Saturday, July 9, 2016 

We have taken Valentino on two evening walks. Nothing. He pulled us all the way home and is now hiding in the basement. Must be an impending storm. Either that or he heard a firecracker earlier. There will be no coaxing him back upstairs until early next morning.

Mom isn’t in much better shape. She’s been packing for Bayonne, looking for the keys, her shoes, and anything in the closet. She doesn’t recognize her room, her bed, nothing. She was hungry and Rob made the mistake of feeding her. But mom has decided that the only food she will eat from now on is cereal. So cereal it shall be. No fruits, no veggies, no meats. Cereal. At least she gets good raw milk from A2 cows. And I suppose having survived nearly 100 years, she’s entitled to eat what she wants.

 

 

Monday, July 4, 2016

Mom is not only back, she’s in rare form. Did the 8 trips to the bathroom while I was trying to edit a paper. With so many distractions, I have to keep going back to the beginning to be sure I didn’t miss anything. And then there is the incessant begging:

Please sleep with me! I miss you so much.

 Well, I’m right here mom. Besides, you’ve lived here for more than 3 years now, and I have never slept with you. Your bed is made for one person. There’s just enough room for you.

 Of course, why do I bother with an explanation? She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t listen. She will ask again at least 3 or 4 more times before she falls asleep, each time telling me how much she misses me. I am exhausted and she has only been home 3 full days. I am counting down to the next allowable respite period in 67 days!

Friday, July 1, 2016

Mom is back home. We picked her up at 9:00 this evening. Mom asked if I had the key, as usual. She was too tired to notice where we were going or to ask if we or she had ever been there before. But at home, mom was glad to be back in her own bed. Told me where to put her shoes and her things. Mom is now sound asleep. Didn’t take long.

I, on the other hand, have a rough night ahead. Dentist today, lots of jaw pain, but all my teeth are fine. No cavities. No abscesses. Just night-grinding from stress. Was fitted for a night guard. Will have to brave it until I get the guard next week. So it goes. At least mom is asleep for now.

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

 Three days ago, mom awoke at 4:00 am unable to breathe. She called continually for the nurse! Nurse! Nurse! Take me to the hospital. We didn’t take mom, of course. There would have been no point. She seemed well enough and her color was good, but there was no telling what she was feeling. It’s almost like having a child or a dog. You have to do a good bit of guessing. I did call hospice and was advised to give her liquid morphine. I was very reluctant to go this route, as I assumed morphine would further suppress her breathing. What it did, instead, was to relax her and put her to sleep. She was still sleeping when I returned from work at 4:30 in the afternoon. I woke her immediately and plied her with liquids. She was a little hungry. So I figured cereal might be easy enough for her to digest; however, she was unable to keep anything down, a reaction not unlike my own when it comes to any kind of anesthesia. I made a note never to allow mom to have morphine again, unless she were in serious discomfort.

I was most concerned about bringing her to a nursing home for a 5-day period of respite care in 3 days. When I did leave her off, mom was still beat. She sat on the bed, barely said good-bye, and fell asleep. I hoped she would last until she got home again. I didn’t want her final days to be spent away from home. I was also concerned because my brother was off to Italy again for a protracted stay. How would I deal with a problem without interrupting his vacation. Oh well, I decided I would have to call him.

Well, I just received a phone call from the home where mom is staying. The woman informed me (as she had to by law) that mom had gotten into an elevator with a stranger and was roaming the halls having a good time, talking to everyone, passing out the compliments and taking them, too. Have walker will travel! She was in good spirits, strong, and happy, and looking for me.

So much for my worries. All in vain! Sometimes I think mom would enjoy being in a home. There are far more people to interact with and so much more to do. But home it shall be. As for me, I have 3 days left of peace and quiet and I aim to enjoy them.

