Despair

Longfellow

A tough three days at work, and I came home and went to see Mom without the little lie-down I usually allow to fortify myself. The dining room was packed -- busiest I've ever seen it -- and we sat near the entry across from a blind woman named Gloria, and her paid helper. Gloria was old, bent, charming -- her smile, which possibly she'd never seen, radiant.

Mom was solicitous of her, and it was little hard to watch, as her halting manner, quiet voice, and strange thought linkages made her so much more than Gloria the one who needed sympathy. The blind woman was doing fine.

The buzz in the dining room was D and C and Jim and B's big day trip on a bus to Manitowoc, where they toured the Cobia submarine. They'd just returned, and in the other room we could hear them talking about it. Mom told me, possibly enviously, about their trip, and said she wouldn't have wanted to go anyway, because it was $72, and so much time on the bus. The ride alone -- easily two hours each way -- would've driven her mad, I think, and she'd have been too tired to get on the submarine.

It was just, what, three or four years ago when we took her down to St. Pete in Florida, and she climbed nimbly, without assistance, onto my friend's big yacht, stepping across the gap between dock and ladder, and climbing up and over the side. Since then her world has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk to the point where it now consists mostly of two rooms and the hallway between them, with the occasional foray to church.

Walking back to her room, she said she was depressed. I asked why, already knowing the answer. "Because I want to be with my family." It is a bottomless well.

In the room, she gave me a stack of papers to go through, and we went through her email. I read her the obit of her cousin-in-law's daughter, a woman about my age who had had a tough time. And I showed her, once again, pictures from the college reunion she'd missed, and a family shot Sister K had sent.

Her brother, Uncle M, is coming Saturday, and we went over that several times, the calendar on the wall not quite a sufficient explanation. She has been excited about this and has called Uncle M over and over again, but tonight she seemed almost fearful. "I'm so scared of seeing him, knowing him. I haven't seen him for years and years and years."

"Mom," I said, "you saw him just last summer, in Colorado."

"I did?"

She did remember, though, after a few minutes, I think.

The better news is, the staff rearranged her room, and she's using her walker everywhere she goes.