Minnesota: Land of 10,000 Tears

This post comes to you from my condo in St. Paul, Mn.--a condo I bought back in 2008 pre-economic downturn against the advice of my trusty financial advisor. He was right.

But post-divorce, I was making all kinds of crazy plans. I would have taken out a jumbo loan and financed the Taj Mahal at an interest rate high enough to reach the moon if I'd thought it was the solution to how shitty I felt back then. Daughter M was not doing the best in those days either, and I think living here was some sort of balm--as much balm as a physical thing can be for a hurt that's not at all physical. She lived here for three years, and now the other daughter, C, is living here with her husband. With my mom in a nursing home in northeast Iowa, the Twin Cities are now a good gateway to visiting her.

The frozen rural place/a.k.a. Iowa--taken on the road trip with C and her husband to see my mom

Photo of my mom and me taken yesterday. 

It was -28 degrees today in St. Paul. I went out for a walk. The sidewalks were dry and clean. With my eyes watering from the cold and my frozen tears sticking my eyelashes together, I thought about  my complicated history with Minnesota. I came here for college in 1970 just weeks after signing the final paperwork relinquishing my son for adoption. The next year I had major surgery on my spine and a month later my father died suddenly of a heart attack. The following year there was another back surgery. Thirty years later I came here again and again post divorce. I've walked in every type of weather. I've walked in deep into the woods and on country roads in the pitch black winter night while the sky was ripped apart by shooting stars. I've walked ankle deep in the mud on a lakeshore, along the Mississippi River in driving rain, in downtown St. Paul bathed in Christmas lights. I've walked drunk. I've walked sober. I've walked wailing out loud, talking to myself, while plotting mayhem, and while plotting my own destruction. Today I just walked, glad to be out under the sky.

Today, walking in St. Paul

Walking is what I do. Sad, happy, mad, glad, tired, wired, here, there. 

And while I've shed plenty of tears in California, somehow I always feel happier there.

Last month walking on the beach in Cambria, CA

And tomorrow, I'll be back in Margaritaville (a.k.a. Ventura County)

Though I have to disclose that this photo was actually taken in a Mexican Restaurant in Dubuque, IA

Another road trip photo--just because.

Surf Naked

You can buy this t-shirt at LAX,

The sky and the ocean were outdoing one another in the contest for the grayest gray as the airport shuttle zoomed down the coast this morning. Dozens of surfers bobbed in the water, wrapped in their black wetsuits from head to toe. No one was naked.

At a LAX bar, I might have gotten my gin and tonic sooner if I'd been naked. The bartender saw the blond next to me, but I was swathed in my gray-haired cloak of invisibility. This is a randomly employed power I have no control over. Sometimes both men and women make a point of telling me they love my hair. Women frequently go on to tell me they could never go gray. They don't have the right skin tone or their gray is a weird texture. Whatever. Oh! the bartender said, when he finally noticed me, startled as if I'd dropped through the ceiling onto the barstool. At least LAX has stopped carding EVERYONE. There were no silver-haired exemptions. What was that all about? Dear whoever stopped that nonsense: Thank you.

I'm on the way to see my mom at the nursing home in Iowa. I'm leaving this:

Last night's sunset

for sub-zero temperatures. I'm wearing wool leggings under my regular leggings and I have a down jacket the size of a small easy chair. My suitcase contains a wool scarf, gloves, two wool sweaters, a down vest, and wool socks thick enough to use as a pillow. There will be extensive driving on this trip. I'm rather relieved that I will not be making the drive alone. Daughter C and her husband will be my travel companions. I keep picturing this:

My mom now has a doctor that checks on her in the nursing home. She no longer has to go out in sub-zero temperatures. She no longer has to go out at all.

And it's just now occurring to me that she may never leave the premises again. Just like that. She's already gone out for the final time, perhaps, and none of us knew it. Often we don't know these last experiences are happening as they occur. It would be too much for us, I suppose,  if we knew. For the past half-dozen years, I've considered that every encounter with my mom could be the last. And that is how I will approach this visit too. I don't see the point in denying it. It's as real as the brutal cold.

