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Drowning My Blue Christmas In Cookies And Melted Chocolate

12/23/2020

I'd venture to say that a good many of us are having a blue Christmas this year. Which is not to say that there aren't those who are doing all right with their Christmas of white, or not white. But for for those of us who who are spending the holidays staying dutifully cloistered at home in our COVID bubble, apart from our friends, our family, our loved ones, those who give our lives meaning and sustenance, it's hard.
Almost everyone I associate with - I mean, everyone I used to associate with but don't anymore - is somewhere on the blue spectrum these days, as I myself am.
"I'll have a blue Christmas without you," Elvis sang in my head as I set up on our front porch the kitschy Christmas figurines so loved by my grandchildren when they arrived from Los Angeles with my daughter and son-in-law for their Christmas visit.

"I'll be so blue thinking about you," he silently crooned as we decorated the tree without them,

...and reminisced about years gone by.

And while this Christmas I'm thankful as thankful can be for the loved ones who share my bubble,

....I miss my loved ones in Los Angeles.

I miss my my loved ones in Chicago.

I miss my loved ones who live across town.

I miss my sister.

I miss my mother.

No doubt all of us who are hearing Elvis in our heads are finding our own way of dealing with our blue Christmas.
As for me, I've thrown myself into baking cookies and dunking things in chocolate.
Recruiting my daughter Theresa and my hubby Tom as enlistees, I've been leading the charge of the cookie and chocolate-dipping brigade.

We baked and/or dipped about 60 or 70 dozen goodies.
I sent boxes of cookies to my kids and grandkids,

...and Theresa and I made up plates of treats,

...that we delivered to friends, neighbors, and folks that we've met since the COVID epidemic while walking, and walking, and walking around the neighborhood who were also walking, and walking, and walking around the neighborhood, all of us walking, and walking, and walking around the neighborhood because there was no place else to go.
Did baking and delivering all those goodies help my blue Christmas?
Well, it's definitely several shades lighter.
Everyone have yourselves a merry little Christmas.

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A Funny, Uplifting Commercial In The Time Of COVID

12/21/2020

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Patience Is Our Weapon

Yes, the COVID vaccine has been rolled out, but it's pretty clear that for you, me, and everyone we know, life isn't going to change back to what it used to be any time soon. We have three months of winter before us that we need to survive, hopefully without catching and/or spreading the coronavirus. And by now it's pretty clear that the only sure way to do that is by putting our lives on hold and staying in our bubbles and away from each other until the time comes when it's safe to be with each other again and to resume our lives from where we left off. Which it isn't yet. But which it will be eventually. And that is is what we critically need to not lose sight of right now.
My daughter came across on her twitter feed a public service commercial put out by the German government that offers a clever twist on the message of the importance of staying home during the COVID-19 epidemic. "First it made me laugh," said my daughter of the ad. "Then it made me feel better."
The ad had the same effect one me. Subsequently I've been watching it at least once a day as a pick-me-up. And I'm recommending that you watch it, too. Because, besides being a mix of entertainment and inspiration, this cleverly made video is a reminder that, as difficult as these days are, as hard as it is to stay home and even so much worse, to stay apart from our friends, our family, our loved ones, those who give our lives meaning and sustenance, someday we'll look back on the dark and lonely times of this epidemic - but only if we survive the epidemic.
This German advertisement is a call to us to do what we need to do - or rather, what we need to not do - to fight the COVID epidemic, to be heroes, and to live to someday tell about this time that we went through. It's a short, sweet, and inspiring video. So watch it. Hopefully it will make you feel better. And stronger. Here's the link. Enjoy. And hang in there. At home.
youtu.be/FS1DDn2eklU

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Good Vaccine Karma

12/18/2020

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GOOD VACCINE KARMA

Yesterday my daughter Claire received her COVID-19 vaccination.
Claire is charge nurse of the day shift of the COVID Intensive Care Unit at Northwestern Hospital in Chicago.

