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....Continued from yesterday: My mother's anxiety had nothing to do with her imminent move from Assisted Living to Memory Care; she still had no idea she was moving. My mother was in a state of turmoil because she needed to talk to a priest. Or rather, she needed to talk to a priest because she was in a state of turmoil and needed to confess. Immediately. I tried to explain to my mother that it was unlikely that I could find a priest to come over and visit her that day, but that the following weekend I'd take her to the local Catholic church for Saturday afternoon confession. But she didn't want to wait until Saturday, she couldn't wait. She needed to see a priest right now. Her eyes were filled with desperation. I was seized with the terrible notion that maybe my mother, who'd always had a clairvoyant streak, was having a premonition of her death on this day and was seeking last rites before she died. I consoled her as best as I could and told her I'd look for a priest. In the meantime I suggested that she join the other residents in the Bistro where there was a special holiday musical performance, two harpists playing Christmas carol duets 
 I left my mom to watch the harp performance while Tom and I helped the Sunrise relocate my mom's things from her old room,    
 ...which ended up looking nice and cozy enough once we'd gotten it set up.      My mother enjoyed the harp concert, though after it was over she asked me if I'd found the priest yet. Of course I hadn't. Because I hadn't been looking for one. I'd been hoping she'd forget about it during the concert. The staff decided it might be best to let my mother have lunch in her old neighborhood then after lunch break it to her that she was moving and lead her directly to her new room in the Memory Care unit, which was what we did, putting the finishing touches on her new room while she ate lunch. To my great relief my mom appeared not to particularly mind the move to her new neighborhood and new room, and seemed to be distracted from her preoccupation with finding a priest by the newness of her surroundings and the kindness of the Memory Care staff, who were showering her with attention. Tom and I left my mom, hoping she'd acclimate and settle in a bit and maybe even forget about wanting to talk to a priest. When we returned to check on my mother a few hours hours later she was sitting in the Memory Care living room among the other residents, looking distressed.
 I asked my mom how she was doing "Terrible," she said sadly. "They're not going to let me go." My heart sank. My mother knows she's in a locked ward, I thought. But it turned out that wasn't what my mom meant. She explained to me that she'd gone off to look for a priest and they'd told her to come back, that there was no priest here. "But I know there's a priest here," she said, "there has to be. This is a Catholic place." When I told her that this wasn't a Catholic place she said, "I know it is. I saw nuns here." My mother had mistaken several of the caregivers, Muslim women wearing head scarves, for nuns. "I need a priest," my mother beseeched, "now." I decided I had to try and find my mother a priest. Now. I came up with the idea of calling the local Catholic parish where we'd been taking my mom to Mass every Sunday morning since her arrival. I thought maybe I could drive my mom over to the rectory to talk to one of the priests there. Or maybe one of them would at least talk to my mom on the phone. The church secretary was kind and sympathetic, but one of the priests was out of town and the other was unavailable until the next day. Would I like to call back tomorrow? For no other reason than that I didn't know what else to do, I called my sister-in-law, my mother's former guardian, in Seaford, Delaware. I told my sister-in-law of my mother's plight, but she had no more idea what to do than I did. However she agreed with me that it was unlikely that my mother would find peace until she'd made her confession to a priest. A little while after I'd hung up with my sister-in-law she called me back. My sister-in-law had called the parish office in Seaford and talked to the parish secretary there, who came up with the idea of calling a priest who'd been my mother's pastor there years ago, a kind, good-hearted man who'd since retired and moved to Annapolis, Maryland. The parish secretary called the priest, who told the secretary that he'd gladly hear my mother confession over the phone right then. So the parish secretary called my sister-in-law who called me. I could see the relief in my mother's face when I told her that Father would hear her confession over the phone. I called Father from my mother's room, then I handed her the phone, left the room, and shut the door. Out in the hallway I met one of the Memory Care caregivers who asked me if I had any ideas on the best way to handle my mom. I told her that my mom generally didn't need handling, that she was usually a friendly, nice person, but that today she'd been upset anxious over not being able to see a priest. The caregiver was understanding and sympathetic and said she'd be glad to pray with my mom if that would comfort her. I thanked her for her kindness. About fifteen minutes later my mom exited her room and handed me back my phone. Father was still on the line and wanted to talk to me. He assured me that my mom could call him whenever she wanted or needed to. I thanked