Monday Evening Beach Report

tonight's sunset 

Maybe the world works differently than you imagined.

Maybe your aged mother goes to live in a nursing home and you think Medicaid will throw itself into gear. Everyone is so nice. The social worker at the nursing home. The case worker at Human Services. Surely everyone wants what you want which is that your mother is cared for and that the expenses for that are covered since her money is as gone as the sun at midnight. But maybe not. Maybe the gears of the system move slowly for a reason. The nursing home gets more money from private pay clients than it does from Medicaid patients. Slow equals dough.

Maybe you have no idea how the world works. None at all.

What you know is this: That when the sun goes down, the sky turns red, turns gold, turns colors there are no words for and those colors fill your eyes, float over your skin, let your soul know that you are alive. And how can it be that while your mother lived here, you could not once, not ever, even with the lure of a martini in a travel mug, convince her to watch the sunset from the sand?

Friday Evening Beach Report: How a walk on the beach is like a lifeboat

 I am stuck. No not literally. Not in the mud. Just the mud inside my head. Still no word from the state of Iowa that my mom has made it onto Medicaid. It's Friday. Why didn't I call the caseworker? I don't know. Because I'm stuck in the mud inside my head.

Meanwhile my mom's dentures somehow got lost at the nursing home. This might be day three of toothlessness. Everyone is looking for them. No one has found them. Lost teeth were a pretty regular occurrence when my mom lived here with me. I'd find them under the bed or in the bed. Once my mom tried to retrieve them from under the bed herself and fell and hit her head. I think that was the time she ended up with a big lump on her forehead that made her look like a Klingon. One day I came home to find her and her caregiver looking sheepish. My mom had dropped her teeth in the sink and a piece broke off and was stuck in the drain. I didn't know whether to call the plumber or the dentist first. It turned out not to be a huge deal. The dentures were fixable and the piece of pink plastic was not big enough to obstruct the plumbing. I was able to do something. Now I'm just able to fret and think of all the reasons why one should not lose one's dentures.

I'm great at menial tasks while fretting. So I fretted and did menial tasks. Christmas lights, cutting up the giant cardboard box that the new ping-pong table came in. Pitching another thing or two into the Goodwill bag.Trying to decide if I should plan a visit to see my my mom soon. Deciding no. Deciding yes. Deciding no. Deciding yes. Getting frustrated for being indecisive.  I couldn't decide whether or not to take a walk either. But I finally did.

The sky looked like cotton batting

And the sand was a mirror for the sky.
Foam was dolloped on the sand like whipped cream.
And if I turned around, I could see the tops of the mountains were white too.

I walked for over an hour until the sky turned red over Santa Cruz Island. I finally got unstuck enough to text daughter C and ask if she wanted to go see her G-ma with me. 

The sunset went crazy and I went sane.

And I've gone through an entire day only being vaguely conscious of my injured ribs. I think I'll try to get back to yoga next week. Another way to be sane.

I came home and bought a plane ticket. I got out the checkbook so I can pay another million dollar bill for the nursing home. I resolved for the billionth time to floss every night so I'll never have dentures. 

It was a perfect day.

Secret Solstice Sunset

The sun refused to show itself at the close of the shortest day, sinking into the water behind a wall of clouds.

I haven't shown myself much lately either. I've been roaming the house in the dead of night with a throat so sore that I can't sleep, then making my way back to bed when the middle of the night House Hunters re-run lulls me into submission. In the morning I wake with half-a-dozen Ricola wrappers on the night stand, convinced that certainly this will be the day I feel better. And I do for a little while. But then. Crash. However, this being the longest night of the year, I may be up again watching Love It or List it, International House Hunters or god knows what. I should be reading through my stack of New Yorkers, brushing up on my French or something but it feels like there's a block of goo filling my brain. Okay, it might have been that last night I finally did sleep. If I sleep again tonight, I'm going to proclaim myself cured.

