My stomach tightens as I approach the glass door. What will I see today? I’ve been out of touch for a few weeks-I haven’t even heard from Hospice. I need to visit my mom.
When I round the corner of the assisted living home to go to her room, I see her at the end of the hallway sitting in her wheelchair, draped over the bar that opens the door. There are no locks-no alarms. It’s not a lockdown facility. Mom has escaped several times already-once losing her shoes in the back field after midnight. She was found by someone coming on shift. The shoes were found the next day. She looks defeated today, but then she sits up and and cracks the door open, just as I reach her. She’s in the midst of an escape attempt. I put an arm around her shoulders and one on her outstretched arm. “Are you having a bad day Mom?”
She looks up with green eyes I have known since she was 18 and she begins to cry. Not easy crying, but hard, gut wrenching crying. Her face crumples and contorts. Grief is etched on her flaky, pale skin.
“Oh, it must be a really hard day for you. I’m so sorry,” I say as hug and kiss her. I think about how we didn’t hug and kiss when I was growing up. Hitting and humiliation took the place of praise and encouragement. The anguish on her face pierces my heart though, and I want to pour my love out to her.
“Are you sad today Mom?” I ask. “You look really sad…”
“No, I’m okay,” her voice so small, I barely grasp her words.
“How about we go down to your room and hang out?” I ask.
She covers her face and bends her head down low, trying to keep her feet off the ground, but stubbing and dragging her toes under the wheel chair.
When we go to her room, she points to her loveseat and starts to get up. I quickly put on the wheelchair brakes, get in front of her, wrap my arms around her middle and use my body weight to turn her and get her settled on her couch. I sit beside her as she continues to cry. I fold my body around her, hold her, rock her and rub her arms.
“What do you want to do today Mom?”
“I want to go home. Nobody will take me home.”
“Are you lonely?” I ask. I don’t want to talk about taking her home. I know we can’t take her there, but it seems so wrong. She’s been married for over 65 years. She’s built a life with my dad. He built the house she lived in since 55 years ago. It was a big property with lots of room for an orchard and gardens. We always had fresh things to eat. Mom’s favorites were fruits…they had to be on the green side though. Cherries were her favorites. That was her property, her little farm and now she lives inside a building on a barren lot covered with weeds and gravel and a foundation for a building that can’t be built because the home ran out of money.
I rock her and hold her and she leans into me and begins stroking and holding my hand. “Have you seen Laurie?” she asks. “She’s my girl with the little child’s voice.”
“No Mom, she’s in Texas.”
“I didn’t know that. What’s she doing there?”
“She raises dogs. Lots of dogs. For people who need helper dogs. Her dogs can bring the telephone and the remote controls.”
“They can? That’s nice.”
“What about Bruce? Did you see him?”
“Oh yeah I did. Bruce is a great brother and I love Shelly too.”
“Yeah, she’s a good girl,” Mom says, “a good wife.”
“Does Bruce have a job yet?” she asks.
“Yep, he’s a preacher. He has loud music in his church.”
“Why?” she wants to know. “That’s crazy.”
The door to Mom’s room opens for a second and quickly closes. “Who was that Mom?”
“It was my Mom. She saw we were busy and left. She’ll come back.”
Grandma’s been dead since 1962, but no matter. Mom’s speech isn’t clear like I’m writing it. It all goes together in a mishmash and she talks so soft I can barely hear. I try to see the forest and not to see each tree. Ideas and sentences emerge as I intuit and search for her meaning. Sometimes she speaks a sentence of total gibberish, and I know that she knows she didn’t get it out right, and it seems like she’s locked away in a tiny distant cabin in a dense forest, peering out the windows, wanting so badly to share her meaning.
Just then the music begins. When the Roll is Called up Yonder…On Friday mornings an elderly couple comes to play the piano and sing hymns with the residents.
“Do you want to go sing Mom?”
“No, I don’t like those people,” she says.
So we stay embracing on the couch. A minute later, Mom starts to stand up.
“Where ya going Mom?” I ask.
“Sing,” she says.
There’s seven ladies and a man with their wheelchairs all pulled in a circle. They start their second song.
”What a Friend we have in Jesus,
all our sins and griefs to bear.”
Mom hums softly. I never could sing any of those hymns. You had to be a soprano to hit the high notes and I always had a rough edged walnut shell in my voicebox. I only realized a few years ago that I can hit all the notes when I sing tenor.
O what peace we often forfeit,
O what needless pain we bear,
All the old people sing soft and so I boom out the tenor to encourage everyone. Mom stares at me for a second and then she starts singing louder.
“That was the song they sang at my confirmation when I was in 4th grade,” a cheerful woman says at the end.
“Does anyone have a request? Anyone at all?” the song leader asks at the end of the song.
“Do you have a request Mom?” I ask.
“What a friend we have in Jesus…” she says.
“Okay then, we just sang that song, but we’ll sing it again, Praise God,” the guy says. And we have a second round of What a Friend we Have in Jesus.
I'll fly away, fly away, Oh Glory
I'll fly away;
When I die, Hallelujah, by and by,
I'll fly away
I start using my finger as a bouncing ball under each word of the song and I sing even louder thinking of Allison Krause and Jimmy Page’s version. Mom’s voice goes louder too. Sarah in the next chair remarks that she’s never heard Mom sing so loud. Mom is a soprano and I love hearing her pretty, high voice.
