Dinner and Dancing

My mom's favorite vegetable is carrots. The last time I served these red ones, she loved them. I wasn't sure if she'd love them tonight or not. Beloved foods fall by the wayside now and then. Last night she picked every last seed out of her tomatoes (which I'd skinned.) And the little "beans" inside the green beans, she removed too.

I'm happy to say that tonight's veggies were a success. And it appears that salmon is still on her list of edible foods too. I do feel though that anything can be bumped from the list at any moment. Bacon is gone as are Rice Krispies and most soups. In a way it makes cooking easier. She really loves sandwiches and pizza right now.

As for me, I'm going dancing. And post dancing, there'll be a Skype session with the man from Indiana. Still the leash feels short this evening. There's been non-stop moaning for two days, but when I ask if she needs a pain pill or a hot pack, the answer is no. The moaning is unconscious. If I tell her she's moaning, which I don't like to harp on, she says she doesn't know she's doing it. If I timed it, roughly every 3 seconds, she makes a sound. There are three or four sorts of moans in her repertoire. One sounds like pain, another like disgust--kind of an abbreviated "Bah!" as in Bah Humbug, the others sound like little satisfied sounds or maybe like she's surprised. Two days of it non stop. Did I mention that? Maybe I'll keep mentioning it over and over again, okay?

Or maybe I'll just go waltz and rhumba and cha-cha for a couple hours. If my mom could still dance, that would probably help her too.

Scrubbing the Floor

The air is a liminal state. Up in the air. We say it all the time. At this moment I am in the air in a plane between my life with my mother, tending to her every need and my life without my mother, tending to nothing at all because, for the next almost-month, my brother and his girlfriend will be tending to her. I have left her with them.

It's a project, this vacation, and I've cursed it bitterly. The audacity of it. How dare I--what was I thinking--I paid all this money and it might not even happen--and what if something bad happens to my mother while I'm away.

Fuck it. I can't turn back now.

But I wonder if I will ever attempt it again. My mother was on hospice. Because a patient cannot  have two hospice transfers in a Medicare benefit period, we had to sign her out of hospice or she wouldn't be able to get back onto hospice for several weeks after her return to California. The fancy-dancing to get enough hospice drugs in the interim was, yeah, well, fancy. This morning as I packed to leave my brother's, the medical supply place called asking if they could pick up the equipment today, i.e. the hospital bed, the tray table, the oxygen concentrator, etc. Er. Well, no, I had to tell them. so they're coming tomorrow and already my brain feels a bit fizzy wondering how we will get all this shit back on the Saturday evening that my mother returns. I'm wondering. Not worrying. Because I'm so tired of this shit that I don't have the energy to worry and hospice case managers are houdinis. These women in their pastel scrubs and pretty earrings and perfect make-up are forces. Stand the fuck back. Outta the way. Here comes the hospice nurse. Really.

In a couple of hours I will unlock my front door and return to the former house of moaning. I have no idea what I will do. I might get down on my knees and scrub the grout between the kitchen floor tiles because that would be an excuse to be on my knees and that's probably exactly where I need to be.

Report from the Abyss

Today's evening beach walk. (thank god) There were hundreds of gulls.

I heard THIS today as I was driving and had to pull over. If you're a regular reader here, you'll remember that about a month ago I LOST DAN'S VOICEMAILS. I was overjoyed to hear that after three days the 11 engineers working to recover the lost message from this guy's wife succeeded. If you Google "lost voicemails from loved ones" you'll see that is not how it usually goes. I recommend you have a box of kleenex handy if you do Google that. Just reading the search results page without actually clicking on anything is enough to shatter your heart.

Here's the thing. A voicemail is not just a recording of a person's voice. It's a recording of them speaking directly to you and only you. Those words are for your ears only. And they've had a few seconds to gather their thoughts while they listened to your outgoing message. They want to talk to you. They have something to say. They want to talk to you so bad that they're going to talk even though you're not really there in person listening.

So yeah. Fuck you T-Mobile.

And speaking of the voices of loved ones, it's monumentally ironic that as I type this, I'm opening up my iTunes to drown out the sound of my mother who is on one of her moaning jags. Are you okay? Do you need something? Can I help you? Do you need a pain pill? These are the questions I've politely asked while my brain is screaming shutupshutupshutupshutupshuthefuckup.

So yeah. Fuck you old age and all the meds with the weird side effects and every other degenerative thing that can make a person moan and groan non-stop without even knowing it.

Yeah. It's 9:00 and I'm going to bed.