Meanwhile, I've been appropriately engaged during  these dark days.  I'm spinning around and around trying to get my mom on Medicaid. This morning I confirmed that state #1 has now faxed State #2 in order to confirm that the measly little life insurance policy of my mom's has no cash value and therefore cannot be counted as an asset prohibiting her from qualifying for Medicaid yet again. So if State #2 faxes back to State #1, all should be well. Riiiiight? How's this for a darkest day of the year fear: My mom will finally get that Medicaid acceptance letter the day she takes her final breath. I've been working on the Medicaid thing since the end of September.

Here's what I've been reading these short days and long nights:

It's Never Too Early to Start Thinking about Your Own Death

What Working in a Nursing Home Taught Me

Our Bodies, Ourselves

If You're 30% Through Your Life... (of course I know that I'm at least 60% through my life)

A Parting Lesson From My Parents

How Mindfulness Can Ease the Fear of Death and Dying

I might add that I've also been drinking some nice wine, eating rum balls and chocolate truffles, and lighting lots of candles.

One of the denizens of Hearst Castle

What have you been reading during these dark days, dear ones? Where are you finding the light?

Beach Report

Waves crashing over the breakwater at Channel Islands Harbor yesterday

The waves have been immense the last couple of days, the tide so high that yesterday trucks came and pulled the lifeguard stations back from the water several feet. Today there were pools of water as far back as the dunes as a result of the high tides.

Willets and snowy plovers must have felt like they had swank resorts with their own private islands.  I can hear the waves crashing from my driveway which is just over a mile away from the beach. At the risk of redundancy, I'll say again that I love this place. It is paradise.

This picture does not do justice to the enormity of the waves

I don't always know what to do these days without my mother here. I'm greatly relieved that she's in Iowa, yet I'm uneasy sometimes that she's so far away. While making phone inquiries as to the cost of transporting someone's remains to a university deeded body program, it could be helpful to look across the room and see that person eating cookies and yogurt.

I would like to say that I've been able to turn my attention to writing. Instead I find myself googling things like "how to help a Syrian family," "interfaith organizations," "how to support religious freedom." Like the ocean, the world is in an uproar. Like most people I don't really know what to do about it personally. What are you doing, dear reader?

Most likely my volunteer gig after the first of the year will involve sea lions or the Channel Islands. But what I should probably be doing is sitting in the hallway at a social services office in Iowa, weeping and gnashing my teeth until I get my mom on Medicaid--and perhaps while ensconced there, stepping up on a soapbox to rail against Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. The bill for the third month of nursing home care has arrived and I've made my third attempt at bureaucratic hoop jumping. Sometimes I think I have too much faith in everything.

I've been wondering too if my life will soon feel settled. The last seven years have held a lot of turmoil. Divorce, death, and drama have been recurring themes here in Margaritaville. I do believe the winds of change are blowing. I have faith in that. Really I do.

Not really feeling festive just yet, but here's a Christmas wreath

Home

I'm home and it looks like this:

I live in a beautiful place. I am now free to enjoy the sunsets on the sand as well as the morning. My mother continues to do well in the nursing home. I've purchased tickets for a November visit. My brain is re-booting itself as it shuts down the hyper-vigilant caregiver mode. What's next? I ask myself and then remember that I have not yet succeeded at getting my mom onto Medicaid. We're close. I hope. Meanwhile, I've sent a boatload of money off to Iowa to pay the first bill. I'm still in charge of her finances--paying her insurance premiums, her credit card, handling end-of-life arrangements, thinking ahead while looking behind and all the while blessing every present moment whether my feet are in the sand or under my desk.

