Trying To Let Go

     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.

Where is my comfort?

 I seek comfort in my heating pad

When there is no body to warm my back.

I crave comfort in those early treats served to sooth a hurt:

A cookie, a piece of cheese, buttered bread.

My mouth opens like a baby bird’s

To foods that no longer serve me,

With flavors lasting only moments.

I whimper for the comfort of strong arms in a hug

And lips to whisper across mine.

I seek comfort in activity: a play here or a dance there

Sitting on organizational boards somewhere, everywhere

Until I sicken from too much thinking,

From being too responsible,

From keeping up the false face of ease.

Comfort then becomes my bed, my bath, my couch.

Silence and solitude,

Alone and self-attended.

Comfort, I am learning,

Is like happiness.

It’s an inside job.

Earlene Gleisner

From “That’s the Spirit” (a work in progress)

January 2015

The Travesty of a Tapestry

     Another person from the fabric of my life has left the pattern. Someone who intersected my days in unexpected ways then ran parallel with me for the last seven years.

     When we were together, I was as comfortable as a softened robe worn in an evening, with large sleeves that puddled across my chest when I held my arms together to seek ease or relief and with big pockets where partially-used Kleenexes lived on top of stale chocolate kisses in their silver wrappings, a stray cotton swab, and a toothpick.

     Carol was everything I needed whenever we came together. We didn’t live in such proximity that we knew each other’s movements by heart. There was enough separation, so that it was fun to catch-up when we had a moment or an hour to share.

     The thing is, this loss is a little like losing my long-term companion. I’ve not just lost the living with her in the now, but I’ve lost one more person who shared my history, who had knowledge of where I came from, and could reminisce with me about memories of what was once. Events we experienced were touchstones, ones we held as unique points of each other’s foundations. She was in my past when I first came to Laytonville, thirty-seven years ago. She faded as our lives went in opposite directions, but then we came together again to share the new and unwanted perspectives of widowhood.

     I am a little mad about this loss and the fact that we don’t get do-overs in our lives. I can’t unravel the weft or the warp and add a few more yarns or threads of cotton to provide me with more options of comradeship toward the end of my life, so that I’m not left dangling all alone. I could never have replaced Carol, but I might have had the idea to pick up additional and younger filaments/friends along the way. Then, when one as precious as Carol has left, I could have more around me until the length of my own fiber ran out.