I assumed that Claire would be in the first group of front-line health care workers to receive the vaccine, but she had informed me that she didn't know when the vaccine would arrive at Northwestern.
However this past Wednesday, the third day of the vaccine roll-out, Claire texted me that she'd received an email telling her, "You've been chosen! Sign up!" to receive the COVID vaccine.
But when she tried to log onto the given website to sign up, the website wouldn't load. It was, Claire said, "like when you're trying to get "Hamilton" tickets but so is everyone else." After a few tries she couldn't get into the website at all, which led her to believe that maybe the email inviting her to sign up for a vaccination was a fake or maybe all the time slots were already taken. She mused that, after all, "This is the hottest ticket in town."
I reminded her how good she is at snagging hot tickets. When "Hamilton" opened in Chicago Claire was able to get tickets, not only once for her and Miguel,

...but a second time for the family (See post from 6/25/2017, "Hamilton").

I pointed out to her that she had good Hot Ticket Karma and that maybe it would turn out that she had good Vaccine Karma as well.
And so Claire continued to pursue the vaccination sign-up website, listening to the soundtrack of "Hamilton" for good luck. After numerous refreshings, she was finally able get onto the website and to sign up. She was given an appointment for the following day at noon at one of the Northwestern satellite locations.
On December 17, 2020, at noon, Claire joined the ranks of the first wave of COVID warriors to receive the initial dose of the vaccine.

She began crying when the nurse injected her.
"Oh, did that hurt?" the nurse asked.
Claire told her that no, it didn't hurt. She was just overcome with emotion, humility, and thankfulness beyond words.

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Too Many Moving Parts

12/16/2020

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TOO MANY MOVING PARTS

It's been a month and a week since Joe Biden won the Presidential election,

...a month and a week that soon-to-be ex-President Donald Trump has spent heave-ho-ing the legal system from stem to stern,

...in an effort to trip up the Electoral College and delete votes of 81,283,485 Americans.
This could theoretically have been possible as we Americans don't actually vote for our Presidents, we only think we do.
  It's actually the group of Electors chosen by our candidate's political party who vote for the President. So when we the people vote, who we are in fact voting for is a group of strangers to do the voting for us. The Founding Fathers, not completely trusting the good sense of we the unenlightened people, put this system of Electors in place as a safety measure just in case Americans were ever dazzled into voting into the office of President some lying, grifting, fraudulent, corrupt, self-dealing, over-privileged, immoral, dishonest, divisive snake-oil salesman with a genius for stirring up and glorifying the basest desires and prejudices that simmer in the human soul. The Electors were supposed to overrule us in case the majority ever made such a misguided choice for the leader of our country.
At least that was the stated plan of the Founding Fathers, though they did have another reason for instituting the Electoral College - some historians say the main reason - which was to get the South on board with the whole united states concept.
  Since the agrarian South at the time didn't have as great a voting population as the more urban North, the compromise of the Electoral College was made among the Founders. Every state was granted a number of Electors based on the state's total population, and the South was permitted to count each slave as three-fifths of a person. So this gave the southern slave states more representation than was equaled by the number of eligible voters.
And so it goes to this day, long after the demise of slavery, that in our country states are granted Electors based on population no matter what percentage of that population actually votes. Thus in the United States a candidate can lose the popular vote by millions but still become President by way of the Electoral College.
As it turned out in the 2020 election, Donald Trump lost both the popular vote - by millions - and the Electoral College vote. However he set in motion a scheme, backed by some powerful Republican lawmakers, to get the Democratic Electors switched out for Republican Electors. And with a little cooperation by the courts and state legislatures and maybe a little more time he theoretically could have pulled it off.
But five weeks after the election is the time appointed by law for the Electors to cast their votes for - or at least one hopes for - the candidate who won the most votes in their state.
On the December 14, 2020, each Elector faithfully cast their vote in accordance with the will of the voters in their state rather than in accordance with the will of Donald Trump, and the fear that the votes of 81,283,485 Americans would be overturned was put to rest.
Well, not quite put to rest. Along with the Electoral College, the Founders at the time thought it wise to install what they deemed one final safety measure in our election process. After the vote of the people is approved by the Electors, the vote of the Electors must be approved by Congress before the President-elect can be indisputably declared the winner o the election.
Congress will meet for this purpose on January 6, 2021, about three weeks from today and two weeks before the inauguration of the next President must, by law, take place. It takes only one Congressperson and one Senator to object to Joe Biden's confirmation to open a Congressional debate. Already allies of Donald Trump are talking about fighting Joe Biden's confirmation on the floor of Congress and dragging out the process for as long as possible. This means that after the stress of the election and the stress of worry about the Electoral College vote, Americans now have to stress over the distant but possible possibility that Donald Trump, master of dissembling, propagating disinformation, pulling rabbits out of hats, mesmerizing his adoring base, empowering his allies and bullying everyone else around him into submission, might yet pull off one more sleight-of-hand and somehow nullify the election and turn the results to his favor.
Our American election system has too many moving parts. Too many cogs that can break or malfunction, as when a candidate can lose an election by the people by millions of votes but win it by the Electoral College. To many pieces that can be bent and manipulated by a corrupt but proficient political mechanic.