Rising

Forest of saguaros. Random ocotillo in bloom. The desert bursts with surprises. For three days I stayed with friends on a mountaintop above Phoenix. At night, the city below laid out like a circuit board. The mornings full of birds that buzz or laugh—birds I’ve never before laid eyes on. From the patio I scan the landscape below and study the mountains behind the mountains behind the mountains behind the mountains. Surely, if I look west, the ocean is there somewhere. If I look east, the stubble of golden corn rolling across the Iowa hillside.  In a way, I see all of that. I see past and future. I see where I’ve been and where I’m going. 

I’m still traveling and my mom continues to do well at the nursing home in Iowa. She’s had a raft of visitors. I’ve had a raft of feelings, but mostly relief. Relief for me. Relief for her. While she lived with me, I often led my mom outside to look at the moon. The moonrise in the desert was spectacular last night. I saw it with friends as we drove down into town for dinner. Maybe the moonrise in Iowa was spectacular too. I don’t really know. There’s a lot I don’t know right now as I begin this new chapter of my life. But the future feels full and bright and beautiful.  

Report from the Universe

I'm thinking a lot bout the big picture these days. Love. Luck. Beginnings. Endings. The never-ending. Everything.

I went to see my mom in the nursing home Thursday evening. She hadn't been served her nightly glass of wine. Her toenails needed cutting. Stuff. Took care of it. She looked good. The food looked good. She ate well. The nursing home is the most attractive nursing home I've had any experience with. (There have been four.)

When I went back the next morning, she looked even better. She seemed more engaged and awake than she's been in ages. She said the words my friend while referring to another resident. Over the past few years the only times I've heard my mom use the word friend in reference to friends of hers is this: All of my friends are dead. A person can be 91 and make a new friend. How about that?

New things are constantly occurring.

I'm on a road trip. New things outside the car windows every second. Car windows are my window on the world right now. The first night on the road was at my brother's house. The next night, a town called Liberty. Yesterday a quick stop in a town called Kismet. Last night, a town called Liberal. I'm not making this up.

I wish you liberty, kismet, and liberal doses of love.

Monday Morning Beach Report: the Road to Shangri-la

They groom the beaches here and this morning it looked like a road had been laid out to take me straight to the horizon.

But life is complicated here in Pillville. I feel more like a behemoth of a cargo ship navigating a treacherous passage. I'm sitting on the patio right now with my mom. There's a breeze and the water is shimmering. Our silver hair is probably shining in the sunlight and passersby might think how darling these ladies are. Did they choose shirts the same color this morning by accident or by design? How nice they can sit on their lovely patio and enjoy the day. They have no idea. Does anyone ever really have any idea what it would be like to be in someone else's shoes? I mean their everyday shoes. Not their church shoes. Mostly, I think we do not. But sometimes we do and those people who can slip into our shoes the way that Cinderella fit into that glass slipper, they are meant to be held close and not let go.

I've been making phone calls to Iowa this morning and messaging my aunt. I've been talking to the hospice here and the nursing home in Iowa. I've been putting on my mom's shoes. We've talked. She most definitely wants to go to Iowa. She's not particularly excited about going to a skilled nursing facility but she says she knows she should. I told her I want her to have 24-hour skilled nursing care. She understands the particulars of that. She knows what's gone on around here. So we're back on track with the plan. More or less. Meanwhile, I'm fixing my eyes on that broad smooth road I took a picture of this morning and I hold close those of you who understand.

Report from Pillville: The Balance of Opposites

Photo from this morning's walk along the beach in Ventura--a local artist stacks these stones.

My mom is more frail than ever but feels well.

I'm happier and stronger than I've been in a long long time but feel spent.

Those statements balance one another in a way I can't quite explain. And maybe there's balance too in the fact that my mom is sleeping more and more these days while I am sleeping less and less. And even when I do sleep, I awake feeling hung over. There's no gin involved in this, I swear--at least not for me. She is, of course, still having her martini. The balance of opposites right here in Pillville.

