CROSSING TOGETHER-5

Today has been a good day. Mom got up early--for her--so we went to WalMart for a few things which she needed, including some special clothing for her. The bill was more than she wanted but she had to have these things.

She's in good spirits right now. She hasn't gone to sleep so quickly as in other days. I think she has leveled off. Now she wishes she could drive. She says she can drive just like before, but that isn't true. She really wishes for her independence but it's long gone.
She eats better around 10am than earlier; and she eats better in mid-afternoon than later. Right now as I am typing this she is in the kitchen eating her dinner.

I am more positive about her every day. Actually this has become more of a boon to me living here in this rich neighborhood than it is really necessary for me to be here. I think she was depressed. I think my value in being here is to have someone here for her to talk to and be with.

I really like it here.

But tomorrow will probably be different.

Today is Tuesday. I had to get Mom up at 10am. She had spent 12 hours in bed. This is worrying me. So I got her up, almost roughly, saying she had to get out of bed and eat. She had to stop spending the day asleep.

She did not like that. But she knew she had to do that. So I left the room, to let her get dressed without me watching her. I went to WalMart to get some food for us. When I got back, we were speaking civilly again.

She knew she had to eat well, and that I was saying that all along. So she gave me the money for a laptop, which I needed. I could have paid for next week. That made me very happy. Then she said she'd prepare some real food, a real meal. It was very good.

So after that we had a good day.

It seems Mom is depressed when she sleeps, almost wishing to never get out of bed again. But when she does, she regains her will to live. She can then go on. Sometimes she can even seem happy. But I can't let her stay in bed past 12 hours.

COMING TOGETHER
We have come home.
  After 10 days in a recovery center, we are back among our own surroundings.  The nurses are gone, the tests, the watching over my mother and the case workers have gone on to someone else.
  I suppose it is not easy to do what they do, but the consolation might be that they do not see the end of anyone's life.  They see the recovery and the leaving for home.  Then they go on to someone else.  They do not see the failure of a heart, the end of breathing, the final closing of a life.  What they see is the recovery, the happiness of family who get to take their one home.

  Now mom is home.  She is back in her own bed, surrounded by her own things on the nightstand, her own kitchen where she knows what is where.  She has her own routine.  She can decide she doesn't want to do something just now.
  The phone will ring.  It's a great interruption, although my mother does get to speak with her life-long friends. She doesn't have to face them with her fading, splayed hair. 

  She says, 'I'm just not presentable.'

  Of course everyone knows that.  No one expects her to look like a movie star, but the vanity of all wishes comes out in anyone.
  Taking care of her is all about deciding what she needs to do and what she doesn't need to do.  I won't let her be lazy about getting out of bed, putting her clothes on, answering the phone, walking around the apartment property.  At the same time, I can't be too strict.  She needs an occasional scoop of ice cream.

  I suppose everyone does.

  Why does life end like this?  Why can't life end with great pleasure and enjoyment?  The wrinkled skin that turns to broken breath is not the way to culminate a life.  And yet this is what we have.
  I think once you get to be 50 years old, you should start getting younger and feeling better and looking younger till you die looking great.
  Oh well, just a thought.

COMING HOME

I brought my mother home from the recovery hospital.  Checking out is like taking gold from Fort Knox, they don't want you to leave right away.
  They have more papers for her to sign than Carter has little liver pills.  But finally they did release her and I drove my mother home.  She sat in the car, gazing around at a world she had not seen nor been a part of for a long solitary week.  She had been like an underground people, finally seeing the blinding light of day.  She just looked around.  This world had been her home, but she had existed in that hospital, in that bed, in her own place.

 This episode told me how much we are but a slender beat of the heart from an ending.  Not much of tissue, not much of nerve endings, not much of electrical impulses from the mind to the heart.  This had been a glimpse of returning from the dead.  Not entirely dead, but much like it.  As much like it as sleep is like extinction, a forgetting, a not knowing, a pause in place.

  When we came to her apartment, she then had to struggle with her own legs covered by wrinkled old skin, stiffened by age and use.  She had to struggle with the coping of age, the slowness she had never known before.

 Now the mountain of mail awaited her in the mailbox.  Stacked together in my hand, they were like a book of appointments she will never keep.  Some of them seemed trivial--coupons for diet coke, advertisings,  bills for electricity which she didn't use, travel folders.
  All of these were temporary weights from this world, anvils of the ankle, paths which lead nowhere now.  So much of life is just entertainment, an ending where it does not matter what you do.
  But it was a routine which reminded my mother of what people do, of what they are like when they don't come from a hospital.  They were the tasks of the normal life to which she now returned.
  This is coming home.

COMING TOGETHER
I am starting a new blog about the last years of my mother.  I hope I can say what everyone going through this experiences, I hope to make this blog common to many of us.

  My mother now is 92 years old.  As my father was wealthy, my mother has spent a great deal of money to stay alive.  With Medicare, prescriptions and operations, she has outlived her own body.
  She is the first person in our family to do this.  My parents and grandparents were the offspring of the Depression and the 19th century.  For them, death came to the home.  You went home to be there when God came for you.  If there was pain, so be it.  One didn't rail against death, one went gently into that good night.  So those of my parents' generation didn't have operations to keep parts of the body alive, to live longer.

  A friend of mine says, Life is a social disease, the fortunate ones die young.

  I can't say I agree with every part of that expression but it is a viewpoint today.  My mother was born in 1920.  She has seen a great century go by.  She has seen buggy coaches to airplanes, from big bands to rock groups, from chilly winters to checkers in the park.
  She has done a great many things.  She has been an Air Force wife, a mother, a world traveler and homemaker.  Now she is at the end.  This means every day is the same to her.  Feeding, a bath, trying to find something to occupy time, and then sleeping wondering if she will wake up.