him profusely. The ministrations of that kind priest dissipated my mother's fear and anxiety and she was now transformed back into her old good-natured self. She smiled at and gave a hug to the caregiver who'd asked me how to handle my mom. By then it was dinner time, and so the caregiver led my mom to the dining room and introduced her to her new neighbors. The following afternoon when I arrived at the Sunrise Memory Care unit, nervous to learn how my mom was faring, I asked the caregiver who I followed down the hallway to the unit how my mom was doing. "She's really being hard," I heard the caregiver say. "Oh, no," I said, "she's being hard?" The caregiver laughed and turned around to face me. "No, no," she said with a smile, "I said, 'she's a real sweet heart.' She's so nice. She helped me all day. She helped with the other residents and she helped feed the ones who needed help eating. She's a very nurturing person." "Well, she was a nurse," I said. I decided that the Sunrise staff knew what they were doing after all. And I sent up thoughts of gratitude for that good, kind-hearted priest. 
8 Comments
 …Continued from yesterday: My mother’s week-and-a-few-days-long reprieve at an end, she was moved on Monday, December 2, from her old new home at Sunrise Assisted Living to her new new home in the Sunrise Memory Care. I’d spent a portion of the previous night lying awake angsting. Though my mother had been in her Assisted Living neighborhood a little less than three weeks it somehow felt to me, strangely, as if she’d been living there for many months, so far back in time did my old life with my old preoccupations before her arrival seem. But how would my mother take the news of the move? How would she take leaving her friends? How would she adjust in the Memory Care unit? The Memory Care Unit, like the Assisted Living Unit, was divided into two neighborhoods.
 The staff had informed me that one of the neighborhoods housed the higher-functioning residents, but that the anxiety level there was higher there than in the lower-functioning unit, and so they’d decided my mom would be better off in the low-functioning but less anxiety-filled neighborhood.
And so my still-cognizant, still sociable, still-conversational ninety-nine-and-a-half-year-old mother who, despite her confusion still possessed a decent amount of joie de vivre, would find herself in an environment where she was the highest functioning of all the residents, most of whom spent their days staring blankly. And how would my poor mother deal with that? Would she herself quickly mentally degrade to the state of the dementia and Alzheimer's residents around her? What was the Sunrise staff thinking? I not-too-happily wondered. But what choice did I or my mother have? Thus I hoped that, by some miracle, this move would turn out to be not for the worst. I’d been told by the staff that I could help with the move if I wished, or not if I didn’t wish to, but I did wish to help, so on Monday morning Tom and I showed up to help with the move. As it turned out, all the residents in my mother’s Assisted Living neighborhood knew that my mom was moving out that morning. During her brief stay in the neighborhood my mother had managed to endear herself not only to her neighbors but to several of the residents of the other Assisted Living neighborhood, several of whose residents were now in the daily habit of meandering over to my mom’s neighborhood to hang out with her. I imagine they enjoyed soaking up her warmth and humor, which she hadn’t lost despite her sporadic mental confusion. On the morning of the move several residents approached me and told me how sorry they were that my mom was leaving. One resident looked around her then leaned closed to me and said softly, “I wish they’d let your mom stay here and move a couple other people away.” I laughed at that, pointing out to the resident that they were one of the people whose room my mom had invaded in the middle of the night. “I don’t care,” they said, “I still wish they’d let her stay here.” So do I, I thought to myself, not the least reason being that when I'd arrived that morning to help with the move I found my mother, for the first time since she'd arrived at Sunrise, in a terribly anxious, unhappy state. She knows, I thought, nobody told her, but somehow she knows. But as it turned out, my mom's sudden high anxiety, unlike mine, had nothing to do with her imminent move. To be continued...  ...Continued from December 14: But my mom did not end up moving the following day from Assisted Living to Memory Care. As it turned out, in the room I chose for my mom there were some stains in the carpeting that didn't come out with a shampooing and stain treatment so the director decided to have the carpeting replaced before my mom moved in. The carpeting replacement would take about a week, so my mother had a week's reprieve. Or at least that was the way I saw it. My mom didn't yet know she was moving. But I was glad, because the postponement of my mom's move would mean she would still be in her nice room in her lovely Assisted Living neighborhood for the following week, Thanksgiving week, during which time my sister Romaine would be visiting from Portland,  ...and my daughter Claire and her hubby Miguel would be visiting from Chicago.  Romaine arrived on Monday, November 25, Claire and Miguel came the following day, and for the next few days we did our best to regale my mom with love and attention.  