Thursday, June 2, 2016

 

Maggie Smith is a brilliant actress and my favorite. Recently saw her in “The Lady in the Van.” She plays a homeless woman who winds up living in playwright Alan Bennett’s driveway for 15 years. We are given the privilege of learning something about her past—much of which I will not reveal here. Go see it for yourself. I will say that she had been a concert pianist, causing me to sob through some of the film. Musicians are loathe to see other musicians suffer. For similar reasons, I cried and laughed through “Quartet.”

Her reluctant “caregiver” makes some poignant observations, including that caregiving is all about feces (only he chose the more direct word). And it is, indeed! Mary, as she was known to Bennett, was still cogent in most respects. She claims at one point to have seen a boa constrictor and is summarily dismissed. But in fact, some animals had been let loose from a local zoo, a boa being one of them.

And then I am brought back to mom. Had she seen a boa, I would have been surprised. She is more concerned about the stray fly on the porch or the “others” in her room. She and Mary share something, however: their droppings, so to speak. The daily occupation—washing clothing, toilets, bathroom floors, showers, butts—becomes a preoccupation. I am almost always called to these noisome tasks when I am cooking. I use a prodigious amount of surgical gloves, paper toweling, baby wipes, antibacterial wipes, and plastic bags (to dispose of feces-ridden wipes and diapers)—not to mention soy candles and lemon verbena-scented aromatherapy bathroom cleaner. Mr. Bennett has the great displeasure of stepping in some of Mary’s leave-behind in his drive. Sanitation in the home is out when caregiving. No amount of cleaning will ensure that you have not stepped in some small dried up specimen somewhere and traipsed it through the house on your socks.

Then there is the issue of having only one bathroom. When mom is showered, I must remove all objects from the tub/shower, lest they become contaminated. It’s no picnic. But as careful as I am, a visiting CNA will neglect to pull things from the shower, and the cleaning quadruples for me. And once you unknowingly touch a toilet flusher handle encrusted with the stuff, you wind up spending the rest of the day washing your hands over and over again.

Do I hear a “Yes, yes! Oh my god, yes!” Funny, how when someone else is going through “it,” you can see the humor. I suppose it’s a function of being once removed. I myself found Mr. Bennett’s predicament hilarious, mostly because I knew it to be true. “It really is that way!”

I wonder if someday I will look back at this time and laugh or cry. Probably both.

Tuesday, April 12, 2016 

Mom was always telling what “they” say. She would drive me nuts. It would go like this:

They say it’s going to get cold tonight. Bring a sweater with you.

Mom, it’s 90 degrees out there. I am not carrying a sweater.

But if you go into an air-conditioned place, you’ll get sick.

I won’t get sick. I just get sick of carrying my damned sweater around.

Tonight as I was helping mom with the nebulizer, I held her in my arms and kissed her head. I didn’t want to believe this current problem would take her from me. I cried and tried to hide my tears. As I was holding her, she pulled away and looked up at me and said, “You can’t trust what they say.” I laughed and said, “You’re right, mom. You can’t trust them at all!”

Sunday, April 10, 2016 

When I was growing up, mom and dad (he was the better cook, a natural) would make Bolognese sauce (aka meat sauce for the uninitiated) on Sundays when we didn’t go to grandma’s house for the same. We didn’t call it Bolognese then, we called it gravy, as most Italian-Americans did in those days. The American families had their brown gravy. We had our red gravy. You would never eat pasta at a friend’s house, unless their parents were Italian. Non-Italians used ground beef—anathema to us Italians. To tell the truth, I haven’t had a good Bolognese since my mom last made it for Thanksgiving maybe 20 years ago. I won’t order it in a restaurant and surprisingly, I never attempted it. Why bother! Only grandma and mom and dad knew how to make it. They would take a wonderful cut of beef (“Go ask Ben the Butcher. He knows what cut to give you.”) and some pork and some veal (see Ben the Butcher). Nothing was ground. God forbid! That was for making meatballs. Another dish I never tried to make.

It is seriously surprising that I never attempted the sauce and the meatballs. I love to cook and have the stove of stoves: a Bluestar. Years ago, in the early 70s, I went through “Beard on Bread” and baked nearly all the recipes. I also went through the two volumes of Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” long before what’s-her-name ever thought of broadcasting her accomplishments online for doing same.