I almost had to sit during my T'ai Chi Chih practice yesterday. Today I opted out of yoga and took a walk. I need the sky over my head to feel the vastness of possibility. I need to be quiet.

I'm in the process of transitioning my mom into a nursing home after more than 3 years of caring for her in my house. I'm filling out the forms for Medi-Cal and Iowa Medicaid. I'm gathering documentation. I'm making travel plans and not making travel plans. I'm formulating a Plan A and a Plan B and wondering if they are mutually exclusive while wondering if both of them will fall away.

I'm sitting on the couch in my living room as I write this, wholly aware of the sound of her breathing in her room, while feeling that I'm barely breathing at all.

My heart is in Indiana with the man that I love and my heart is here, heavy as a stone, and so light it is a tower reaching for the sky.

This morning's walk took me past the estuary. Here it is looking inland--and looking out to the sea, just like me.

The path I was on took me under the freeway, framing a perfect view of the hills,
and it took me across the railroad tracks. Travel plans, vistas, hopes, dreams,manifested through a camera lens-- and if you look closely at the photo below you'll see a white cross in the lower left. I didn't see it when I took the photo.

Why We Should Eat Dessert

Pavlova by candlelight, prepared by my friend Sasha for our Friday night dessert after dinner on the patio.

I ask myself these days what I'm doing right, what I've done wrong. What I can re-do. What I don't know how to do. What I don't know how to do, but must do.

I'm hoping to move my mother into a nursing home in Iowa. Put her in reach of more people who love her. Put her in the care of nurses 24/7. Put myself in airplanes regularly again like when she was in the care of my brother and his girlfriend on the east coast.

This past weekend was as mixed as a weekend can be. A lovely Friday evening dinner with friends, daughter M here for the weekend. Then Sunday devolved into the unblog-able. There were two calls to the hospice nurse this weekend, two new meds in the past week. This afternoon the moaning was so loud that I thought for a moment I literally could not stand it. As per usual, the moaning does not really signify pain, it's an unconscious thing that my mom does not know she's doing. How can she stop it if she doesn't know she's doing it? How can I stand it when she can't stop it?

Every day I write in my little red "mom notebook" what I have to do, what I've done. I try to keep the plan moving along, but the plan might be changing. Plan A, Plan B. Maybe there's a Plan C that I don't even know about yet.

One of my favorite bloggers lost her mother Alice last Wednesday. Andrea's adventures with Alice have been sort of a guiding light for me. Now that light is out. I have plenty of support left, but I ask myself if I'm ready to let go of my mom. To really let go. I think I am. But I also think it will be harder than I imagine.

Tonight I'm remembering this dream I had when Dan was dying. How the dream helped me know what to do. How it changed the plan. How everything fell into place. How I had to let go.

Report from Pillville: How to plan

1) Fill the pillboxes for the next two weeks as if you are sure they will be needed.

2) Thank M and her friend for cleaning up your mom's coffee spills while you were at yoga.

3)  Thank M and her friend for making your mom another piece of toast when she forgot she'd eaten the first one.

4) Spill your own full cup of a perfect latté all over your stack of journals, your lamp, your end table and the white chair in your bedroom.

5) Clean up your mess, but decide that the slipcover to the chair can be spot cleaned, not removed and washed.

6) Talk to your other daughter on the phone about getting her grandmother to Iowa (or not) about getting her into a nursing home in a timely fashion there (or not) about you staying in Iowa longer than planned (or not).

7) In the same conversation decide to take your mom's wheelchair to Iowa. (duh) Decide that the daughter's husband will pick you up from the airport in Minnesota and take you to the airport hotel so your mom can rest before the drive the next day. Decide to get just one room for the two of you. Joke about hiring an exorcist to eliminate the possibility of middle of the night shrieks and hollers.

8) Throw the slipcover in the washing machine. Remove the towel from the bottom of the lamp. Note to self: be careful when switching the lamp on later.

