Make it do

Recent Mom art

I went Saturday. Mom had already been to art, and I attended the baking session with her. There were about eight of us there. Mostly we all watched while Hildur, the new activity woman, from Iceland, made a kind of quesadilla, with two big tortillas sandwiched together with a filling of Brie cheese, apple slices, walnuts, brown sugar and cinnamon, with a little squiggle of caramel syrup on top. It was all heated up in a kind of toaster she had brought. Pretty darn good.

Mary -- a different Mary -- told us about her husband's saying:

Eat it up

Wear it out

Make it do

Do without

Katherine said she had heard the last line, "Throw it out." So we debated that. I see online that the first line could be, maybe better, "Use it up." But we were eating the enchiladas, so we were eating it up. 

Mom does art pretty well, I think. This one, above, is her own work. Sometimes they do art by everybody starting with a blank page, doing something on it, then rotating the pages around the table, creating a set of community pages.

She has her obdurate moments. Sunday, at church, I was pushing her forward (in wheelchair) for communion, and she kept grabbing the pews as we passed and holding on. I couldn't figure out what she wanted. Did she not want communion? Hard to imagine. So I would lift her arm off the pew and put it in her lap. Finally, about after about five of these, I hissed, "What are you doing?"  

She grew quiet. Sullen, I think. And of course I felt bad. We got a brownie after church, which I cut up and saturated in coffee, and fed to her little by little. "That is so good," she said. Nothing like a brownie to bind the wounds.

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Going on a big bike ride next week, and I'm so excited.

Mom and Betty at Singalong

Ain't it pretty

Forth and back

Sister S, descending

Long time, no write. It's hard to say, "No change" in a way that's interesting. On the other hand, there have been small events.

Mom has fallen twice in recent weeks. Both of them out of bed -- she wakes, thinks she can get to the bathroom, and goes down. She's wearing bandages on her hand now and has a scrape on her knee from her most recent fall, about a week ago.

Also, she was moved temporarily to a different room while her own room was fumigated for bedbugs. Her clothes were hither and yon, her shoes lost for a time, and it was pretty disorienting. Finally they brought in a sniffer dog, a bedbug specialist, who declared the coast was clear. It was a beagle, like our old dog Herman on Newport Road, who pretty much lived through his nose.

Mom is lucid at moments, is better for special company, but mostly when I see her she is hard to understand. She speaks very quietly, and is constantly starting thoughts that she is unable to finish. Some seem very urgent, and I say "What? What?" but it never comes through.

She eats well, but is losing weight.

Meanwhile, the rest of us have played some. I went to Frankfort with Sisters S and K and their husbands, and had a real nice week. We hiked in the dunes (above), ate and drank, and I biked. I met up with a friend there and we rode M-22, surely the Midwest's best biking road. Two days later I went to pick him up for another ride, and he'd been hospitalized with a stroke. That's how old we are. He has, thankfully, made a full recovery.

Sophisticated Ladies
(S and K)

Genealogy sidetrip to Alpena

The Olson church in Spruce

Snippets by Sister S

Pinwheels

We've got a near-summit of Sisters and brothers-in-law in town. Here's Sister S's take: 


Had a good first day with mom. I arrived shortly before lunch. We ate, then the gang had hand massages in the penalty box (Bev, Joanne, Gloria, etc). Then we went to arts and crafts with Jesse and made a pinwheel and went outside to see them spin. Then we went to Stratford for tea and brownies and discussion of the news. She did not speak, but seemed to be listening intently, and did not ask to leave even though it lasted a long time.

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Today Wendy from Bright Star is there instead of Ivette. She's great. We went down to the lobby after breakfast to watch the comings and goings. There was a bus going to Trader Joe's, which is right next to Bay Shore mall, so I left mom with Wendy and went along to buy mom socks. She only had 5 socks in her drawer and none of them matched. Beautiful sunny day. Does mom need anything wear?

Birthday boy

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Went to Kohls - 2 nice t-shirts, 6 pair of socks, 2 stretch bras. Then stopped in Trader Joe's for a $5 bottle of chardonnay. 30 minutes and back on the SJ bus! Success.

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Beautiful day in Milwaukee. Just had breakfast with mom, and Wendy from Bright Star came as we were finishing. Mom ate scrambled eggs, a whole English muffin with butter and jam, fruit bowl, and the forbidden bacon, cut up real fine.

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The art today was alcohol and paint applied with a dropper onto clear plastic, so each drop exploded into a bright color. Mom was beaming and said, "This is WONderful!" Now they're off to yoga before lunch.

