By Jane Anderson
My mother, Ruth, died at age 81 in the middle of the night in a nursing home. I see her in her bed in my dreams, screaming for help because she can’t reach the alarm button and wouldn’t have the strength to depress it if she could. In the dream the night nurse comes — after 20 minutes — to calm her down.
“Be quiet now, Mrs. B,” she says. “You’re all right. The doctor will make his rounds in the morning. Tomorrow is Friday, doctor day.”
My mother doesn’t respond. She’s dead. The nurse pats her hand without noticing the rigor mortis setting in and leaves the room. The next day Mother is cleared away and the chart marks time of death as 9:20 a.m., which puts her death after the time the doctor walks in. This will save embarrassment, maybe a lawsuit. Can’t be too careful.
This is only a dream. Isn’t it?
The decision to put Mother in a nursing home was a wrenching one. She didn’t want to go. But she was recovering from cancer surgery. She was unstable on her feet, very hard of hearing and weak from not using her muscles. My husband Matt and I decided she needed round-the-clock care. Neither of us were able to do it.
Translation: Neither of us wanted to do it. We had our jobs. Our house payments. Our car payments. Our boat payments. Our credit-card payments. Joined together, they all added up to big debt and responsibility.
“Lucy, I don’t want to leave my home,” Mother had cried. “I’ll miss my dogs and my birds. I’ll miss my view of the foothills. I’ll miss just being here.”
“You won’t miss falling on the floor,” I told her. “You have to be safe. Then you can come home.”
“What about the animals?”
“We’ll take care of them,” I said. Once Mother was in the home, we stopped by her house once a day to feed the two dogs, both of whom were beside themselves with loneliness and stark terror. After Mother failed to get better quickly, the home informed us that she was a long-termer. They didn’t use that word, but that’s what they meant. So we took the dogs to the Humane Society, and the birds went to a bird sanctuary. We thought those were good choices.
Translation: Out of sight, out of mind.
When Mother asked how the dogs and birds were doing, we said, “They are fine. Great. Don’t worry. They miss you, but they are well taken care of.” That was the truth — sorta. When Mother asked if the exterminator had been paid, if the weeds had been cut, if the pool had been kept up, we said, “It’s all under control, Mom. Don’t worry about a thing.” She closed her eyes, but her knuckles were white as she kneaded the blanket.
Translation: You are never getting out of here, Mother, so we’re “cleaning up” your household, selling off your things, putting a for sale sign in your lawn. Oh, by the way, that paper you signed three weeks ago was our Power of Attorney, so we are able to do all this. It’s for the best.
Mother only lasted 7 months in the nursing home. In spite of everything that was done for her, she seemed to curdle up and reject everything: the home, us, the world. At the end, she didn’t even watch TV. She just lay in bed breathing more and more erratically. I was distraught, but I had to carry my weight on my job, so I only went to visit her once a week. Sometimes she seemed not to recognize me.
Translation: I didn’t know what to do about Mother, but I wasn’t about to sacrifice my job for her refusal to cooperate and get better.
Three months after Mother died, my son and daughter-in-law had their second child, a little girl. They named her Ruth Ann after my mother and my daughter-in-law’s mother. My grandson Spencer was now 3. Melody was a wonderful mother and had been employed part-time as a substitute teacher. Before Ruth Ann was born, however, she was offered a full-time teaching position, which she accepted more for the benefits than the salary. My son Tory’s teaching position only offered health insurance for him, not for his family, so getting health care for Melody and the children was a huge bonus.
A daycare center was lined up for both Spencer and Ruth Ann. They were dropped off at 8:30 a.m. and picked up at 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. Spencer didn’t seem to mind. He had had lots of hands-on mothering at home and really liked pre-school because of the other children and the fresh stock of toys. Ruth Ann did not prosper. She changed from a happy, smiling 4-month-old baby into a wide-eyed, wobbly-chinned, crying baby.
Matt and I noticed the change at once.
“Are you worried about Ruth Ann?” Matt asked Tory and Melody after we had discussed it together at home.
“Why do you ask, Dad?” Tory replied.
“Well, she seems unhappy now that she’s in daycare.”
“Maybe it’s not daycare. Maybe it’s just her age,” Melody said.
“I don’t think there’s a whole lot of difference between 3 months and 4 months, do you?” I said.
“There’s a TREMENDOUS amount of difference. Babies grow oodles every month. I’ve read a lot about it.”
“Maybe you should discuss this change of personality with the daycare people.”
“Tory asked about it. They said she would get used to it.”
“People get used to concentration camps. That doesn’t mean concentration camps are worth staying in.”