It's the 21st Century. We could get rid of all the out-dated, absurdly inefficient moving parts and advance to a more streamlined, up-to-date, state-of-the art election system.
What about this: Let's say every eligible American gets to vote and the candidate who gets the most votes wins. How's that for a revolutionary idea?

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The Mystery Is Solved!

12/13/2020

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Such sweet, spicy sugarplums
They'll want to read them twice!

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The mystery of the white roses has at last been solved.
As chronicled in my previous post (see post from 12/9/2020, "The Mystery Of The Roses), five days ago I received a dozen-and-a-half beautiful white roses with a condolence card for the recent passing of my mother,

...but with the name of the sender missing from the card. Hence I'd spent the last several days trying to figure out who had sent the roses, every hunch I followed coming up negatory.
Then the night before last I found this envelope taped to the front door:

Inside the envelope was a surprise, indeed: a note and a photo revealing that the senders of the roses were my nephew Randy and his wife Anusha.

But of course! Randy and Anusha! Strangely enough, the only people I hadn't thought of! The wording of the erroneously anonymous card now made sense:

My nephew having lived with us years ago, and in more recent years he and Anusha being - prior to the COVID epidemic - part of our regular Sunday night dinner crowd,

...Randy had come to know my mother, and Anusha had met her a time or two as well, from my mother's visits over the years to Ohio. In fact the last time they saw my mom was December a year ago when I brought her home one time for Sunday dinner shortly after she moved from Seaford, Delaware to the nearby Sunrise senior care facility.

The card and the roses now made perfect sense: Randy and Anusha knew my mom well enough to specify her by name on the card, as well as to describe her as "a sweet lady" who "just lit up a room." And they were close enough to me to send me a bouquet of eighteen roses.
Amazing how sometimes we miss what should have been so obvious.
Anyway, there's more to the story. As it turns out, I was not the first one to learn the identity of the mystery white rose gifters.
My sister-in-law, Randy's mother Mary Jane,

...guessed the solution to the mystery as soon as she read my blog about the the white roses. The key for Mary Jane was the place from whence the roses came: Sam's Club.
Now, many people know that Sam's club sells flowers in bulk - for weddings, for example. In fact my daughter Claire ordered her wedding flowers from Sam's Club (see her wedding posts posts from 5/1/2014 - 5/9/2014). Here's a picture of my me cutting the Sam's Club flowers at Claire's mother-in-law's house in Wickenburg, Arizona, Wickenburg being where the wedding took place.

And here's my mom, still a youngster of 94 at the time, helping to set up the flowers at the wedding venue.

But though many people know that Sam's Club sends out bulk flowers, not many people know, as Mary Jane pointed out to me, that Sam's Club also sends gift floral arrangements. However Mary Jane did know this fact, mainly because Anusha and Randy from time to time gift her with a bouquet from Sam's Club.
And so as soon as Mary Jane read my blog about the roses having come from from Sam's Club, she had a hunch who'd sent them. She called Randy and he confirmed that it was, in fact, he and Anusha who had sent me the roses. They decided to let the mystery percolate for another couple of days just for fun and to see if anyone else would guess. Nobody did, though my daughter Maria probably came closest.

She thought the answer might be one of the Liszkay/Loushin cousins. I should have followed her hunch.
Still, it was, in fact, a sweet, funny moment when Anusha and Randy sprung the surprise. But one sweet surprise deserves another, so last night Randy and Anusha likewise found a surprise on their front porch. ;)

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The Mystery Of The Roses

12/9/2020

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two books, in fact:

"Equal and Opposite Reactions" and "Hail Mary"
Available on Amazon
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THE MYSTERY OF THE ROSES

On my kitchen table sits a beautiful bouquet of eighteen white roses in a glass vase that was delivered to me yesterday.