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Jon came for lunch and we gave him our cards and a pinwheel for his birthday. Mom had trouble swallowing and packed her food in her mouth - first time since I've been here. Maybe she didn't like it. She ate the rice pudding dessert. Then she asked to go to bed and had a good nap.

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Move and groove didn't happen, but it was okay. She had a new young aide, McKenzie. She was very good with her and patient. Then she left and we did devotions and sang a little - Jesus Loves Me and Be Near Me Lord Jesus as she fell asleep. Felt a little choked up; it reminded me of us singing as dad was dying.

When an anti-depressant depresses

20 miles of gravel on the Eichenbaum State Trail

Mom has slightly improved. The nurses reduced her anti-depressant dose, and in the topsy-turvy world of pharmaceuticals, it has perked her up a little bit. She looks better, seems to feel better, and is able to get through a full thought occasionally without forgetting what she started to say.

"We think it was starting to snow her," said one of the nurses, on the dosage she was taking. Snow, as on a fuzzy TV.

The drama Sunday was all about Gloria. She's blind, maybe from birth, and 80-plus. For as long as she's been there, you could find her in her wheelchair out in the penalty box, reading in Braille, running her fingers over the thick pages of an untitled book. Sometimes she would gasp or say "No!" at a critical point in the narrative, and you would think,  "What is she reading? Must be a good book!"

But she is losing it. She doesn't read much any more, and if she doesn't sense the presence of somebody nearby, she'll call out "Help me! Help me!" and even shriek for some kind of reassurance. So we all say, "It's OK, Gloria. We're here." But often it's not enough. The other day they gave her a bath or shower and you could hear her throughout the entire floor crying out. "Help me please! Help me please! Ah, ah, ah! I'm dying! I'm dying!" It went on and on.

The other day Julie brought Ollie, the dog we babysit, and had Gloria touch his plush white fur. "Oh, this is nice," she said.

*

Rode my bike 110 miles yesterday, Milwaukee to Appleton. It was fun, felt good till I hit the Eichenbaum trail. If I were rich, I'd have it paved.

Eden, Wisconsin, where they grow the trucks big.

Recent Mom art

Sister L says it all

Picture by Sister L

Check out Sister L's recent post at Habits of an Artist.

It's the little things

The feet that won't stay put

Yet another Sunday morning with Mom. I figured that today she's been here almost three and a half years. Not forever, I guess, but sometimes it feels that way.

For most of that time, I and the aides have been fighting a battle to keep her feet on the platforms of her wheelchair. Today I stopped to put them on at least three times, and every time, within a few steps, she was dragging them on the floor again, making it hard to push. Sometimes she even pushes back, wanting to go a different direction, but never sure where.

After church we went to the Bistro, got some cookies, and I even ordered a scrambler, and she leans over just as we're settling in, "I have to go to the bathroom really bad." I left the table set and buzzed her back upstairs. She'd already done it in her pants by the time we'd reached the toilet, and I called in reinforcements.

We returned to the Bistro, finished our snacks, and I brought her back upstairs. She was, I think, just as glad to see me go as I was to leave.

The balm of the harbor

We are all in need

Dad's burial
May 2013

Found Mom asleep in her room last night at 7 p.m. Singalong had ended early and, downstairs, an ensemble of the Milwaukee Symphony was playing in the chapel. When she was healthy, she might have gone to that. Now -- just like my dad, when he was deep into Alzheimer's -- she finds her truest self, her most complete self, when she's asleep.

She looks haggard some days, and other days pretty good. Her food has improved -- they no longer puree the main dish, just chop it into small pieces -- and so has her eating. But she is tiny now compared to her middle-aged self. She was always worried about her weight, but she was never huge, and it's ridiculous in hindsight.

I had my third "counseling" session yesterday. These are conducted by a young woman, T. I asked her how old she was yesterday, and she said 31. She might as well have said 13. She has some book learning, and has done a lot of these sessions with all kinds of people, so, while she's a little bit "young" in her analysis, she's useful when I ask her if what I'm feeling is normal. Mostly, she just lets me talk.

Yesterday I went on about how I felt about my mom at different times. Her narrow morality, the humility she stressed and imposed on us -- and, on the flip side, her welcoming of all kinds into our home, and her relative lack of judgment of almost any individual person she got to know. She was selfish, I think, when we would visit with young kids and would have to leave a couple hours early because, say, a snowstorm was predicted -- she would pout and it would ruin for her the whole three-day visit. She lacked, in that way, empathy or imagination -- just could not see our real concern, the fear that we and our kids might actually, for example, die.

She's so feeble now, so completely dependent, so very different. The thing that continues to bring me up is that she thanks me for coming. Did I ever thank her for picking me up at school? I don't think so.

Big sky in Dodge County

Car couture