 ...Continued from yesterday: On Thursday, October 3, I toured the Sunrise of Gahanna senior care facility. On Friday, October 4, I was back to sign the paperwork. It so happened that I returned at around 3:15 pm, which was fifteen minutes into the 3 o'clock social hour which took place each afternoon at that time in the Bistro.  But when I arrived to sign the paperwork the business manager and a number of other managers and staff members were congregated in the Bistro where the social hour was taking place. Or should have been taking place. Apparently, often the Friday afternoon social hour involves musical entertainment, and this week's musician, a dulcimer player, was stuck in traffic and had not yet arrived. Chairs had been set up in rows for the audience, who were waiting for the performer to show up and the show to begin. The staff members were trying to keep the audience in good spirits, apologizing, looking at the clock, assuring everyone that the musician should be arriving soon, and hoping that was true. One of the managers had brought over her i-pad to at least produce some music, but, by bad luck, her i-pad chose that moment to plotz. Seeing that the staff was preoccupied with the situation at hand, I didn't press my business at hand, which was signing up my mom for a room at Sunrise. I did notice that there was a nice-looking upright piano in the Bistro. I offered my services to play some piano for the residents while they waited for the dulcimer player to arrive. My offer was quickly and gratefully taken up.
"Upbeat or mellow?" I asked the Sunrise Director. "Upbeat, please!" replied the Director. So I started with Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance," then took it down a notch with "Take My Breath Away." Someone in the audience requested "Amazing Grace," so I played and we sang a few verses of "Amazing Grace," at the end of which the very apologetic dulcimerist arrived. He really was very good. And so the social hour ended up being much enjoyed and my mom was signed up for a room at Sunrise.
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 ...Continued from yesterday: How hard could it be, I wondered.
 ...wasn't so hard or complicated logistically - emotionally was another matter - as it was all-consuming, and at times not a little overwhelming. In any case, as soon as it was agreed upon by my siblings, my hubby and myself that my mother would move to Ohio under my guardianship I became consumed with the not only with the logistics of the operation, but with my sudden, unprepared-for new role as my mother's guardian. The first task at hand was finding a senior care facility for my mother, which undertaking I began toute de suite. I decided to start my investigation with the assisted living facility closest to my house, then work my way outward. As it turned out, the care facility closest to my house was less than a mile away, a place called Sunrise of Gahanna where my daughter Claire had worked for a summer before she started nursing school. I recalled her saying at that time what a nice place it was. And so I scheduled an appointment for Tom and I to visit Sunrise on Thursday, October 3. We entered through the pretty front patio, ...into a bright, beautiful lobby,   ...where we were greeted by a big friendly Labradoodle named Ginger who nonetheless made a beeline back to her cage when I pulled out my camera.  "She doesn't like having her picture taken," chuckled the Concierge, as the friendly lady who works at the front desk is known. Tom and I met with the Sunrise sales manager, a sunny young lady who talked to us at length about the the facility's assisted living and memory care units. We learned that Sunrise is a chain of senior care facilities based on the Swedish model of senior care, which involves elderly people living together in community houses. The sales manager explained that at Sunrise the assisted living residents lived in one of two "neighborhoods," each with twelve residents. There was a memory care or dementia unit as well, also divided into two neighborhoods of twelve residents each. We then toured the assisted living area, starting with the Bistro, a social gathering and activities place situated between the two neighborhoods where snacks and drinks were always available to the residents.   We headed down the hallway from the Bistro, past another hallway leading to the memory care neighborhood,  ...to one of the assisted living neighborhoods.  The residents' rooms opened into a homey great room consisting of a living room,  ...dining room,  ...and kitchen where the meals were prepared.  After our indoor tour we had a look at the courtyard where, we were told, the residents enjoy gathering in nice weather.    Now, it wasn't just that I found this place cozy and charming or that that every staff member we met that day, from the Director to the care managers to the housekeepers was friendly, cheerful and seemed to like their job (even a couple of care givers apparently taking an outside break whom Tom and I had passed on our way into the building had smiled and said hello to us as we passed); it was also this sign in the lobby:  ...that made me know that my search for a place for my mom to live was over, thankfully, on the first try.
