So where do you want to live?

The Oak Leaf Trail

Well, I drove after all. Had to call AAA to get my car started, but I got there at 12:15. She was waiting in her room, with a wrinkly face just up from a nap. She hadn't had lunch, so we went to Simple and were there at least an hour and a half -- waiting, ordering, waiting, eating, talking.

"I really want to talk to you about where I'm going to live," she said.

I couldn't keep avoiding it. "So where do you want to live?" 

She said she wanted to live with one of her children. 

"If you live with me," I said, "you will sit there for hours all day while we're at work, just waiting for us to come home. There will be no one to talk to, no exercise room, no activities to go to, no one to eat with, nothing to do. And that's true of all of us."

She said the thing she'd liked best was living with Siri, which she did for a month a couple summers ago, when Siri was on vacation. Whatever Siri did, Mom did. But Siri told her, we've all told her, that that was unusual, that there was no one who had that kind of time all year round, even if they could stand it.

We reviewed the last couple years, since my dad died. How, after he died, she was living alone, with C coming over a couple hours a day, while her friends were doing everything they could. But there were long lonely days, and she couldn't quite take care of herself, sank into depressions, and just kind of waited till we would visit. She acknowledged that, but didn't seem to remember it -- remember how it felt. 

She did remember seeing St. John's and thinking it was fine, that she could live here. But now she characterizes it as "living in a hotel. All these people are just paying and living in a hotel."

"They're retired people, Mom. They don't need to work, they don't want to cook, they have health problems. It's a good place for them, it's a good place for you."

She said she'd like to have a job, maybe one day a week. Maybe she could work at Kmart, she said. I said I didn't think she could work at Kmart. Maybe Taylor's, the restaurant at St. John's, would let her lay out forks for an hour once a week, I said, only half-serious. "They have people that do that," she said. 

She's made good friends at St. John's, but she misses her Ann Arbor friends, her lifelong friends. Really, only in a few glimpses have I fully seen the enormity of this change in her life -- she hides it well -- and this was one of those glimpses. 

She seemed to momentarily understand the logic of it -- why she was here -- but this nag inside her, like the bra obsession, will stay there and keep coming out. Logic doesn't quell her anxiety. 

*

So, lunch over, we get back to her room, and she holds out her arms and says, "Where's my purse?"

She'd had the purse in the restaurant, but no credit card -- probably that's lost, too. She fussed over how to pay -- she always wants to pay -- and finally I paid, and then we'd gone to the car, and now I saw myself having to go back to find her purse -- this woman who thinks she could handle a job at Kmart. 

I stalked back out to the car -- no purse there -- then stomped back in, quite angry now, to tell her I was going back to Simple, all the while seeing my biking time, my me time,  dwindling. But like a miracle, the man who'd been out in the hall cleaning said he'd found her purse, and she had it now. 

By now it was almost three hours since I'd arrived, and I made quick work of checking her emails, helping her make a couple of calls, and left. 

I got my 20 miles in.