There was a card attached to the bouquet with a message of condolence for the recent death of my mother, but there was no name on the card telling who had sent the flowers, evidently an oversight by the sender or by Sam's Club, from where the roses came.
I know the sender was likely not someone close to me, not only because I had requested of friends not to send me flowers, but also by the wording on the message of the unsigned card:

I further gleaned the wording on the card for clues as to who might have sent the roses and who probably didn't.
The use of the words "Romaine's passing" as opposed to ""your mother's passing" led me to deduce that the roses were a gift from a group of people who were associated primarily with my mother but who also knew me in a secondary way. So, they knew and cared about my mom, but also cared enough about me to send me a bouquet of eighteen white roses shipped overnight from Miami, according to the shipping label,

...prior to being sent from "Colo," which must mean Colombia, the second largest producer of roses in the world, something I learned from the movie "Maria Full of Grace," the story of a young Colombian rose cutter who is recruited to be a drug mule.

At first I wondered if the roses might have been from the staff at the Sunrise senior care facility where my mother had been a resident in the Memory Care unit for the past year and where, before the COVID epidemic, I used to visit her every day (See post from 11/25/2020). But the sentence "We are very sorry to hear of Romaine's passing" did not suggest Sunrise, as it was at Sunrise that my mother died, and so the the staff at Sunrise would not have "heard of" my mother's passing; they were in truth the first to know.
I also thought that maybe the members of my mother's church back in Seaford, Delaware, where she lived before she came to live near me in Ohio, might have sent the bouquet. But then the description of my mom as "a sweet lady" who just "lit up a room" somehow didn't seem like the words of those who were close to my mom in the way that her church friends were. My mom was very involved with and active in her parish. She was the president of her parish's Legion of Mary and held the meetings at her house until she moved to Ohio at age 99. The Legion's statue and shrine were kept at my mother's house.

And so it seemed to me that, had the flowers been sent from my mother's fellow parishioners there would have been a reference in the card to her in the context in which they knew or worked with her.
Or maybe there would have been a religious message. Because my mom was, in fact, a very religious person, her beliefs and spirituality almost bordering on those of a mystic. She had a clairvoyant streak and would occasionally hear a voice or have a feeling or a dream that would impart to her information on the state of being of someone to whom she was close, not necessarily geographically, but emotionally. She was occasionally possessed of an intuition that went beyond normal perception.
And, as I recalled in trying to ascertain the provenance of the mysterious roses, this flower did in fact have a symbolic reference in my mother's spiritual catalogue. It was her believe that if one said a novena - special prayers continued for a cycle of nine days - and if at the end of the novena one was given a rose by someone who did not know about the novena having been said, then the intention for which one was praying the novena would be granted.
I found myself wondering. Had it been nine days since my mother had died? I checked the calendar. No, she died on November 23, which was fifteen days previous. Nor had I been praying for the last nine days for anything in particular, nothing other than the same old things I'm always praying for. So there was no connection that I could see on either of those fronts.
Then I remembered that it was December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, one of the Holy Days of Obligation on the Catholic Liturgical Calendar. It is the belief among Catholics that the moment at which a human being is conceived is the moment at which we are imparted with a soul, and upon this soul there is the mark of sin, a mark that can only be erased by baptism. The Feast of the Immaculate Conception, December 8, celebrates the belief that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was conceived without this stain of sin on her soul.
And so, my mother having been a devotee of Mary, I spent some time pondering whether the roses and the day on which they arrived and my mother's spiritual connection might all be interrelated.
But then I decided to climb out of that rabbit hole before I went in any deeper and accept what I could see: that all my conclusions based on my analysis of the wording of the card could be wrong and that the roses are a very thoughtful gift to me from some kind people who knew my mother and maybe knew me.
To whoever me sent the eighteen white roses and the unsigned card, thank you so much for your kindness. The roses are beautiful and arrived in tip-top shape on the day they were supposed to arrive.

If you happen to see this post please let me know so that I can thank you properly. And in the meantime I'll keep trying to unravel the mystery of who you are.