“They sang that song at my confirmation,” says the cheerful woman. Matter of fact, she said that after every song we sang.
I sang my heart out once stopping to think that I felt truly happy… and not just because I was helping Mom have a meaningful experience, but because I was enjoying sitting in the wheelchair circle singing with the old folks. I noticed that all of the songs have a reference to death or getting to heaven though.
About that time, my Dad and Uncle Brooks walk in the room, probably quite surprised to see me belting out hymns. Dad doesn’t talk to Mom and walks across the room to say hello to someone. Mom’s eyes follow him, filling once again with tears.
“I think I saw your husband Mom…”
“Is it him?” she asks. “It is him.” She sighs and looks longingly in his direction.
Then came the little sermon-the 23rd Psalm. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death? Strikes me as a lot of messages about death today. I wonder if it was planned that way. It makes a certain kind of sense in a place like this where people go to die. Or is it about Christianity? Is it about a religion fixed in the future? Will we be damned when we die or will we live in glory when we die? It’s like the main act happens after a person dies. So the song service and the Psalm are getting the old folks ready for what’s next?
Dad feeds Mom some Mandarin oranges, calls her honey, kisses and hugs her and is on his way. Mom is not quite sure where he went or if he was coming back. She asks why he didn’t take her?
Just then an attendant comes and announces that lunch is ready. I hear a man in the hall asking her, “Where is everybody?” I had noticed when I came in that several rooms were cleared out.
“Well…” she sounds uncomfortable. “Some people passed away and some are in the hospital and some just moved away.”
When I take Mom down to the dining room, I see some bed ridden people eating lunch in their rooms, but the dining room is more than half-empty. I look around to see whose face is missing. I don’t see Quilma or Mary. A few of the men are gone. I hope they are just late for lunch.
Mom sits at a table with Sal, Joyce and Bonnie now. The plates of food come. Mom gets a plastic plate again and a real fork. She had to use paper plates and plastic spoons for months after she soared a plastic plate across the room almost hitting a resident. The menu for lunch is pork and beans, chunks of ham, a tiny roll and a cup of water with a straw. Sal comes to the table and stands looking at me. He’s a quiet guy who wanders the halls, sometimes unaware that his pants are loaded. A trail of aroma sometimes wafts after him. I always say hello but he never speaks.
“Hi Sal. How’s it going?” I ask. He grunts at me with a slight smile. “There’s a great lunch today. Pull up a chair.” He stands up tall, spreads his arms like wings and yells.
“AHHHHHHH…”at the top of his lungs, the slight smile never leaving his face. The dining room is quiet as everyone turns in their seat to look at him and then turn back to their ham and beans.
“Lunch looks good,” I say. He sits and begins to pick up beans in his fingers and chow down. He eats all the ham chunks in less than a minute. Joyce, who hardly ever eats, starts taking ham off her plate and putting it on Sal’s plate.
“He’s hungry,” she says.
I break apart Mom’s roll, and spread the butter from the gold foil packet. She tastes it. “Real butter…” she says rolling it against the top of her mouth with her tongue.
When my parents first got married at 17 and 21, they could barely afford food and had envelopes of cash for each bill they had to pay. There was a separate envelope for real butter. Mom has forgotten many things, but her love for real butter will probably be one of the last things she forgets.
Bonnie sits at my right. She’s the lady who has a flap of skin between her nostrils that she pulls on all the time til it’s almost a half-inch long. She has a new habit. She’s started pulling on the little cartilage ridges inside her ears and they are getting bigger. They look like little piles of pink chewing gum.
“Hey Bonnie, How are you?” I ask.
“What?” she bellows.
“How are you? I haven’t seen you in a long time.” I raise my volume.
“I’m fine,” she draws out her words in a deep Southern accent. “I guessss,” she says. Everytime she says anything, she follows it with a long …I guesssss.
“Lunch looks good today, doesn’t it?”
“I guesss.”
“How about that little roll. It looks tasty.”
“I guesss.”
Mom has eaten every bit of food from her plate and is wiping up bean juice with her finger and sucking it off.
“I want another roll with real butter”, she says. I go into the kitchen and bring her back another roll which I split and butter. She picks up one half in a spoon and begins to eat it. She hands me the other. This one is for you. I think she actually would like to eat it, but she is giving it to me and I’m touched by her generosity.
I’ve been with Mom for three hours and need to go home. I tell her I’m leaving.
“Do you have to go?” she asks.
“Yeah, I do Mom, but I’ll come back.”
“Do you have a house?”
“Uh-huh..I do.”
“Do you have your own car?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Will you take me in your car and take me home?”
“Oh Mom. I can’t. I’m sorry.” At that moment an attendant comes in to check Mom’s diaper. She mostly speaks Spanish.
“Pee pee? Pee pee?” She asked, feeling Mom’s diaper. Mom nodded her head yes. As the attendant helps Mom stand, I kiss her and say goodbye. Her green eyes once again filling with tears. I feel like shit leaving her there. Most of the time she doesn’t remember that I was even here-even a short time after I leave. All I can do is make her time easier when I am with her and cross my fingers that I can figure out how to do that.
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