 ...also shared in the attention, as well as copious amounts of cat treats.   In our mission to make this a happy, enjoyable week for Grammy - my mom’s grandmother handle - we not only spent lots of time with her at Sunrise,  …but we took her out for lunch every day. 
 We even took her out for lunch on Thanksgiving day, again to Bob Evans, the only restaurant we could find open that day and where, much to our dismay, the only menu choices were Thanksgiving dinner or a couple of breakfast items. But it was an outing, anyway.  That evening, while my sister spent her second turkey dinner of the day at Sunrise with my mom, the rest of us had Thanksgiving dinner – for some of us also the second turkey dinner of the day – at our house.  By Saturday morning all the out-of-town company had returned home, and with all the visitors gone and the flurry of activity over, I wondered if by Saturday afternoon my mom would be feeling suddenly let-down or lonely. I went to visit her on Saturday afternoon and found her contentedly watching the Ohio State football game with some of her friends.  After the football game my mom went off to participate in a game of Ohio State Buckeyes Bingo and I went home, grasping at a strand of hope that maybe the Sunrise staff would surmise that the extra week of outings and family interactions had had a therapeutic effect on my mother’s cognitive process and that perhaps they’d let her try staying a bit longer in her Assisted Living neighborhood.
But no. The staff informed me that, though my mother may have seemed well enough with her family, she still frequently wandered around the building in confusion during the day and left her room to wander at night, too. Her week-long reprieve had been only that, a reprieve. She was still scheduled to move on Monday into the locked Memory Care Unit.  …Continued from yesterday: In the days following her arrival at the Sunrise Assisted Living my mother settled into her new neighborhood while I popped in to visit her once, twice, sometimes three times a day. The staff often assured me that my mom was doing wonderfully well, amazingly well for her age, and at one point one of the friendly staff members said to me, “You’re welcome to come over every day, but you know you don’t have to. And you don't have to feel guilty.” But I felt that I did have to. And it wasn't about guilt. Well, maybe it was, a little. But whatever my underlying interior motivation, I wanted to come every day. One day I met the daughter of one of the residents and we agreed that putting one’s mother into a care facility felt like putting one's small, vulnerable child into daycare 24/7. They were always on our minds. We worried about them, worried whether they were well, whether they were happy. So Tom and I took my mom out for lunch. 