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A Few Final Words And Some Pictures

12/3/2020

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After my mother's death her body was transported back to Seaford, Delaware, where she had lived for twenty-five years until the last year of her life which she spent in Gahanna, Ohio at the Sunrise of Gahanna senior care facility. Her funeral was in Seaford on December 1, a week and a day after she died (See post from 11/25/2020).
My mother spent a hundred-and-a-half years on the planet. She had five children, nineteen grandchildren, eighteen great-grandchildren, and too many friends and acquaintances to count.
There were five people at her burial. The COVID-19 pandemic has without a doubt been the creator of many sad ironies.
Her funeral service was a brief outdoor blessing by the parish priest,

...followed by taps, as my mom was a veteran,

...an Army nurse during World War II.

Present at my mom's funeral were two of my brothers, their wives, and my mother's household helper/caregiver/guardian angel and dear friend of many years, Fran (See post from 5/28/2014, "Funny Ladies.").

The rest of us who loved her could be there only in spirit. As she now is with us.

I miss you, Mom. Rest in peace.

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Black Friday

12/1/2020

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Life's exigencies have a way of interrupting our grieving and maybe that's for the better.
The day after my mom died I found myself needing to make a plan for clearing out the room that had been hers at Sunrise of Gahanna (See previous post).

During my mom's final days the fact that her furniture, clothes, pictures, and other possessions would soon have to be dealt with might have crossed my mind a time or two; but only briefly and in the abstract. Now the abstract had become concrete.
How my mom's things would eventually be dispensed or disposed of would, I decided, be a plan for another day. What I needed at the moment was a plan for getting those things out of Sunrise and, for want of a better immediate storage venue, into my living room.
My mate Tom and I brainstormed on a course of action and found ourselves engaging in what I'd call A Liszkay Thing: How would we do the move? Well, we could maybe borrow the neighbor's pick-up truck and then get our son Tommy and nephew Randy to help us move and load the furniture into the truck...except that the neighbor's pick-up truck was a polished, pristine, finely detailed vehicle that's used for transporting the neighbor's bicycles for bike hikes and trips and so mayhaps asking to borrow it to haul furniture might not, we decided, be the most neighborly move.
On the other hand, if we brought our station wagon and the boys brought their cars we could, within several trips, probably load everything into our combined vehicles, except for the motorized lounge chair, which we could maybe fit into the station wagon if we could take it apart, which might be tricky, so instead of using our cars maybe we should rent a truck? Or a pick-up truck - do they rent out pick-up trucks? - and then Tommy and Randy could help us with the packing and loading, but then we'd been told that only two people would be allowed inside Sunrise to do the moving because of COVID, and, speaking of COVID, should we really even be asking our young relatives to venture out to help us at all?
We even batted about - very briefly - the idea of asking Sunrise if they'd maybe like to just keep all my mom's things for the next resident, who - who knows? - might like using my mom's furniture, wearing her clothes, sleeping on her bed sheets and looking at the pictures of her family hanging on the wall?
While Tom and I were going back and forth my daughter Claire called. "Why don't you just hire a small moving company to take care of this for you?" she said. "Have them pack everything up for you, move all the furniture, do it all from start to finish."
In my daughter's words I swear I heard the Hallelujah Chorus. I wondered why Tom and I never thought of calling a moving company? But of course calling a moving company when you've got perfectly good relatives isn't A Liszkay Thing. (Though I swear that for this branch of the family tree it will be in the future).
And so I called Two Men and a Truck on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and they said they could do the job on Friday.
It took the two young men with the truck three hours to neatly pack up my mom's belongings and deliver them to my living room,

...except for the gargantuan motorized lounger, which I decided could take up residence for now in our family room.

And then began my end of the job.
As it turned out Tommy and Emily were - to my great relief and gratitude - agreeable to coming over on Saturday and taking the furniture from my living room, which they did,

...with a little help from our station wagon.

However it meant that in preparation I needed to spend the remainder of that Black Friday emptying the drawers full of my mother's things.
Her things seemed like her,

...and smelled like her,

...and reminded me of her.

By Friday night my mom was all around my living room,

...and she was even more so by Saturday afternoon after the furniture was gone and I opened the boxes.

The boxes were filled mostly with her clothes,

...which my daughter Theresa helped me move from the boxes to bags.

We could see my mom again in the clothes we remembered her wearing.
"Remember this one?" we'd say.

"Or what about this one?"

"Oh, this one is her for sure."

"And remember how beautiful she looked in these?"

We found her purse,

...inside of which was her wallet,

...a few pairs of rosary beads, and an old, stained picture of Aunt Mary, mom's younger disabled sister who lived with us when I was growing up (See posts from May 30 and June 2, 2014: "Fly Homeward, Little Bird."