9) Realize that your mom has picked new wounds into the skin on her arms while you wrote this post. And then wonder why the anti-anxiety med worked the first day of the picking, but doesn't seem to be working now.

10) Wonder when you might see this man you love again. Go over the plans and try to make peace with potential failure of said plans.

11) Realize that you started this post an hour ago.

12) Ponder your goals for today: Unsubscribe  to a few more emails. Pay the overdue water bill. Or not.

13) Make peace with sitting on the patio with your mom so you can suggest more ointment if she starts picking at her skin again.

12) Look forward to everything by planning nothing. Let go. Let go. Let go.

Report from Pillville: Nursing Home Ratings Demystified

New Year's Eve 2013

In my daily life of life of caring for my 90-year-old mother, I do not think of nursing homes when things are going well. I have dozens of reasons why it's better for her to live with me rather than in an institution. On bad days though, nursing homes are all I think about. Give me a day with non-stop moaning, a day when I've barely slept because she's scared the crap out of me all night long with her nightmare shouts, or those shaky days and weeks when she's recovering from a fall or an illness, and I'm on the Internet trying to figure out where I can put her. 

My mom had a lobectomy in order to remove a cancerous tumor from one of her lungs in 2009. The day she was supposed to go home, I arrived in her room to find the crisis team preparing to hustle her to ICU. She couldn't breathe. After spending nine days on a respirator, she suffered at least a half dozen other set backs. It seemed that she was dying. During the worst of it, I hoped that she would die. It seemed like the only relief from the suffering. 

After a month she still was not well, but the hospital deemed it was time to release her to a skilled nursing facility. It was my job to find one. It wasn't that I didn't have the time. I'd been living in the hospital guest quarters for a month, writing my thesis, washing my three outfits out in the sink, microwaving weird convenience food in the microwave at three a.m. whenever anxiety kept me from sleeping. Finding a nursing home seemed easier than all that. There were WEBSITES AND RATINGS. I'd get her into some place good.

If you clicked on the link above that takes you to a New York Times article and a video, it's worth noting that I went to the same two websites portrayed in the video: U. S. News and World Report and Medicare.gov. Like the couple in the video, I had only a day or so to pull this off. The five-star place I wanted had a long waiting list, so I went with a four-star place near my brother's house since I lived across the county. I had no car to check out the facility in person, and my brother and his girlfriend had full-time jobs. But hey, U.S. News and World Report, right?

My mom and I arrived at the facility near dusk. The staff was too busy to provide any sort of cordial welcome. Things were chaotic Chez One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. The place stank and patients were calling out for various kinds of help. My mom and I had arrived by medical transport, so we were stuck. Later that evening when my brother arrived, we discussed just taking her to his place, but we didn't have prescriptions for her myriad of medications or any oxygen. We sat in her room with her for a while doing what we could to make her comfortable. We rang the call bell for her roommate who was crying uncontrollably. We sat, listening to the clack and hiss of her oxygen machine, going over our options. We tried to talk our not-at-all tech savvy mom into keeping one of our cellphones, but she refused. We sat for a while longer, marveling in horror at the name on her oxygen concentrator. Devil's Bliss, we thought it said. (It actually said Devilbiss, the name of the manufacturer) I couldn't stop wondering why anyone would name a piece of medical equipment Devil's Bliss. It seemed like a bad omen.

The next morning I went back at breakfast. My mother was having chest pains, and I insisted that the staff call 911. She was transported back to the hospital. After some days there, I had to find her another nursing home. Then I went to France on a writing fellowship. Things did not go particularly well at the new skilled nursing facility either. After my mom fell, and was subsequently tied (I'm sure there's a different word medical professionals use) to her bed, and overmedicated, my brother took her to his place. She was well cared for there by him and his girlfriend for three years. It will be three years this August that she's lived with me.

