Smiling, sorta

Happy New Year, everybody. We gathered the whole fam damly for once. Sans Blaise, who had to stay home and work.

We had a nice Christmas Eve dinner with Mom. She got the seafood platter swimming in fluids -- it must have a real name -- and she ate very well -- shrimp, scallops, salmon -- and then tucked into the cherry-topped fudgey chocolate cake and ate half of a huge piece, and it was great to see her eat with real hunger. She stayed with conversation pretty well -- she gets up for visitors -- and we all had a good time. Sunday, then, she and I went to chapel and opened some of her gifts and cards, and got a call from a Sister.

She'd been begging me to bring Dad's funeral program, so about a week ago I brought it and we went through it line by line. Read the biography; the hymns (I spoke about one line of each); the liturgy; the readings (including the 23rd Psalm: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want"); and the sermon, by John Rollefson, titled "Quick to Listen, Slow to Speak," which I thought was apt enough.

Aside from conversation one-on-one, there is nothing that engages her like the well-worn groove of worship of any kind. Add to that the subject of Dad, and she was rapt. She's fixated lately on those who have died -- her parents, her husband, two of her brothers -- and they keep coming up, rotating through her mind. Sometimes they are dead, but mostly they are still alive. She calls me Nels about half the time, or "Daddy," or her father. She says things like "Where's Orla?" or "Where's my mother? When will she come?" And when I say, "Your mother died, Mom," she is shocked every time.

The Sisters, Julie and I have at various times discussed this. Is it better to inform her, or to let her think what she will? It's hard for me to let her believe something that's wrong, but maybe she believes it anyway, no matter what she's told. But then sometimes I think I say what's true for myself, not at all for her. Facts are facts -- this is what I believe. Though why I should need to insist on this, I'm not entirely sure.

Too much motherlove

Huh. Jolly.

Arrived at Mom's place last night at the end of Singalong, in time to hear her say, "That's enough now. Let's stop."

She has some intolerant tendencies.

I took her to her room.

I had told her I would come over, but not said exactly when, and she seemed perturbed that it was so late, and I didn't help matters by saying I wouldn't stay long. "Oh, no, Jon. It's late. You can't leave. You stay with me now tonight." It was, maybe, 7:15 p.m., and it did seem like midnight.

I suggested we read devotions, but she had no patience for it. The terms of the visit were suddenly the entire subject matter of the visit. She asked me if I'd eaten, and I said I had, though I hadn't, and her thoughts toggled between me staying the night and her coming home with me and the matter of me eating and who had a car and who would drive.

I helped her in the bathroom, and then we discussed whether she wanted to lay down, but she was agitated and seemed not in the mood for that, so I took her out to the penalty box -- against her wishes. She said she didn't want to talk to them, and she got her feet to the floor and pushed back. What do you want? I asked. What do you want?

She couldn't say, but she wanted me to stay.

When we reached the corner, I left her for a couple minutes to get my jacket out of her room, and what I got back she'd formulated her final gambit: "How about you stay a couple hours longer and we both go together."

I said I had to go, and gave her a peck on the forehead. She watched me as I went to the elevator, her eyes furious.

*

What I feel, lately, is sad. The fluctuating emotions of visit after visit -- how I feel, how she feels -- are all part of an enveloping sadness that just has no end. Anger, joy, frustration, even moments of laughter -- it all goes in there.

Meanwhile, downstairs ...

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving dinner

We had a mass visit of the sisters last weekend, and it was great. Lots of face time for Mom, including a couple of swims. She tries harder, stays in the game longer when visitors come to town.

I went over Wednesday for a short-ish visit to let her know we'd have dinner in the fancy restaurant Thursday, Thanksgiving Day. A woman turned as we passed and said, "Your mother is wonderful. She was a great beauty." I wasn't sure how she knew this, since she'd only known her the last two years. On the other hand, in the land of the geriatrics, where most of us are headed, maybe you acquire the ability to read the young person inside the old one before you.

So we went to the fancy restaurant. She is impatient with slow service -- that is to say, normal service -- so I came armed with a folder full of things to look over -- Dad's obit, clippings from the old Albert Lea newspaper about her father at the church, her recitals, her father's retirement, etc., and one about a visit home to Albert Lea with Sister K in 1987.

"The O's are members of Zion Lutheran Church where M is active on the Christian Service Board and in a circle. ... she keeps busy almost full-time working with host families and foreign students at the University of Michigan, is on the Shelter for the Homeless Board and Social Service Neighborhood Center Board, as well as being a member of the Church Women United Friendship Circle" -- what she called her "black and white club."

Yeah, she was busy.

She listened to everything, looked at the pictures, and yet hardly moved. And when her dinner came -- salmon, mashed potatoes, cooked carrots -- she only picked at it and sat frozen. She whispered something, and I went around the table to hear her better.

"I can't eat all this and I don't know what to do."

"Just eat what you can, Mom."

But she was overwhelmed. It wasn't just the food; it was the crowded dining room full of well-dressed people, big families, lots of kids. "I can't face it," she said. So we had a little pie and then we left.