Inside my mom's wallet were two dollar bills and a receipt from Pizza King, my mom's go-to eatery back in Seaford for Sunday morning brunch with her church friends.

In the pocket of one of her sweaters I found a tiny ceramic baby Jesus.

By Sunday everything was bagged,

...and on Monday we left the remainder of my mother's earthly things at Goodwill.

Maybe soon someone else will be beautiful in her clothes.

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Good-Bye, Mom

11/25/2020

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   Late the night before last - November 23 - I received the call from the Sunrise senior care facility that my mother had died.
It was a strange moment. As soon as the phone rang, before even checking my phone, I knew who was calling at this hour and why and yet it didn't seem possible that what I'd known all along was going to happen - and dreaded all along - could really, truly, finally have happened.
  For just the snap of a fleeting moment this felt like the recurring dreams from my childhood,

...in which something I was frightened of in real life - invading Russian soldiers, the Devil, robots from outer space, the neighborhood bully - had finally trapped me, this time for real, this time not a dream...except that it always was a dream. But this time it wasn't a dream. This time it was real. My mother had really died.
Of course she'd been dying for the past ten days. The Sunrise staff and the hospice nurses told me as much, though it wasn't necessary, I could see it for myself. I sat with my mom for hours every day as she drifted uneasily in and out of some vague consciousness. I talked to her, held her hand, pulled up her favorite music on my phone and held it close to her ear. I held my phone in front of her face and Facetimed her with relatives, though she appeared unaware of any of their screen presences, or mine very much, for that matter. But then I guess it hasn't been determined of what and to what degree a person might be aware when their mind has moved on but their heart is still beating.
Sometimes my mom lay calm and still, but more often than not she moved her arms or legs as if in a restless half-sleep, or as if she were trying to get up out of the bed. Often her eyes were open or half-open. I wondered where my mom was. Sometimes I asked her. Was she suffering? Was she in distress? I couldn't stand to see her in this state. And yet I didn't want her to die. I didn't know what I wanted.
But, of course, I did know what I wanted. I wanted my mom to return, to open her eyes, to sit up, to smile and get out of bed. I wanted her to be herself again, the self she'd always been, the self she was just last year.

It's true that my mom was one hundred-and-a-half years old, which was, I suppose, more than long enough to expect one's mother to live. But then the longer she lived, the longer she was a presence in my life, and the harder it was to imagine that she ever wouldn't be.
The day before my mother died one of the Sunrise nurses stood by her bed and said, "Your mom moves so much because she never liked to sit still. She was always up talking to people and trying to help people. She would help feed people. If she saw one of the residents crying she would go to them and try to get them to stop. She was always trying to help the care managers with their work. Now she doesn't want to lie still."
Yes, that sounded like my mom.

"It didn't seem like Grammy would just die," said my daughter. "It seemed like there should have been fireworks or shooting stars, or something."
Yes, it seemed like there should have been.

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Twelve Beautiful Cupcakes

11/21/2020

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TWELVE BEAUTIFUL CUPCAKES

It's been a rough week. But then, for most of us that probably goes without saying.
After all, there are currently so many possibilities of how life can be rough, the COVID-19 pandemic having dropped a whole new world of interconnected maladies, misfortunes, and unhappiness on top of the already vastly numerous run-of-the-mill happenings that can make life rough.
I suppose a variation of the famous quote from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina could sum it up: These days everybody's life is rough in its own way.
As for me, it was a fairly run-of-the mill development, I suppose, yet ushering in no less of an emotional upheaval than a more seismic one might have, that propelled me into my rough week: A week and a day ago I was told that my mother, 100 years and 5 months old, was near the end of her life.
My mother lived in her own house until one year ago,

...when she relocated from Seaford, Delaware to Gahanna, Ohio to take up residence at Sunrise of Gahanna, a wonderful senior care facility one mile from my home.

From the time she arrived at Sunrise I visited my mom every day, took her to church every Sunday and out to eat a time or two a week. I watched her make friends and thrive, even after she was moved to the Memory Care unit, where she received the kindest care I could have hoped for.