 At Sunrise she was making friends and endearing herself to the staff with her warm, funny charm. And though my mom appeared to be doing well and happy enough, there was no denying that she traveled in and out of a state of confusion. She wasn’t sure where she was or why she was there. She seemed to think that she’d be moving soon, though she didn’t know where she thought she was moving to, or, for that matter, where she’d just moved from. But on two occasions she took pictures down from the walls and wrapped them in clothing for the move. The aides had to re-hang her pictures. The nurses and aides informed me that she sometimes wandered around the building, lost and confused, and had to be walked back to her neighborhood. A couple of times she'd wandered into other residents' rooms in the middle of the night - most residents don't bother locking their doors - and flipped on their lights. One time she went around and said good-bye to the residents who were sitting in the living room, telling them that she loved them all and would pray for them all, and that she was leaving. It turned out she was right. A week and a day after my mother arrived at the Sunrise one of the nurses informed me that my mom was heading in a direction that would necessitate her moving from Assisted Living to Memory Care, "sooner rather than later." The nurse offered to give me a tour of the Memory Care unit the following evening. The following day was Thursday, November 21, one week before Thanksgiving, and that evening was the Sunrise Family Thanksgiving dinner, to which family members of the residents were invited to share a Thanksgiving meal. Tables were nicely set for the visiting families,  
 ...including a variety of yummy desserts.    After dinner I met up with the nurse who'd offered to show me the Memory Care unit. On our way to the unit we passed pretty lounge that I hadn't seen before where Dennis the Sunrise cat apparently liked to hang.  It was such a cozy little spot that I thought I might not mind hanging there myself.
 ...joined by a homey common area filled with objects that might resonate with people in dementia.          Unlike the Assisted Living, the Memory Care was a locked ward. The whole unit was considerably smaller than the Assisted Living wing and was well staffed, and the nurse assured me that my mother could wander to her heart's content here and that all the items in the unit were touchable, and if a resident picked up something and brought it to their room, well, that was permissible, too. There were residents sitting silently at tables or in chairs or wheel chairs and a few wandered about. The nurse showed me two vacant rooms, one in each neighborhood, one room that opened into the living room, the other set back down a short hallway.  The rooms looked smaller than my mother's current room, though the Sunrise Director later assured me that the Memory Care rooms weren't smaller than the Assisted Living rooms, just differently configured. In any case, these rooms lacked the vanity with the extra cupboard space above and the mini-refrigerator below, 
 And there was no shower in the bathroom. All the residents were bathed and showered by the care givers in a room called the Bathtique.
Both rooms depressed me. The whole Memory Care unit made me sad. I hoped my mother wouldn't have to move here too soon. In fact, I hoped that maybe in time, in a few weeks or so, my mom would become acclimated to her new surroundings and maybe with some therapy her confusion would clear so that she would be able to stay in her present neighborhood with her new friends. "Which room would you like for your mother?" the nurse asked me. "Which room?" I asked. Now I was confused. "I need to pick out a room already? I mean, my mom's not moving right away, is she?" "Tomorrow," said the nurse. That was what she had meant by sooner rather than later. On our walk back from the Memory Care unit I struggled to hold back tears.  ...Continued from yesterday:
  ...before heading to her new home in the assisted living at Sunrise of Gahanna. My mom did fine her first day at Sunrise, already going about endearing herself to the staff, 
 ...during dinner, for which my brother and sister-in-law, Tom, Theresa and I were invited to stay.   In truth, I must say that my mom did better her first night at Sunrise than I did. I'd decided to spend that first night there with her so that she wouldn't be lonely or afraid. In retrospect, that probably wasn't the best idea. My mom didn't seem lonely or afraid,
 My understanding had been that my mom's bedtime was around 7 pm. So when 6:45 rolled around I asked her if she was getting tired. She said she was, so I went out into the neighborhood, as the living area is called, where the other residents were gathered in the common room watching television, working on a jigsaw puzzle, or socializing. I began looking around for someone to administer my mother's evening pills and do whatever else might need to be done, as I'd been told that my mom would heretofore be receiving assistance with her morning and night-time routine.