But I finally made a Bolognese sauce. I bought the meat from a local farm store. All grass raised, hormone and antibiotic free. Years ago, we would not have thought to ask or look for such items. It wasn’t necessary. We ate well. I am also in the process of making meatballs. No one, but no one could duplicate what grandma or mom had ever made. My brother and I liked them crispy—before they were added to the saucepot—OK, the gravy pot. The smell of the sauce was fantastic. The waiting for it was painful. Mom would always relent, warn us not to ruin our appetites, but give us each a piece of De Filippo’s bread to dip into the sauce. We’d savor every drop. I can still picture myself standing by the stove, on a little stool, perched precariously over the bubbling pot. If child services had ever seen me, I would have been spirited away to some household where the woman of the house would probably have opened a can of tomato paste, added water, and called it whatever Americans called their sauce. But I needed to breathe in this deliciousness, this life, this love.

As I ate my organic pasta today (chiocciole to better hold the sauce), I wondered why I had suddenly caved in. What made me do it after all these years? I love cooking! Why didn’t I make this dish sooner.

The answer is simple: I wasn’t ready to be next in line. I wanted to hold my mom’s meatballs, not mine, in my memory. Mom was the expert. She is the last in the family to hold the secret to making the best gravy in the world. She is the last in the family to hold the secret to making the best meatballs in the world. But now, as mom lies in bed with her nebulizer, straining for a decent breath, it was time for me to rise to the occasion. I am daughter, wife, aunt, and great aunt. It’s now my turn to take the torch and hold the pot of gravy high for my family. So here I am, making gravy and meatballs in memory of Grandma Raffaela, Grandma Giuseppina, dad, Aunt Tillie, Aunt Angie, Aunt Chris, Aunt Vera, Aunt Michaelena, Aunt Jean, and Aunt Josie and many more in our family and hoping that, even though mom won’t eat the pasta or the meatballs, she might smell it. It might bring her back to happier, healthier days when we were all together on a Sunday afternoon, dipping our bread into the gravy and telling her how much we loved her and that she was the best cook in the world. Daddy would protest: “I taught your mother everything she knows about cooking.” You’re right, dad. You did. And you did an excellent job of it. My turn now.

Correction to typo in last post: “Not batting 1000.”

Thursday, April 7, 2014

It is unseasonably cold and very windy, and Mom is not well. I ordered an antibiotic and a very-low-dose diuretic, just in case fluid was building up around her heart. Not batting 100 here. Mom is not very responsive. She is listless and cold. Not even interested in watching television. But she does her word search puzzles in the morning.

Her last fall a week ago might have precipitated the increased confusion. Or maybe having M come stay with her while Rob and I went to the symphony was a bad idea. She brought her baby. Maybe the baby had a cold and gave it to mom. Mom is so vulnerable. Second guessing here. Who knows?

The sun. All we ask is for a warm sunny day. Not another night when I have to cover my daphne or the Korean spice viburnum—both laden with buds. Mom needs the sun. She needs warmth. Why aren’t we getting it? Is God conspiring against us? We aren’t ready to let mom go. For as difficult as this journey has been, we pray it isn’t over.

March 2, 2016 

My sleep deprivation is off the charts. Sleep is not possible with mom and Valentino. I cannot even add a simple column of numbers. Glad I am not an accountant. That would be a dangerous profession for one in my state.

Still, there are moments of laughter. Take this morning, for example:

Rob, where’s my thing.

What thing?

You know. I left it. I had it.

[I walk into the room]

Sandy, where’s my thing?

What thing mom?

You know. The… she had it.

I don’t know what you’re talking about. Can you describe it?

It’s… I had it.

Well, I have no idea what you’re talking about.

I had it. It’s… oh, you know.

No, I don’t know. Can you describe it? What color is it.

[a moment’s hesitation] It’s beige.

Well, if I see something beige, I will bring it in to you.

OK. 

As Inspector Clouseau would say, “Problem sol-ved!”