Then the epidemic struck, life became surreal, and by March senior care facilities across the country were put under quarantine and I didn't see my mother for three months except for a weekly digital visit via my iphone screen, and even for that I was grateful.
By June the quarantine had been lifted slightly for care facilities and for the next five months I was allowed to spend half an hour once a week with my mother sitting outside twelve feet apart. I watched her hearing and cognition deteriorate week by week, though the Sunrise staff assured me that she was still active and quite social. I felt that if I were able to still come and see her every day she wouldn't forget who I was; if I could just sit with her and hold her hand she would be better.
One of the nurses suggested that, as several of my mom's friends had baby dolls, I buy a baby doll for my mom, too. From then on, they tell me, my mom was never without her baby. She always brought her baby along for our visits.

A few weeks ago when the weather turned cold our weekly 12-feet apart outdoor visits became weekly 12-feet apart indoor visits. Last Friday, November 13, when I arrived at Sunrise for my visit with my mom I was met by the charge nurse of patient care who informed me that I could go back an visit my mother in her room. My mother appeared to be approaching her final days, and so I could now visit her in her room every day if I wished.
She was weak when I saw her on Friday, bedridden by Saturday. On Sunday I was told my mother was "in transition" - from life to death, I suppose. I've sat with my mother every day for the past eight days, two, three, four hours a day in mask, face shield and gloves.

I talk to my mom even though she doesn't seem to hear me. Once in a while she'll say something, usually incoherent, and so softly that I struggle to hear her. Sometimes she lies with her eyes closed, so quiet and still that I become fixated on a vein in her neck, watching it to make sure it's still pulsating.
But sometimes when one or two of her Sunrise caregivers enter the room, all cheerful and bubbly and fussing over her, my mom springs back to life, reaches for a hug, kisses them, tells them she loves them, that she’ll miss them, prays that God will bless them.
And so it's gone for the past eight days. And while I've felt mostly bathed in the comfort and kindness of family, friends, and the Sunrise caregivers, several days ago I fell apart, briefly. A remark was made to me concerning my mother, so harsh and unkind and unexpected that it left me not only momentarily speechless, but momentarily breathless.
For the first time since I learned that my mother was dying, I cried. And cried. I told my sister about the mean remark that was made to me. I told my husband, my children, my friends, I laid awake at night and ruminated and cried some more.
The following day I spent an hour sitting in our family room on the phone with a friend discussing, dissecting, analyzing and psychoanalyzing the remark. When I hung up the phone my husband entered the room and said, "Look in the kitchen. Somebody sent you cupcakes."
On the kitchen table was a box of a dozen beautiful cupcakes.

They were a gift from my sister Romaine, who'd sent them to make me feel better. And, wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles, these twelve beautiful cupcakes did make me feel better. Immediately. Romaine had ordered them from a Gahanna bakery called Fate Cakes owned by a young pastry artist who delivered the cakes to our house herself.

"I asked her to make the cupcakes look like desert succulents and to add extra icing," Romaine told me. These confectionary cacti were little works of art, down to the sprinkling of graham cracker crumbs for the desert sand.

And the icing was just the way I like it: two parts icing to one part cake.

And were they delicious? Oh yes. These little Fate Cakes and my sister's kindness nourished my sweet tooth and my spirit.
My mother used to say that a little kindness was like water that could bring a parched flower in a desert back to life. I might add that a cupcake desert can work wonders as well.

Reference:
https://www.thisweeknews.com/story/news/local/new-albany/2020/08/29/gahanna-bakers-stress-relief-turns-into-fulfilling-business-with-fate-cakes/42345053/

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Drowning My Blue Christmas In Cookies And Melted Chocolate

A Funny, Uplifting Commercial In The Time Of COVID

Patience Is Our Weapon

Good Vaccine Karma

GOOD VACCINE KARMA

Too Many Moving Parts

TOO MANY MOVING PARTS

The Mystery Is Solved!

The Mystery Of The Roses

two books, in fact:

THE MYSTERY OF THE ROSES

A Few Final Words And Some Pictures

Black Friday

Good-Bye, Mom

Twelve Beautiful Cupcakes

TWELVE BEAUTIFUL CUPCAKES

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two books, in fact:

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Archives

Categories

Patience Is Our Weapon

GOOD VACCINE KARMA

TOO MANY MOVING PARTS

THE MYSTERY OF THE ROSES

TWELVE BEAUTIFUL CUPCAKES