To be continued...  Congress is holding Presidential impeachment hearings and the bombshells are dropping daily; our country is on the cusp of a Presidential election year and new candidates are popping into the ring by the day; there's been another mass shooting; chaos reigns in Hong Kong; a hunter in China caught bubonic plague after eating a wild rabbit; there's a world-wide loneliness epidemic for which reason the U.K. has appointed a Minister for Loneliness; the world is on fire. Literally. And my house is a mess. But all local, national and world events have been humming by on the edge of my awareness, as has been my neglected housekeeping, ever since I made a rather spur-of-the-moment decision about six weeks ago, a decision that took me out of the world, or at least away from my previous occupations and preoccupations in my little corner of it. It was just about six weeks ago that my siblings and I came to the undeniable realization that a decision had to be made regarding our ninety-nine-and-a-half-year-old mother: if she continued to stay in her house it could only be on condition of finding round-the-clock care for her, along with a full-time housekeeper, plus having my brother and sister-in-law, who lived several miles away, keeping a constant eye on her welfare. Otherwise she would have to move to a senior care facility where she would be safe and have her daily needs taken care of. "Should I offer to bring Mom out here to be with us?" I asked my hubby Tom out of the blue. "Yeah, why not," replied Tom, just like that. So just like that I proposed to my siblings that our mother move from Seaford, Dealware, to Gahanna, Ohio, or the nearby vicinity, where I'd surely be able to find her a nice care facility. And just like that my sibs agreed, and within one day the decision of what to do about our mom was agreed upon. By everyone except our mom. But, fortunately for all of us, our mom also knew it was her time to move on. In fact our mother - who's had a clairvoyant streak her whole life - had recently been having confused premonitions that she'd soon be moving out of her house. We lumped her confusion about moving - which no one had yet brought up to her or among each other - together with the other occasional episodes of confusion she'd been experiencing. But she knew she was moving. Weeks before we knew, she knew. To be continued... References:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/world/europe/uk-britain-loneliness.html Sometimes it occurs to me that people during their lifetime actually live a number of lives within that lifetime, one life opening up the way to the next, which opens the way to another and so on, each old life being simultaneously - and paradoxically - both left behind and brought along as we move on to each new life. Of course the frontier between one life and the next exists in each person's individual perception, if that frontier even exists at all; it could be that there are people - maybe even most people for all I know - whose lives seem to be woven of whole cloth, who have no sense of moving from life to life within the span of their lifetime. But as for me, I feel that I have crossed a number of new-life frontiers in the six-plus decades I've been kicking around the planet, each subsequent life full of new experiences, unanticipated outcomes and quite amazing, sometimes astonishing, discoveries.
 And then the strange, new, challenging yet wonderful, all-encompassing life of parenthood, the entrance into which somehow made me feel as if I'd become a card-carrying member of the human race.  It was during the years that I think of as my Parenting Life that I began to write, and became a published author.   It was also during that life that I became a piano teacher,  ...a produced playwright, 
 ...that, unfortunately, never made it farther than my living room and the living rooms of some of my friends.  Then those years were gone to wherever years go to, my children grown up and moved on to start their own lives, and I crossed over into another life in which I mostly sat on the sidelines of my children's lives, though moving in and out of their lives as I was needed or wanted, relishing along the way the joys of their successes, marriages, the births of my grandchildren,  ...while helping my children with life's challenges and adversities in whatever way I could. Meanwhile in my own life I went about my daily routine such as it was, teaching piano, plowing my way through a novel I hoped to someday finish, getting together with my Posse,  ...traveling to visit my children from time to time, and occasionally thinking about the old Peter, Paul and Mary song called "Mon Vrai Destin" - my true destiny -  ...and wondering whether I'd ever find my true destiny, or if I were, perhaps, already living it out. But it turned out that I wasn't yet. In 2013 Tom and I walked the 500-mile Camino de Santiago de Compostela through Spain (see www.tightenyourboots.net and www.andlightenyourpack.com).  A friend suggested that I write a daily blog during the journey and, following her advice, I did. The web logging of our journey along the Camino turned out to be for me the entrance to my next life, as by the time the trip was over I'd collected a very small but engaged readership, some of whose members expressed to me the hope that I would continue blogging. But now that I was back from Spain I wondered what there could be for me to blog about. It was one of my readers who solved my dilemma when she told me, "Just share your observations on daily life." And so I decided to do that, and on December 20, 2013, my blog "Ailantha" was born,  ...with this first post, explaining the blog's title: Ailanthus Altissima, called either Tree of Heaven or Slum Palm, is a tree that thrives in places where no respectable plant would grow: in vacant lots, between the broken glass in alleys, up through rubble and cracks in the sidewalk. It is widely considered an urban blight, an ugly invasive eye sore, and because of its tenacity, campaigns to rip it from the face of the planet are ongoing and expensive. But there are others out there who praise the Ailanthus for standing up to the asphalt and concrete and bringing a bit of welcome shade and greenery, a little oasis for passersby. So what is Ailanthus? Occasional oasis or tenacious blight? And which will its spin-off Ailantha be? And so, in my sixth decade of life, I crossed over yet another border into another new life as I began writing everyday and posting my observations as a traveler just visiting this planet and reporting various and sundry observations, hopefully of interest to my fellow travelers.
 ...it seemed not so much as if I'd crossed over into another new life, but rather as if, like a literary Christopher Columbus, I'd discovered - or rather, been propelled into - a whole new world.    And so my life had settled into a groove of blogging, writing - I recently learned that my next novel, "Hail Mary," the sequel to "Equal and Opposite Reactions" will be released in May 2020 - teaching, traveling, and taking care, more or less, of the daily business of my life such as it was, leaving me to suppose that I had finally discovered my vrai destin, and that there would be only one more new life left for me to discover somewhere in that mysterious country of my own old age. But no. I have just stepped over the border into yet another new life, one I've head tell of so often from others of my generation that I marvel that my own entrance into it is turning out to be for me such a prodigiously unheralded experience. And yet it is, as I now understand it must be for everyone who steps into this new life.
 ...moved from her home in Seaford, Delaware to an assisted living facility nine-tenths of a mile from my house. I'm now my mother's guardian, advocate, daily visitor, emotional care-giver, and provider of her needs. It's a whole new life.  |
"Tropical Depression"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTPN7NYY 
"Equal And Opposite Reactions"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa or from The Book Loft of German Village, Columbus, Ohio 
Or check it out at the Columbus Metropolitan Library
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