Upstairs I tried one more time. I showed her a YouTube video of the St. Olaf Choir singing "What Wondrous Love." She liked that -- and then she had to lay down.

Julie had gone to do Thanksgiving with her mother, and she and I met after our parent-service at a resort in Elkhorn Lake for a night of decompression.

I'm thankful for it all.

No solace

What it really looks like

We're still in mourning here. I wanted a better sermon today, so I went to my regular church, arranging with aides for Mom to get to chapel, and when Julie and I got to her at lunchtime, she hadn't been to chapel, which frustrates her and pisses me off. So much depends on the aide you get -- when you can find one -- and it's a real crapshoot.

We took her to the Bistro for lunch, and Julie had to dissect the omelet we got her, and still she would hold it in her mouth and gum at it, digesting it with saliva. Finally she had to go to the bathroom, but first fussed and fussed about wanting to save the ruins of her leftovers, so we found a container and scraped it all into it, and then, as we left, I threw it out.

She asks questions that trail off into inaudible nonsense, and even if she gets it out, it is a question about arrangements, like who's driving and where we'll be staying. When I get ready to go, she insists she'll come home with me, and asks what it is I have to do -- which is really to ask what could be more important than staying there with her?

Last night she said her mother would want to go to church with her, and was shocked when I told her her mother had died 35 years ago. "My mother is dead? Nobody told me! I didn't know! I didn't know!"

It is sad, pathetic, and exhausting. Today I really wanted to quit. I think, though, she might live another decade, with just enough presence of mind to keep me coming back.

Brave New World

                                                       Wednesday morning in America

The only thing that works

Tilted like the rest of us.
Downtown Milwaukee

Went to see Mom yesterday, a job, lately, I never look forward to. I found her in the penalty box, staring straight head. I touched her shoulder and she whirled around, her eyes wild with boredom and said, "I gotta get outta here." I said, "You mean, this corner?" hoping she didn't mean the building. She said, "Let's go to my room."

So we went to her room, and I cast about for things to say, like I always do. I suggested devotions, which she likes, and I read her several, including a reflection on Zacchaeus the tax collector. We talked about it a little bit, getting straight who Zacchaeus was, and then I asked her if she remembered all the people she used to have to dinner.

We listed them off: Mr. Cook, Kenny, Greta, Ole -- these were the standards, some combination of them there every night, besides us four kids, often one with a friend -- and then there was a list of irregulars, brief visitors and long-stayers: George M, who bicycled everywhere he went; Paul the deaf boy who stayed with us and locked me out of the house; the wife of the Vietnam soldier who wrote her husband every day and did a lot of ironing; the pregnant girl Lois; two pilots from South Vietnam, Reza from Iran; a man who answered the phone one day when I called home from college and said he was "Jonathan from Namibia"; Bruno from Brazil (the best of our long-stayers); and even a guy I picked up hitchhiking one day. And I know there were others.

And then there were friends of her children, who didn't always stay for dinner, but would stay and talk to Mom in the afternoon even if the kid they wanted to see wasn't home. Bruce is the shining example, but there were others. She'd put them to work folding clothes or setting the table and chat with them, get the goods, the straight dope, and, I don't know, but maybe even counsel them in a kind of invisible way.

People were her priority, the thing she did, and this is in contrast to my own visits to friends' houses, when, if I encountered the parents, they were like furniture -- a brief hello and they were off.

She was, I think, socially fearless. We might be having friends to dinner -- say, relatives from Minnesota, or maybe the N family of six? eight? -- and some motley assemblage of the others would show up unannounced and uninvited -- a combination of people and interests that just should not work. It always filled me with fear, like the world was about to blow up, but she would just say how wonderful it was that they had come, pull out the card table chairs, set more plates, come up with some leftovers, and everybody would eat and talk and have a good time.

Talking with her about this yesterday, she was amazed at all the names, and that she had done these things. She was completely absorbed, her eyes bright, her questions pretty much on point, and I felt like I should do this every night. Just to save her more time of endless waiting. 

I did go back today. She slept in church, hardly touched the food I got her in the Bistro, but, in the half-hour in her room before lunch, I read her poetry and we almost got there.

Guest post from Sister K

Halloween bowling

Here's a guest post from Sister K:

Hi All-
Having a nice time here in sunny Milwaukee. Got in the pool twice and mom gets very chatty while doing laps. She is trying to figure out why no one told her dad died, why Jon is her father, and why her friend E was singing in a choir concert the other day and didn't say hi to her. (E called yesterday and they sorted it out.) It must be a kind of agony to have these seeming truths in her head and not be able to understand them. Generally, she seems pretty ok, though. She often seems to think she's busy doing important things, like volunteer work, and I think that kind of confusion is a sort of blessing. 

Jessie's been doing a lot of activities this weekend, and I left Mom at spooky story hour last night and met J&J for dinner. Saw their beautiful apt - so nice!

She's snoring away now so we'll see if we make it to church or not. I leave early tmoro morning.