“What are you looking at?” she snapped at me when I first went into her room.
I had prepared myself for her having a very short memory. I had prepared myself for her being in a wheelchair and watching television all day. But I hadn’t prepared myself to deal with a mother who had become a mean person.
I was surprised how defensive I felt. After all, I had been up since 5:30 A.M. getting ready for the trip and had been in a car for two hours being driven through a low visibility snowstorm. I quickly had an entire conversation in my head to transform the impulse to leave into kind words. “I was admiring your collection of owls. I’m glad to see you still have them,” I responded.
“That’s not a collection. It’s a few tokens.”
She was right, of course. At one time in her life I think my mother had well over a hundred owls as tokens of an apology, if you will, as a result of my father having taken a real owl she raised to the dump when it died.
“Do you mind if I turn off the TV?” I asked as I did. I noticed that her remote control was on another table and that the phone was within reach beside her on the bed. She looked remarkably vital for a 79-year-old woman. Unlike many of the other residents at the nursing home, she sat upright, proud. Nary a wrinkle was on her flushed face, and her eyes were clear and healthy.
I rolled my wheelchair toward her in an attempt to give her a hug.
“What are you doing?” she giggled nervously as I got closer.
“I’m trying to give you a wheelchair hug, Mom. You look wonderful,” I added as our wheelchairs clanked against one another and we exchanged brief kisses.
Just then her roommate ventured in to the room and my mother literally snarled. Her face twisted as she raised her hand and gestured for her roommate to leave. “Oh you just get out of here. Leave!”
The contempt, anger and disdain in my mother’s demeanor shocked me.
I’d known her to be compassionate, unassuming and kind. In the last four years my mother had gone from the status of homeowner to the luxury of living in an assisted care facility, and was now in a nursing home. She had grown to be a snob. She had “more education than most, after all.” I couldn’t tell if her roommate could hear my mother, but I was certain that she could feel her. My immediate reaction was to tell her to cut it out.
“Oh Debbie, you don’t know the half of it. She’s a retarded nitwit and I can’t stand her.”
“I don’t care if she’s a dog, Mom. You don’t talk to people that way. What did she ever do to you that you think she deserves to be treated like that?”
Her roommate was struggling to no avail to get into the shared bathroom with her wheelchair. It was small and far from accessible. As she mumbled under her breath, my mother wasn’t making it any easier for her. I was very uncomfortable.
“She steals.”
I looked at her with my mouth wide-open, “And?”
“Her IQ is 40. No. Make that 15.”
“What happened to you, Mom? When did you get to be so mean? You’re being really being rude! I feel really uncomfortable with this. You cut it out!”
“No. I won’t. She deserves it and more.”
“How can you be living in the same space with someone and hate them so much? I’ve never seen you like this. She deserves to be here just as much as you do.”
There was no response, so for emphasis, I added, “I can’t control what you do when I’m not here, but while I am, I would like you to stop.”
She stuck out her tongue and blew me a wet raspberry.
I sent one back to her.
“Who is the parent now?” she asked.
“I am. And I will leave if you don’t treat her with respect. I didn’t come here to be around all this negativity. How can you live like this? You’ll die from hatred before you die from natural causes. What happened to you? You must be hurting a lot to be so mean to someone.”
Her eyes welled up with tears, she rolled her head back and cried, saying, “If I let on to people that I am a good listener, there would be a crowd in this room, and I don’t want that. She’s retarded and can’t even carry on a conversation. I’m surrounded by stupidity.”
Then she forgot what she was talking about and tried to get out of the wheelchair and onto the bed. Apparently she was strapped in, and the seatbelt was attached to an alarm, which went off. Mom was inclined to be independent, stubborn, and not in the habit asking for help. Nor did any help arrive in the next few minutes, during which she struggled to dismantle the alarm, mysteriously succeeding when pounding the mattress.
“There. That’s better,” she sighed and smiled. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”
On my way out to see if someone was going to come, I observed residents headed toward their rooms to receive their meals. I tried not to pay too much attention to my mother’s roommate who was peeing in full view, having been unsuccessful at closing the door to the bathroom. Nobody was even at the nursing station, which was directly outside the door. Moments before, there had been loud conversations between people dispensing food. There had been intermittent voices blaring over the intercom and phones ringing. In her case, the noise was OK, because for years, she had slept with the radio on all-night. Strangely, she found comfort in the chaos of constant sound.
A while later, a woman I assume was a bureaucrat came into the room and calmly put the seat belt back together. ”Carol, what are we going to do with you? You can’t keep trying to get out of the wheelchair by yourself. Why don’t you ask for help?”
