Tough day

March 8, 2015

I went to pick up Mom for church at 9:30. She was dressed, but sleeping sideways on her bed. She woke when I came in, and we chatted a few minutes, but she was groggy and didn't look well. I said she should skip church, sleep some more, and that I'd go to church and come back after, and we could have brunch.

When I got back she was doing a puzzle with a couple of wheelchair ladies, one of whom immediately backed away, professing her ineptitude at puzzles, and suggesting, somehow that I was a champion, a young matador of jigsaw puzzles. Mom lightly scoffed at the woman who said she was bad. "Everybody who comes by here says something like that," she said, and waved her hand at the puzzle as if to say, get going. I thought, Wow, that's the old Mom.

We went down to eat, and she was slower than ever. We got huge omelets, bacon, and diced potatoes that were not quite unfrozen. She pushed half her food to me, some of which I ate, and regretted. Up in her room, then, I checked her email and printed out the interesting bits, made a couple of new pages of her return-address stickers, and we put together a gift for Marie's son, who lost his wife. All during this, Mom would ask me to read something to her, then wander all about, and even leave the room. Then she'd come back and start pulling out letters -- mostly from Christmas -- and ask me if I got this letter or that or the other, all of which I got and all of which I'd been asked about on almost every visit I've made since they'd arrived.

I was there two hours and watched her decline all the while, till she finally said, "I keep getting more and more worried about what I'm going to do with my life. I mean, all these people are just going to stay on and on and on." This is like my dad -- somehow, where he was wasn't where he was going to be, wasn't the home he sought. But I can't say to her, "This is it, this is where you 're going to live." The best I can do is make an avuncular shrug and say, "I don't know, this is a pretty nice place," which I'm not sure communicates any sense of finality. I was feeling nearly crazy when I left.

At home I worked on her taxes, trying to pull all the paper together. I came across a card she'd written with a Christmas check a couple months ago.

"Dear Jon and Julie,

"Thanks for a lovely Christmas and New Years with you.

"This is your gift -- 'twill help you pay for the college bills? -- or whatever!

"Love you so much

"Grama Mary"

Simple lines, but somehow it cried out to me, Love me, love me, love me. I felt cheap having accepted the gift. It felt so much like commerce. It's just family.