holding on

Mom's fourth day at Mirabella. Sat through Mom's therapy. Dementia is interrupting Mom's ability to participate in therapy--there's a disconnect between her brain and her limbs, so therapy sessions find Mom vague and unfocused. Even the look on her face is vague; that she can't keep her head upright doesn't help. She doesn't even know that she's looking sideways, that the world is somehow lopsided in her mind's eye. Becky, the OT, talked about nuero-development therapy, trying to manipulate Mom's limbs so that the brain is stimulated and remembers what to do when asked. The PT used PEN to stimulate Mom's muscles with electrical activity because Mom can't activate these muscles herself. Alarming to watch Mom strapped to a bicycle machine and see that Mom can't contribute her own effort to the task of making the pedals spin around.

Mom wet herself during therapy, so when I step out to give her privacy when the nurse is changing her Depends, I run into my brother. For the first time, both of us consider that fact that maybe Mom can't return to her home after they are finished with her in therapy, or rather after Medicare won't pay for her stay at Mirabella any longer because she is not making "adequate" progress. The director of Mirabella strolls by in her causal work-out clothes and stops to say hello. We beleaguer her with questions, wanting to know what might happen to Mom when she is no longer eligible to stay here under Medicare funds. I try to imagine Mom here, at Mirabella, in their assisted living quarters, and am surprised that this is something my mind can imagine, something that seems inevitable to me. I am astonished as the plan has always been to get Mom home as soon as possible....and yet her new condition seems to warrant something else, some other arrangement. My brother is the first one to bring this up....and we are both reluctant. Realism seems to be what is warranted now. When Eric speaks to his wife, his story may change. When I fully consider the ramifications of Mom's decline, my ideas may change also.

In the meantime, I am living with an image--Mom laying in her hospital bed, her head crooked to her right shoulder and her eyes just a slit of vision gazing somewhere at the level of my waist. She can't raise her neck or level her sight....so what she sees is what she sees in her slanted view of life. When I kiss her goodbye, she can't look me in the eye, and instead mutters something about my coat, though she can't think of the word "coat" and instead stumbles for a minute at least until I figure out what she wants to say--"another pretty coat" I say to her as a question. Mom nods in agreement. "Yes," I say back to her, "something I got second hand." "Oh," she says, and I want to weep because pretty coats and killer shoes are not anything Mom needs right now. All she needs is what she can't have--good health.

When I pull away from our hug, there are three smudges of lipstick on her cheeks, the places where I pressed my lips to her fragile skin--our nightly ritual. I move to smooth out the age-spotted surfaces, to remove the pink remnants of color, and when I do she says--"No...Leave it." The last thing I see as I turn to leave is the glow of my pink lipstick against the white of her sheets, against the pallor of her cheeks, against the institutional gleam of her room, a reality that not even pretty upholstery and tasteful bed linens can quite conceal. She's holding on...and so are we. When I get home, I hug tight my cat, Cougar, glad this one thing's still steady.

Deeply, a mother's daughter