

   She was already in the dining hall, parked halfheartedly within the realm of tables and left there to block traffic eventually and thus be moved to her place by someone other than the aide who left her. 
   Her eyes were narrow slits and dark. It’s possible nobody was home.
   
   But I had come all the way. So I found a chair and noticed that, as I took off my coat, Someone was there.
   She would say nothing, so I sat down and sang. At first I sang at her, but in a while I was singing for her and then — not too long later — with her.  Our roster of greatest hits:
   "How Much Is the Doggy in the Window."
   "Blue Skies."
   "If You Were the Only Boy in the World."
   "Tennessee Stud."
   "Blueberry Hill."
   "Mister Sandman."
   
   An aide apologized that we needed to move out of the way; they were bringing the people in for dinner. So I pushed Mom to the feeding table where she always eats and settled down beside her on my knees.
   "Over there," she said. "The beautiful light still there."
   And she rolled her eyes toward a sconce.
   Mom hadn’t seen the dining hall in however many days the long quarantine lasted. She was reassured that the sconce was still there. She thought it was beautiful.
   
   Other than singing a stitch of "Doggy In the Window" with me, all she said for the next 45 minutes was that the beautiful light was still there. But her eyes widened, and crinkled. She wriggled her nose like a bunny. We guffawed. Michael called on the phone, and she read his name off the cellphone screen while he babbled amusingly. One of the less demented residents tucked a napkin over her chest and sang in with me on "Hey, Ho, Nobody Home."

   When I slipped away to check out the socks situation in her room, Mom was grinning and looking around at the other people at her table. Eyes bright.

   I am afraid to be glad that she is alive and apparently going to live on a while longer. I am afraid to be glad. 
   But I AM glad.
   Happy New Year, Mom. I hope you see it through.

Dammit

   Mom has now been dying in the nursing home for more than 1,070 days.

   The foot-tall Santa I put on top of her cabinet has made her say this: “Do you see it way in the back? An old-time Christmas.”
   He cost $19.99 at Kroger, so probably he was made by poor Chinese workers; but he has a fine white earthenware face and hands, and his plush red and white suit is impressive, as is the black belt with its shiny buckle, the French horn in his sack and the fat gold rope dangling from his hand.
   She seemed to see him, and she seemed to be enchanted.
   “Do you see it way in the back? An old-time Christmas.” 

   There was something that felt knowing about the way she said it, and also there had been something knowing in the first thing she said to me when I arrived, which was, “Have you written a book yet?” I had to tell her no, not yet, but that I wanted to write a book for children. Maybe one about a seagull that steals a cheese sandwich and learns that he doesn’t like cheese.

   But Christmas was the theme today. 

   It felt great to have a genuine gift for her: the word “Joe.” 

   When I told her Joe would visit Sunday, she grinned a beautiful big grin, an emotionally present, happy grin. She might not have remembered 60 seconds later, but in the moment that she heard Joe was coming, her Joe, she was blissful.

   And then she asked if I could see the old-time Christmas, way at the back.

   She said it so often that it got me to think back on our family Christmases and how they might have felt to her. That was something I could talk about for her, and so I described the walk-in closet full of presents wrapped and waiting to be wrapped. The tree big enough for two Christmases. As I was talking, I realized she must have had fond hopes for her beautiful children’s happiness. She was working more than full-time, teaching and going to night school, and still she made Christmas for her 6 children. She really did that. 

   My older sisters created the decorations, and they enforced the traditions, but Mom’s dream of love was why they did. I hope they see that now.

   I tapped those memories and talked to her about midnight Mass, and I sang snippets of the hymns we sang, in Latin and English. As I sang the ones I love I knew she loved them, too. I did my best to describe the candles, garlands and the unearthly calm, marble face of Mary in the alcove of the church. 

   I recited the bits and pieces of “A Visit From St. Nicholas” that I recall. Aunt Mary McCoy used to live in the house across the street from the house where that poem was composed. Mom liked that poem. When I got to the part where he lays a finger aside of his nose, winks and up the chimney he goes, Mom lifted her hand, which was swaddled by her blanket, and although it was hidden in the blanket, she laid a finger aside of her nose, and she winked.

   Suddenly I was choked up. So I gathered my bags, made the clever cheerful exit that does not admit one is leaving, and I slipped out. But I was really weepy.
   Just then a new aide came down the hall. She looked about 20 years old, if that. I saw her see me, and I saw her decide that she was going to heal me. That healing me was her calling, and that she was up to her calling. That she was put on this earth to foist some compassion upon me.
   Hell.
   She dragged me back into my Mom’s room and showed me my Mom and shouted, “Hello, Julia!! She does understand everything! And I know! We have a connection! I look her right in the eyes and she looks back at me and I know she understands! She won’t eat but then I make a big mouth at her and she eats the food before she knows! She is in good hands!!”
   I was getting even more weepy, and when that happens I leave the room because Mom is an emotional mirror: She feels whatever you project. If you grin, she is happy. If you become sad she feels more sad, and if you are upset, it upsets her dreadfully, and so I LEAVE. It is CRUEL to stay.
   But I couldn’t explain that to this girl fast enough to save myself from her. Instead I stood there and allowed her to torture me with her compassion for my guilty feelings, which she wanted to make sure I understood were not justified, because I am “only one woman with ten fingers and ten toes.”
   (And actually, I liked her for that image. That was a sweet thing to say.)
   She wouldn’t stop hugging me and talking about her connection to Mom. My glasses snagged on her hair and WE connected.
   

   As we disentangled, from a distance, from the internal distance that feels like one is standing high above oneself, I saw this as an absurd situation. My mom — my mom — would have relished my predicament, recognized it and quietly laughed her ass off. Because that was her smug daughter Cecelia being obliged to be nice. She so loves her smug daughter Cecelia, but also, it is so funny to see her discomfited.