 ...I found an aide who told me that she'd call a nurse. I returned to my mom's room to wait with her for the nurse. Ten minutes passed, then fifteen. Now my mother was getting anxious, no doubt rattled by my clock watching and wondering out loud every few minutes why the nurse was taking so long. I proposed that my mom at least get into her pj's and climb into bed while we waited for the nurse to bring her pills. My mom in her bedclothes and ready for bed, I returned to the hallway and looked around. "Need something?" called a voice from down the hallway. It belonged to the head of maintenance, who was now walking towards me. I explained to him that it was my mom's first day here and she was getting anxious and wanted to go to bed and I was spending the night and we didn't know how things worked around here but, you know, she was getting anxious and I'd called for a nurse to give her her pills and that was a while ago and now my mom was really getting anxious and it was, you know, past her bed time and we were just, you know, wondering because we didn't know how it worked yet, but we were wondering when the nurse would come because, you know, my mom was getting anxious, and I had talked to an aide who said she'd call the nurse but I wondered if she'd gotten busy, or something, and now my mom was getting, you know, really anxious, and so I was just wondering if, you know... "I'll look for somebody for you," the head of maintenance said kindly. Moments later I was surrounded by the nurse, the aide and the maintenance man. The nurse patiently explained to me that evening medications were normally distributed between 8 and 9 pm, but if my mom wanted to go to bed earlier she could in the future have her meds with dinner, but this being my mom's first day they hadn't yet put together her care schedule, which they'd do tomorrow, and as soon as she, the nurse, finished with the resident she was taking care of she'd come back and take care of my mom. Which she did. (My sister-in-law, a nurse,  ... later explained to me when I recounted the experience to her that this is in fact how things are normally done in such a group care setting; that is, medications and routine care are given during rounds and not whenever patients - or their relatives - call for them. In other words, it's not like hotel room service. My sister-in-law further assured me that my mom did not have to be in bed by 7 pm, but that it was important to just let the staff get her on the established routine which, my sister-in-law, predicted, she'd do fine on. In other words, don’t be micromanaging the aides and nurses. They know what they’re doing. I got it). My mother slept soundly that night and I not at all. The following morning before breakfast my mom and I sat out in the living room watching TV until one of the other residents joined us. She and my mother got into a conversation and after talking for a while my mother said to her new friend, “It seems that you and I have a lot in common.” As breakfast time rolled around the other residents began making their way through the living room to the dining room where they gathered around the table. “Come and sit next to me,” said my mom’s new friend to my mom. That was when I left, feeling like my mom would probably be okay. And maybe even I would be, too.   ...Continued from last time:
So I'm back already. It seems that my chronicle of the journey I'm traveling with my ninety-nine-and-a-half-year-old mother has resonated with so many people who've traveled that same journey - or are currently traveling that same journey - of being their mother’s father’s, aunt’s uncle’s, sibling’s, or some other elderly relative’s keeper that for me the spark to share our own journey - my mother's and mine - has been reignited. In truth, in addition to my feeling in recent weeks of being logistically and mentally overwhelmed and starved for time, I wasn't even sure I wanted to continue writing about this experience. After all, most of the details I'd be sharing are my mother's data, which means it should be up to her to decide whether or not she wants this private data made public. And she's no longer in any condition to make such a decision for herself. As with her other affairs, I am now the keeper of my mother's data. But then it occurred to me: my mother has never been a private person. Au contraire. She's always been a sunny, funny, open person and whenever the spotlight's been on her she's always been glad to shine. And she's often been glad to share the details of her life with others who might benefit from her experiences. Or who just might be interested. (She once wrote an article on menopause based on her own experience, which had been dreadful. Herself unprepared for and uninformed even with her medical training - my mother was a nurse - about what was actually entailed in what women of her day euphemistically and in hushed tones referred to as "The Change," my mother wanted to yank the event up from underground and educate women on the physiological process of menopause and on what they might expect during the process. Her writing alternated in style between clinical and humorous, the funniest line having something to do with women entering menopause not knowing beans from Shinola about hormones. My mom submitted her menopause article to Good Housekeeping. The magazine, however, opted not to publish her article, so my mother just made copies of her menopause article and gave them out to everybody to read. I was in my late teens and I recall being mortified at the time, even though one of my girl friends, a phys-ed major, thought it was a great article. Fifty years later I agree with her). And so, when time allows (as it's allowing at this moment) I'll try to continue blogging, among all the other subjects there are to blog about, updates on what's going on with my mom these days. I believe my mom would like me to.  ...Continued from yesterday: Now that I'd signed the initial paperwork to start the admittance process of my mother becoming a Sunrise of Gahanna resident, there was lots more paperwork to be done and - since my ninety-nine-and-a-half- year-old mother would be moving from Seaford, Delaware, to Gahanna, Ohio, - several weeks worth of long-distance transactions, transferences, evaluations, determinations, and decisions to be made. And phone calls. And faxes. And emails. And texts. And while my brother and sister-in-law (who were my mother's current guardians), myself, and the chill, cheery folks at Sunrise excavated our way through the mini-mountain of administrative preliminaries, my brother and sister-in-law took on the task of prepping my mom for the move and I dove into prepping her new room. The assisted living section of Sunrise - there was a memory care unit as well - was divided into two "houses," the entrance to each of which resembled the entrance to a house.   My mom's room, which opened into the common living area of her house,  ....was spacious, bright, sunny, and empty except for a bed, bedside table, and headboard.   Thus it became my task - nay, my mission - to fill that empty room with stuff that would turn it into a space that my mother would love. Or so I hoped. For weeks I hoped and I shopped and I stressed over every purchase:
 These towels or those towels? These sheets or those sheets? This trash can or that trash can? This chair or that chair? This mirror or that mirror? This TV or that TV? What kind of dresser, what kind of recliner, what kind of desk? I galloped from store to store, to store, to store, looking at things, buying things, changing my mind, returning things, buying different things. I felt paralyzed with anxiety over making even the smallest purchase without the approval of at least one of my siblings, none of whom actually cared whether I bought the metallic-framed bulletin board or the wood grain-framed one. My brother and sister-in-law, meanwhile, had their hands full on their end. While my mother expressed no categorical opposition to moving from her home - whatever she was feeling in her heart, she seemed resigned to the inevitable - she was nonetheless insistent that her pictures must come with her. All her pictures. Or at least all the pictures in her dining room.  And so my sister-in-law, the kindest and most dutiful of daughters-in-law, carefully and meticulously wrapped, packed, and sent out every picture on my mother's dining room wall, and soon my living room was filled with boxes of pictures,   ...it being left to my discretion which among the dozens of pictures would find a home in our mom's new quarters. And so I outfitted my mom's room, decision by angst-filled decision, bit by bit, 
     ...picture by picture,   ...day by day, week by week,  ...expenditure by expenditure,   ...including treats for Ginger, the Sunrise dog and Dennis, the Sunrise cat.    Then, finally, the room was as ready.         On Tuesday, November 12, My mom left her home in Seaford, Delaware for the last time and arrived at her new home in Ohio at Sunrise of Gahanna, where she immediately set about the task of making new friends,    ...endearing herself to the staff and her new neighbors, and endeavoring to navigate a new life in a new place at ninety-nine-and-a-half years old.  As for how she liked her room: When I told her I decorated it and that I hoped she liked it she replied that it was the most beautiful room she'd ever seen. 
 Epilogue:
My mom has been at Sunrise of Gahanna for 19 days now. To me it feels more like 19 months. Or longer, even. I mean that not at all in a negative sense; quite the contrary, in fact. It's just that since I've become my mother's guardian, advocate, daily visitor, emotional care-giver, and provider of her needs - including anything I can conceive of or imagine that she might possibly need or want or might please her - this new life I've crossed over into has been so all-consuming that it feels as if I left the life I was leading before far behind, long ago (see post from 11/16/2019, "Another New Life"). In any case, for the past 19 days I've had less time and even less space in my head for writing. (Alas, for me writing requires not only time but sufficient head space). And so it's likely that from now on my blog posts may be fewer and farther between for a while. And in case it should turn out that Ailantha must go dormant for a short or long time, then let me take a moment now to thank you, my dear readers, from my heart. I appreciate you all more than I can say. |
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"Equal And Opposite Reactions"
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