Who knew?

My mother at age 3 in her grandmother's garden.
Red Wing, Minnesota, 1936.

It's 3:30 in the morning. I wake every night and stare at the ceiling for hours. If you asked me if it's because my mother died, I would say no. But I think it somehow is. And while the nights are long, the days are hurtling by. The paperwork to be taken care of is staggering. As Donald Trump says of health care, nobody knew death could be so complicated.

It's a bad sign when you're quoting Donald Trump.

I've closed or redirected 14 accounts, ranging from health insurance to cable TV to drug companies and doctors. I'm in regular touch with my mom's lawyer, her financial guy, bankers, and people in suits who have some claim or owe something. I want my old life back, but it'll be a while, a month and a half or so, I think.

It starts getting dark here about 4:30 in the afternoon. Milwaukee is unspeakably gloomy, but I try to get out every day and walk along the lakefront and past the shops on Brady. I do it to clear my head and reattach myself to my physical being, but sometimes my mind races and I pull my ear buds out and write a note on my hand.

My sisters have begun to go through Mom's recipes. Many of them are neatly typed or written on cards, with additional scribbled notes and food stains. She kept track of the source of the recipes, and if you knew her very well, your name is probably there. Sister L calls it Recipe Archaeology, and it tells a whole story of its own that I never would have thought of.

We're holding a memorial service at 2 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 13, at Zion Lutheran Church, 1501 W. Liberty St., Ann Arbor. Free coffee and treats in the basement to follow. We hope to see you there!

Recipe Archaeology

The state of things.

Life story

Sister L, Daughter A, Son E, me
the night before the funeral

I found one of my many scribbled notes just now. It's dated February 7, 2014, maybe the very day Mom moved into St. John's. We were about to go to a meeting with the big head nurse for an evaluation, to see if Mom qualified to live independently or should be in the assisted living section. She was crying, she said a quiet prayer, said she was afraid, said, "I wish Daddy was here. This is so hard to do alone."

She knew no one. Her AA home was empty and on the market. Her stuff was all over.

She did qualify for independent living and they were having her stay in a guest room for a few days while a better, bigger apartment was fixed up for her. She wandered the halls, trying to strike up conversations. A man who lived down the hall from her was often in the corridor escorting his blind wife to meals. She tried them several times, but they were cool to her, too preoccupied with their own problems to say more than hello. She visited the one person she knew, Samantha, the nurse in the little clinic upstairs, several times a day, until the nurse said she was busy, Mom really couldn't just hang out there.

I was blind to the depth of her need. I thought we could just plug her in there and she would be fine. She called me again and again and I came when I could, but sometimes I had to say no and fight down my guilt. So most of the time she was alone, out in the halls, bravely trying to connect, never giving up. Even now I don't know what I should have done, short of bringing her to my home, but JV and I would have been gone all day, and she would have been even more alone.

She declined quickly. Her walking became more unsteady. She had quit cooking back in Ann Arbor, and so she ate cereal or heated soup or noodles in the microwave. She called and called and called. Within a few weeks, even before the nicer apartment was ready, they moved her to Canterbury -- she called it "Cranberry" -- assisted living. The residents ate together around big tables there, and she thrived and made friends with Dar and Carol. But over the months Mom declined and couldn't keep up. Dar and Carol were good on their computers and did things like send their DNA for testing. They  enthused about their heritages. They included Mom less often. She was hurt and, really, I don't think she had ever suffered a social failure that stung like that.

Then she fell and broke her hip and moved to the full care wing.

Before the end, everybody we passed in the hall knew her and greeted her, everybody said how sweet she was. One woman said she must have been "a great beauty." They would take her hand and she would smile and make a whispered, half-articulate response. And at the end, the chapel was full, and if she could have seen it, she would have been pleased. But she would have tried to hide her pleasure, because it was better to be modest.

Life goes on

My current life

Paperwork surely was created to keep your mind off weightier matters. Still, it is maddening.

I called AT&T, one of the world's most screwed-up companies, to tell them Mom had died and consequently didn't need cell service any more (hadn't used it anyway for years), and the guy said he would text a code to her phone to prove that I was who I was.

"I don't have her phone. She hasn't used a phone in a long time."

He had to find a supervisor. Finally they worked out that I had to go to an AT&T outlet with Mom's death certificate and show it to an employee, who would then call them to say that it was true, she was dead.

Have you ever been to an AT&T outlet?

People stand around in a sickeningly orange room waiting for service while the three ill-kempt tech-heads who work there all congregate around one particularly thorny problem that none of them knows how to solve, and you slowly die as the minutes tick away.

I waited and waited. I used a bathroom marked with the universal bathroom sign, and was told when I came out, "That bathroom isn't for public use."

"Well I used it," I said.

It took about an hour, two-thirds of the three-man staff and three phone calls to the "Customer Loyalty Department," but I finally got it done. They make it purposely hard to end an account, even in the case of a death, but they sure are excited to sign you up for new one.

So that's one account ended, about six to go. At the same time I'm dealing with her lawyer and other professionals in this strange realm to figure out what goes where.

Mom is out there somewhere. In her last few years, none of this meant anything to her and, in that way, at least, she was at peace.