   Oh, my Mom. How I miss your seraphic irony!

   The deal was, I had to be nice and let the idiot instruct me or I would be a Bad Lady — and shame my mother.

   After a while I recognized the aide’s name on her name tag.
   And I remembered the name because Sunny talks about her. 

   Sunny positively hates her.

   

Out of bed

   Nurse Alex called about 8 p.m., which is never good. 
   The nursing staff calls in the mornings to let me know about every new ding she’s sustained, every new tear in her onion-skin arms or hands, every new hot spot on her rigidly arched foot or the canvas-covered bones that used to be her very cute rear end. 
   My father said he followed that butt all around the Naval War Library until she agreed to go out on a date.
   The staff lets me know about her misadventures, faithfully, but in the mornings.
   Tonight, Alex said, she rolled out of bed somehow and landed on the floor. No skin tears and no blood. But any fall is a bad thing. Those bird bones shatter if you squeeze too hard.
   He didn’t witness it. An aide called him after finding her on the floor.
   “She was just lying on the floor grinning at me,” he said.
   With a goose egg on her head.

   I wonder if the air mattress malfunctioned. That happened once last year. It overinflated, ejecting her from bed. They took away the mattress for a while. But they brought back a new one because she’s so immobile she breaks down with terrifying alacrity without the self-adjusting support. The new mattress inflates but also has a scooped center, so it’s a bit like a nest.
   She’s rigidly immobile, never even rolls over on her own; and they took off the safety railing months ago, to make it easier to lift her in and out of bed, which happens six times a day, every day.

   Fortunately, Sunny slept through whatever happened and she didn’t have to witness it. She broods on bad events and sometimes becomes so upset it brings on a seizure.

Sic days

   We joke at work about hoping to catch the flu. Get the flu, you have an excuse to stay home and watch daytime TV. Stay-cation, Baby. Not a great one, because of all the headaches, chills and vomiting, but still: nothing to do but watch daytime TV.
   This week there’s flu at Mom’s nursing home, at least two cases, one of them on her hall, and that means I can’t visit. Nobody can. They lock down the building when flu is about, because flu is about killing old people.
   It is exactly the sort of situation loving families dread. With their loved ones locked away in nursing homes, the loving families are freaked out when told they can’t visit. I usually wake up once a night and worry about the meaning of life, dementia, Mom’s future or past, but during flu lockdown, the loving families are waking up twice a night. They’ll be calling over there twice a day, too, to make sure their loved one is alive.
   Instead, for me, this flu lockdown is a stay-cation. Stay-away-cation. Get-out-of-guilt Free Days.

   Sunny called me at work today, to complain about how boring it is to be locked down in the room with my Mom, who keeps pulling her blanket off her feet, and we laughed and chatted for about 10 minutes before I regretfully rang off. Sunny is about my age and has most of her marbles, but her seizure disorder disables her enough that her elderly parents are no longer able to care for her at home. Life in the home is restricting enough when she has the run of the floors. While the flu has them locked down, she’s stuck in the room, nothing to do but sleep or watch "Say Yes to the Dress" and "7 Little Johnstons" and wait for lunch to arrive on Styrofoam plates.
   “I'm saving my plastic silverware,” she said. “That way when we get out of here, if someone needs a spoon or fork in the Bistro, I can tell them to go in my room and look in the cup in my cabinet.”
   She’s also saving all her plastic straws.

Up to date

   Mom was fixated today on her name being Julia. Frances. Loyall.
   She said it over and over, conversationally, for 15 minutes, until I got out my phone and looked up the version of "Julia" in which John Lennon sings alone with one guitar. I cranked up the sound and suddenly she was talking away.
   But I couldn't understand her over the song.
   I lowered the volume, and just like that she stopped talking.

   Sunny has been telling me that the aides are putting Mom's dirty socks in the top drawer of her nightstand instead of the linen cart on the hall.
   Sure enough, the top drawer was full of socks, some of which did not have partners.
   Why? "They are lazy," Sunny said.

Yellow Rose

   Intelligent people don't stop being intelligent because they are demented, not in my experience.
   My mother-in-law, during the dementia after her stroke that was worsened by Percocet and morphine, became playful and goofy, but she wasn't stupid.
   And my dear Mom sometimes gives me her familiar acute glances that suggest she’s taking things in and thinking them over, putting two and two together with a grain of salt.

   I brought her a vase of three yellow roses Sunday, and it led to a wonderful, happy visit in which we sang bits of the Yellow Rose of Texas, which, turns out, was originally a sad song about separated slaves, who knew? We certainly didn’t when we were little and it was fun to sing together.
   I like singing with and for my mom. She is the most appreciative playmate of all.
   There was a political talk show on AETN that she had been watching, and every so often she would toss words like "the uninsured" in with the lyrics of “Yellow Rose.” It was pretty odd but also suspiciously smart sounding, as though she was not just confused.

During this visit she kept asking if she was in her big black truck, or telling me that she was in her big black truck, until finally I got it: The big black truck is her big black bed. When she’s in her gerichair and she asks if she still has her big black truck, she means she wants to be back in her bed.

   She absolutely loves the new soft blanket, which is gray and covered with pink and white flowers of some sort. I thought they were cherry blossoms, but they might be dogwood. She calls them her roses, and her embroidery. She laughs and holds the blanket up and says, “This is my embroidery. Oh God, I need a big box for it.” And she says, “This is my embroidery, it keeps me warm on a cold winter’s night.”
   Stupid people do not talk about “a cold winter’s night.” That is some smart people talk, right there.