“I resent your saying that, Mom. Really! How bizarre.”
After that discussion I started having a variation of the nightmare about Mother. In the dream she morphed into me. It would start with her screaming in the night and then become me screaming and dying before the nurse got to me. I would wake up in a cold sweat, Matt patting me on the back, asking me what was wrong and if he could help.
“No. I’m OK. I’m OK. It’s my mother nightmare.”
“You’ve got to put it out of your mind, honey. She was old. Everybody dies,” Matt said.
I nodded but without conviction. My job saved me. I was promoted to district manager, and I became a required workaholic overnight. I was so exhausted by the end of the day that I had no time for nightmares. If they happened, I didn’t remember them.
Tory and Melody had a third child, Clark, quite by “accident,” so now they had three children in daycare. They became workaholics to pay for the mortgage and the daycare fees. They both had dark circles under their eyes, and they had lost their parenting-book patience with their children. All three kids were pouty and belligerent. They didn’t answer to the word “no,” so they were constantly getting “time outs.” For Matt and I, it was an unpleasant chore to visit them.
“I feel like smacking those kids down,” Matt said on a drive home.
“Me, too. They’re insufferable, aren’t they?”
“Imagine what they’ll be like when they hit the teens. I can’t stand to think about it. They’ll be shuffling around in parks waiting for the guy who sells drugs. Ruth Ann will be dressing like a hooker. The boys will be wearing pants that expose their cracks. Maybe they’ll be stockpiling guns and staging a terrorist attack.”
“Oh, my God. Don’t get too dramatic! That would be horrible.”
*******
I no longer have nightmares about my mother. I have nightmares about my son, who died in a car crash at age 50. Melody was with him, but she only survived for five more years. She was so weakened physically and psychologically from the loss of Tory that she didn’t seem to have the will to live. Spencer, Clark and Ruth Ann were young adults, very screwed up, but improving with age.
Matt died of a heart attack when he was 65 and hoping to enjoy the fruits of a long work life. I was 63 and worked for five more years, then retired because of multiple aches and pains, including rheumatoid arthritis and pre-diabetes. I still enjoyed life, but I didn’t have the energy for my job anymore.
I suffered a stroke when I was 78. It left me weak and without as much balance. My memory was going, too, I guess, although I still made out my own bills and remembered to watch my favorite TV shows. Spencer and Clark showed up at my door one evening, and I was delighted to see them. I could tell they came with a “mission,” however. They both stared at me when we talked. They watched me carry in the coffee without offering to help.
“Are you feelin’ a little rickety, Grandmaam?” Spencer asked, looking at Clark out of the corner of his eye.
“Not too rickety, I guess. I’m holding my own — and getting better every day.”
“Well, Grandmaam, we want you to move so you won’t be alone,” Spencer said, raising his voice a little to accommodate my hearing loss and probably also to cement the aggressive tone of the discussion.
“I don’t want to move, Spencer.”
“I have your doctor’s statement here,” Spencer continued, producing a letter from his breast pocket. “It says you should not be alone, that you need to be somewhere where there is 24-hour care.”
“I don’t want to move to a place with 24-hour care, Spencer. I don’t care what the doctor says.”
“Grandmaam, be reasonable. If you aren’t reasonable, we can notify Social Services that you are a danger to yourself. They will force you to move.”
“Exactly what is your motive for trying to do this, Spencer — Clark?”
“We’re responsible for you now that Mom and Dad are gone. We want you to be safe.”
“That’s not your real motive. You haven’t visited more than twice a year since they died — and usually those visits were to borrow money.” Both men stared at their hands.
“We have applied for power of attorney, Grandmaam. We have evidence that you are forgetful, that you are late with your bills, that you can’t keep up your property, that you can’t even pick up your prescriptions. You have multiple health conditions, any one of which might require more constant care,” Spencer said.
“We don’t want to hurt you, Grandmaam,” Clark said. “We want you to be safe.”
“I see. You want me to be safe. And then you will pocket the money from the sale of my house. Is that it?”
“You are being unreasonable,” Spencer said angrily, standing up. “And we won’t put up with it. This meeting is over. I’ll send the county out.”
And that’s how I wound up in a nursing home, 30 pounds lighter, too ill to venture much from my bed, waiting to die.
I’m still trying to figure out how it all happened.
1 Comment
Good writing, Jane, and the last line the best of all.
God bless you, may we all be spared, but then that is what everyone hopes. I remember my own Mom when she went into assisted living because there really was no other choice. It took many months for her to adjust, but I do believe she had a good two years there, better than she would have had living alone after my Dad passed.