still here

"How are you, Dorin?" my cousin Paul asks. Paul is the youngest son of my mom's now-dead sister, Marguerite. He is very dear to my mom.

Paul and I are sitting with Mom. It's been a long day of therapy and meal-eating and truncated conversations. In speech therapy today, Mom put on her glasses and was able to unscramble the ten sentences Lisa offered to her--granted it took a half-an-hour and two of them were truly a struggle ("you are how?" and "dinner is what for?"--the questions were difficult for Mom for some reason)--but time is not the test here. Exercising her brain is. Mom is holding her own and, at times, making improvements--small incremental changes like grabbing hold of a fork or helping to pull down the hem of her shirt when being changed that don't necessarily add up to anything now but may mean something decisive in the future. Meaningful change happens very slowly here at Mirabella--fork by fork, hem by hem.

Today, as I help Mom eat her meal, I am struck by the myriad of things we assume as humans. I'm coaxing Mom into eating her Brussel Sprouts, a vegetable she actually likes but she finds these particular ones too a la dente, despite there being sliced in half by the chef. Mom becomes a child at dinner, requiring infinite dialogue to encourage her to finish her plate. Usually she just eats half, sometimes less.

Today her "Grilled Top Sirloin with Maitre d'Hotel Butter" is pulverized because the soft mechanical diet restriction has yet to be lifted. Eating "pre-chewed" food, as Mom calls it, is difficult when you have limited ability to grab hold of a spoon or a fork. I have to hold the spoon for her, because as she tries to maneuver the spoon to her mouth it flips upside down, like a boat belly up, and the meat tumbles into the creases of her sweat pants. What works better is stabbing Brussel sprouts with a fork--I do the stabbing and she rotates the fork towards her lips. I support her elbow as she moves her arm in a half-swing that just misses her lower lip. With a little nudge from my supporting arm, the forked sprout jumps up an inch or so and makes its way between Mom's teeth. After two of these halves, however, Mom calls it quit, making a face that could scare even an adult on Halloween. "Eeeeyyeeee," she says. "No...no" While sometimes Mom's communications are difficult to follow, this one is clear enough--yuk!

Mom refuses to eat the pulverized meat, muttering something about "dirt" which I don't understand until she starts gesturing towards her plate and the mound of brown-grey carnage laying there. Mom thinks the meat looks like "dirt" and won't eat it. While I have to agree it doesn't look particularly attractive, I try to explain that actually it's steak, the same thing her neighbor-next-door Dot is eating. In response, Mom purses her lips and moves her head left to right, just enough to make her meaning clear. "No Way." After a few more attempts and a bit of conversation, it tuns out that what Mom doesn't like is the meat's tasteless quality, fair enough I think. So after I liberally shake salt and pepper onto it's "dirt"-like demeanor, Mom agrees to eat a mouthful or two. These I spoon into her mouth, taking advantage of every open-tooth moment, whether she intends to accepts bites at these times or not.

When we get to the ice cream, however, it's a different story. Mom loves ice cream. She says "yum" when I pull off the lid and lift a spoon of cream from the cardboard Dixie cup container. It's vanilla tonight. At first I spoon it to her, as the iced cream is already soft and difficult to handle, seeing how we took so long getting through dinner, or through the best we could. But Mom is so eager that soon, between bites, she is grabbing for an imaginary spoon and lifting the ice cream into her mouth, though there's nothing there--not the spoon or the dessert--as she can't tell the difference between grabbing the real spoon or thinking she's grabbing the spoon. It takes me a minute to realize what she's doing. When I do, my breath leaves me for just a second or two and tears bead my lower lids, swell my cheeks. I'm grateful Mom is too busy with her imaginary spoon to notice.

I say--"Wait Mom," you don't have the spoon in your hand yet." She gets a scowl on her face like I'm saying something either wrong or stupid and says with a bit of pique--"Yes, yes...I do." So at this point, I let her take her own spoon, the real spoon, come what may. And while she manages to get several spoons of ice cream into her mouth, another several land in her lap. Mom doesn't even notice. If she doesn't care, I think, neither will I.

Despite it's difficulties, Mom trying to eat her own ice cream is an improvement.

Another sign of recovery is the resumption of her sense of humor, or perhaps in her case, her sense of irony. So when Paul asks Mom--"How are you doing"--there's a grand pause into which we all wait breathlessly, Paul and I for what she will say and Mom for what she will be able to say. This pause goes on for at least a minute and in its duration I become convinced that Mom has gotten distracted--a frequent occurrence. But just before I prompt her to remind her of Paul's question, she says, beaming a grin--

"Well....well...you see...I'm still here."

Paul and I laugh and so does Mom. We laugh hard, like this is the funniest thing we've heard in weeks. I can feel my vocal cord stretch, strain with the effort--vibrate with song. Strings of a violin. The music is dear, sacred. I've nearly forgotten how to laugh like this.

Actually, it's the most real thing we've heard come from Mom. Gives me hope that Mom's still there and we're here too, right along side her. All of us...still here.

Deeply, a mother's daughter
--this is alifewithmom--