After considerable thought, Mom said, “To be honest? It never occurs to me to ask. Why should I?”
The woman put her arm around my mother and pointed to the signs. “We even have signs here, Carol. But I guess you’ve gotten used to them, huh?”
Speaking from experience, I said, “She’ll dismantle the alarm and she’ll never ask for help when she transfers. That’s just the way she is. “Doesn’t occur to ask.”
The woman rubbed my mothers back as she told me that mom had slid right out of the wheelchair and onto the floor yesterday. The woman asked mom if she’d ring a small bell if given one.
I piped up and said, “Nobody came when the alarm went off. What makes you think they’d come if they heard a bell? She’s even directly across from the nurse’s station,” I added.
The woman went on to say how concerned “they” were about Carol falling, and how “they” were liable. I thought to myself how the liability issue was the driving force behind all “their” attention. I suggested putting a cow bell around her neck like a cat for some comic relief. We all laughed a little bit, and mom said she’d just take that off as well. .” While I had to admire her for her spunk, she was also an admitted brat.
Before the woman left, she told Mom to stay in her chair because lunch was coming “any minute”.
I had brought my own lunch, so I found a microwave, heated it up, and brought it back to my mother’s room, fully expecting her lunch to be in front of her by the time I got back. It wasn’t. When it did arrive, it looked like it had already been eaten. God only knows how long it had been exposed to the air. The broccoli looked pathetically boiled to death. On the same plate was an unidentifiable mound of something that might have been hot at some point. The plastic cup of canned pears, the lunchroom container of milk, and coffee with cream and sweet and low were all opened by the attendant who brought the tray.
It was obvious that she and my mom liked each other, for my mother had drawn her close to her side instantly. I thought about how my mother doesn’t get a lot of affection, and how the attendant probably appreciates having someone as lively as my mother around as well.
As I ate, I watched the snow, which had begun to fall rather heavily. I was thinking about Melissa, who had driven me to visit my mom and was now at the dentist. I wondered when she’d be done and how much longer I had to spend with my mom. The snow was accumulating rather heavily and I was anxious.
I looked over at my mother. She hadn’t touched her food. “Are you going to eat, Mom?” I asked. She looked at me and said, “Would you eat that?” We both chuckled. “That’s exactly why I brought my own food.” “Smart thinking,” was her response. She never did touch the tray.
I had been drinking a lot of water while I was there and had to use the bathroom again, probably for the fifth if not sixth time. While I was wheeling myself in that direction, a nurse came in to take my mother’s blood pressure and commented that she wasn’t feeling so good. When I came out of the bathroom, the nurse was sitting with her hands on her forehead, rocking.
“Are you, OK?” I asked.
“No, I think I’ve got the flu”, she said. “I feel like retching.”
“What are you doing here? Why don’t you go home? Can you go home? I didn’t drive all the way here to get the flu. You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be around the elderly. You should go home.”
My mother turned to me and said, “Debbie, that’s no way to make her feel welcome!”
I didn’t go into it at the time, but the last thing I wanted was to make her feel welcome. I just kept my distance, and eventually the nurse finished taking my mother’s blood pressure and quietly left the room.
My mother’s roommate dared to make another entry to put away and retrieve some of her belongings from her dresser, and my mother sent her a raspberry. I turned to her and said, “You cut in out, remember?” She shrugged her shoulders and flashed a false grin.
I brought out my son Kyle’s artwork and photographs. I reminded mom that Kyle was in India
When my cell phone rang, I was relieved to hear that Melissa was finished with her dental appointment and en route to pick me up. It would be another twenty to twenty-five minutes. In the meantime, I decided to interview my mother. I asked her questions about what she would like to improve in her life. If she could change anything, what would it be?
Without hesitation she held her hands up in quotation marks and said, “I wish that they listened to us ‘inmates’ better. We have needs, too. Even though they act like they listen, they never act upon what they hear, which makes me feel discounted.” She would like to go on outings in small groups, even if it was just a short drive for a change in scenery. She also would have liked more time to pet the animals when they do bring animals to her room. Simple enough, I thought.
I had, upon leaving, reached out and caressed my mother’s face. The moment I touched her, I was filled with a profound sadness that emerged in a flood of inconsolable tears once in the car.
We drove home in relative silence, taking in the glistening splendor and beauty of branches laden with snow in a winter wonderland. As we did, I thought to myself how, at the age of 52, my generation would be soon to follow, and how there has to be a better way. There has to be a better way to truly care for the elderly and allow us to die with dignity. I vowed to pray about it and be open to manifesting it. Please join me.
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