  It's drudgery but when you have outlived your own natural body, this is what you get.  I have to wonder about her will to live.  Having friends and visitors can disguise what she's really feeling and that is a concern of mine.

  That's all I will say for now.  Many more posts to come about the lowering of the Final Curtain.

RICHES
Catherine had a reservation at the Tuscany Cafe as usual, now that the summer had lifted for a comfortable fall season.  New clothes, new arts and entertainment and a new menu from the chef.

  When she arrived in her wispy blue suit, hat with scarf and gloves, her table was not there.  She then proceeded to march up to the concierge desk to demand of LeMont Garcon where her favorite table was--he apologized.
  'Oh Miss Catherine, we are so sorry but your table has been chipped at the edge, we had to replace it,' Garcon said, with such regret in his voice.
  Catherine was not used to such disappointment.  She thrust her fists on her hips in protest.  Several eyes in the cafe waited to see what she would demand.

  'Well, I...' she heaved, looking around in exasperation.

  Just then an older man, a bit bent, silver haired with thin-veined hands stood from his table, coming to her.
  'Young lady, you can have my table.  I have to be going, anyway,' he said softly.
  A certain pause fell between these two, as others watched.
  Catherine thought he looked pathetic, in his old age.  'I wouldn't take your table, sir, though the gesture is appreciated.'

  He did not answer her, he simply walked out of the cafe, to the applause of a few.
  Garcon then said, 'His table is vacant, Miss Catherine.'

  At this time Ralston strode into the Tuscany to join Catherine.  She didn't want to have him see her without a table, it would not be the thing to do here at the Tuscany.  So she sat at the old man's table.  Ralston did not see her at her usual spot--he stopped.  He looked around, finally spying her out in the corner where she hid beneath her hat.

  Coming to her, he quipped, 'Have you been bad?  Are you being punished here in this corner?  He joked mischievously.
  'Now you just sit down,' she told him with some hurt indignation.  She took her hat off.  'My table has a chip on it, so I was given this one.'
  Ralston sat.  He gazed around at the close walls, the new views, the guests arrayed around them.  'It's different, I'll say that,' he said still in a sarcastic mode.
  'I was given this table by an old man who was leaving.'
  Ralston's eyes perked up.  'You mean Hugh Fortress, the silver haired old man with the soft voice?'
  'How did you know?  Do you know him?'
  'I know who he is.  Gave a few million to the symphony last year when they couldn't  make payroll.  Blessed are the merciful, as they say.'
  'Where did you get that?'
  'Oh I don't know, I heard it somewhere, that's all.'

  Catherine said, 'It was a simple thing.  He was leaving, anyway.'  She wondered when a waiter would arrive.
  'Of course he was.  That's the way he is, the soul of generosity.'
  'Ralston, what makes people like him that way?'

  'In his case, he lost a son in the war.  What he lost resculptured his own soul.  It was what he gave up that made him the may he is.'
  'I see.  I've never heard anything like that,' she said looking down at herself.
  'I once attended a talk he gave about life and values.  He told about how his only son ran away from him, joined the military but was lost in battle.  They never said goodbye so everyone he sees is to him a son.  He has spent his life thanking everyone he meets.'
  'That's amazing.'
  'And so it is.  Have you ordered, yet?'
  'I don't want to, till I've understood what you just said.'

  'Then I will,' Ralston said, and then waived for Garcon, who finally came.

RISING UP
Ralston and Catherine took lunch on the redwood patio of the Tuscany Cafe, their favorite lunch and conversation spot in the Village.  Their table was surrounded by Italian vines, the scent of roses, and lattice work overhead.  The time was cool, comfortable and easy idle.

  'I love this place in the spring, darling,' Catherine said between sips of a red Dordogne wine.
  'You appear to love the wine more so,' Ralston quipped between tastes of beef.
  'This could be true, I won't deny I love red wine from Italy.'
  'You love everything from Italy.  If we were in Rome, you'd say beggars are cute,' he went on smirking.
  'Now hush.  I do love Italy, some time we should go, in the Fall.'

  'Look, Cathy, overhead, an airplane pulling one of those banners,' he said pointing to the bright sky.
  She looked up.  'What does it say?'
  'It says, Never go to Italy.'
  'It does not.  You're just making that up.  Now what does it really say?'
  'It says, You pay the bill.'
  'No it doesn't.  Do you even know what it says, at all?'
  'It's an announcement that says, 'Greatest Man of the Year' dinner is at the Waldorf Hotel.'

  'Oh, is that all?' Catherine was not impressed with men today.
  'Is that all?  You mean you haven't voted for me as Man of the Year?'
  Catherine laughed, which she rarely does.  She says it gives her wrinkles.
  Ralston went on.  'Look, who is more deserving than me?  Or at least who do you know who is more deserving?'
  'Well now, honey, I can't say I know that many men, but Man of the Year should be very gifted and confident.'
  'I disagree.  I say Man of the Year should be humbled by his giftedness.  To make room for others in your life, to learn to receive and not just take.'

  'Well now, listen to you with your platitudes.  Have you been reading those magazines again, Psychology and Self, and the like?'
  'As a matter of fact, I was reading Great Quotations in History.  One of them was, I must decrease so that he can increase.'  I liked that one most of all.'
  'Hmm, I see,' she said putting her wine glass down.
  'To empty yourself to be filled with blessing and giftedness, to put that down for the sake of others, now that's my ticket.'

  'I see,' she said contemplating what he had said.
  'By the way, do you want your potatoes?'
  'Oh go on, darling, you can have them if your paying for all this.'
  'You're being difficult.'
  'And you like me this way, now don't you?'  She had that sly tilt of her eyes, which he loved.
  'I think I rather do,' he said, clipping the bill and his money together as they left with each other.