When I signed the papers, in 2011, for my mom to move into
the Skilled Nursing Department at her retirement home, I realized she had been
preparing herself. After 92 years (at that time) of never wanting to bother
anyone, she had cleared and downsized her possessions to just enough clothing
to cover her body every day for a week.
She had gone through all the photos in the family albums and tossed
those which I think she thought I wouldn’t be interested in. She had two small
plates, two cups, two bowls, and various sized glasses. The silverware was a
set for four. Two potholders and two place mats were in a cupboard. There was
very little food on any of the shelves and when I asked what she was eating for
breakfast, (her only self-served meal) she looked at me blankly and said, “I
don’t know. Something I’m sure.”
I wondered if this was how she thought she would be helping
me, by having less to deal with. She had, after all, dealt with her mother’s
vast collection of furniture and keepsakes. Then I had to recognize that due to
the dementia, my mom must have also been letting go of memories. When I have
asked her about various family details from her childhood, she could, several
years earlier, remember events in detail. As the disease progressed, she lost
many of the moments that she had cherished all her life. Events she had
repeated to me in every conversation at least once during every one of my
visits. As she lost those memories, I was grateful she’d forgotten the various
reasons she used to be mad at me. I enjoyed the fact that for a long while, her
face always brightened when I walked into her room. She laughed more easily for
a time. In fact, she giggled frequently.
Then came a time of a scowl tightening the wrinkles across
her forehead and around her eyes (even though they were closed.) She covered the
entire gamut of her desires by saying that she wanted me to take her back to
Oakland, which is her childhood home. I repeatedly had to tell her that she
wouldn’t recognize her old home nor her neighborhood. She would sigh and close
her eyes. I would watch her face then and see her talk to her aunts and uncles
with silently moving lips. I would wonder when would she slip between her words and
walk with members of her family who were all in that other world beyond now?
As to her memories of my dad, she seemed to have forgotten
all the challenges of their relationship, what he put her through as a
womanizer and as a man wedded to the Marine Corps. We had moved during my
upbringing every 18 months to three years; she constantly set up and took down our
household. For these last few years, her stories of him have shown him as attentive,
and as a loving husband. She forgot, somewhere in the last of the 20 years that
he has been dead, the other stories she related to me soon after his death. I
let them float in the currents of past lives as I have already forgiven him for
his treatment of me and of her.
For the past eight months, she has slept more than ever. At 99,
she survived a slip and a fall out of bed which caused a compression fracture
of her back and large patches of broken skin on her arms and legs. She
frequently laments that she wants to go. When I bring in a nurse to hear this
request, my mom smiles and says she doesn’t remember what I wanted her to say.
Because she has no disease that could cause her to pass on, she wonders what
she can do. I offered her the observation that she could stop eating. She
wrinkles her nose at me and says, “I don’t want to give up my ice cream.”
Over two years ago, my mom decided that she wanted to stop
taking all her medications. She was not on many, but she believed in that
moment that they were life affirming. So, I got the nurse into her room, and my
mom was able to repeat her request to this proper authority. I knew she would
have to repeat this request to her doctor the following day and held little
hope that she could remember her wishes for him. I had to leave the room so that
my mom could say these words unprompted. The young nurse asked the pertinent
questions while I was outside in the hall. When she came out, I went back in.
I saw my mom flat on her back in the bed with her hands
clasped together across her chest. She opened one eye and asked me, “Well, how
long do you think it’s going to take for me to die now?”
I had to take a deep breath and tell her, “Well, you don’t
have heart or lung disease and you don’t have cancer so you don’t have a
disease process that will take you.”
“Oh shit,” my mom said. “It’s gonna take forever.”
Two years ago, I wrote
this piece to relate a bit of the details around my mother’s experience with
getting old, living in a skilled nursing facility, and wanting to die.
Unfortunately, her decision to discontinue taking her medications made very
little difference in her condition. When she tried to stop eating, they did an
end run around my request not to force feed her. They offered her a chocolate
milk shake with added Instant Breakfast and ice cream at every meal. She loved
chocolate, so she drank it, gained weight, and was essentially revived.
My mom finally got her
wish on June 25, 2018. She is now with my dad and her family in the ethers
somewhere. I am sure they are having one helluva big party.