This past May when the man who loved me got sicker and sicker from his lung cancer, and my mom had been ill and had recently come home from the hospital, and I felt that I was not quite set up to care for two frail people at home, I found a nursing home for Dan. This time, I spent a day driving to all of the possible places near my house. I chose one. It seemed good, but it wasn't great. He was weak and disoriented and in grave danger of falling, so due to the fact that his daughter and his friend Linda had come to stay at my house, I slept at the nursing home. The night that I watched him writhe in pain for an hour, waiting for a dose of morphine, I called the hospice nurse at 4:00 in the morning and made arrangements to have him transported to my house. By the next afternoon, he was there. 

I don't blame myself in a guilty sort of way for asking Dan to go the a nursing home for those few days. But I wish I hadn't done it. In my mom's case, well, she was really debilitated, but maybe she would have been better off going right to my brother's place too. Watch that video in the link above. Read the article. Self-reporting????

 "Two of the three major criteria used to rate facilities — staffing levels and quality measures statistics — were reported by the homes and not audited by the federal government." 

Shit. 

So if you're faced with the need to consider a nursing home, wait, if you can, until Feb. 20.

Escape to the Sea

I had a dream last night as I slept in two chairs pushed together in the room at the care center where the man who loves me now resides. I dreamed I sewed a special backpack out of sturdy leaf-green canvas. I put him in it and carried him to the ocean.

He was wide awake this morning after it took 25 minutes to get him his morphine, so I told him the dream. Haha, he said. Later as the morphine trickled down his throat, he said the word dream as if he wanted me to tell him the dream again. I did, and he said let's go. He flung his legs over the side of the bed, but couldn't get up. What is going on with my legs, he asked.

I didn't tell him the 2nd half of the dream where I hung him in his back pack on a tall iron fence and went to see a my friend J in her cottage next door. When I came back, he was gone.

Sublingual

This comes from Anne Lamott’s book, Traveling Mercies:

All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But what I’ve discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.

I am already grieving although the man who loves me is still among us. Today he ate half-dozen bites of watermelon, a strawberry, two or three walnut halves, the tips of fork tines coated with almond butter, and a thimble of latté. Oh, and two bites of chocolate ice cream. He told me a dream, and I tried to hang onto to it, but lost it. Or most of it. He was involved in a project, he said. In the first try at the project he was disconnected from everyone, and then in a different dream (or was it the same dream and just a different project?) everyone was working together......on something. It's hard to focus on words. There's the hum and hiss of the oxygen machine. And the place has its resident screamer. I don't think he hears her. But maybe he does. He and I have other things to talk about. The taste of morphine under the tongue. Sublingual. We talk about his dreams. His drugs. While I hear the  woman screaming down the hall, a woman we don't talk about. But a woman screaming down the hall Is a woman screaming down the hall. I hear the staff interacting with her.They're doing okay. She still screams. My only hope is that she's not in pain.

"You have to buckle up," my mother said to me tonight as I sat on the couch weeping. Buck up, I suppose, is the phrase she was after. A swing and a miss. Like so much of my communication with her these days. I was speaking to the man's sister on the phone. Is there anything I want from his apartment? Everything. Nothing. Him. Us. My mother told me and the man's daughter, who was sitting beside me on the couch, how her husband (my father) died standing up. Just like that he was dead. He only fell to the floor when she tried to move him. It was terrible, she said. It was.

"Are you going to the nursing home tonight?" she asked as she shook the last drops of martini into her glass. A swing and a miss. "Sure," the spiteful horrible grieving me wanted to say, "I'll leave you here stumbling and shuffling and go lie next to him." But I left those words under my tongue where they belong. Sublingual.

Hopice:That was Yesterday/This is Today/Tomorrow is Tomorrow/

Yesterday:

We meet with the hospice rep in the hospital room of the man who loves me. Immediately, with a sad-eyed dog look and a honeyed voice, he blurts out a bunch of shit about how the hospice “can be there for us 24/7.” 

"Well, stop right there," I say. "So there could be someone 24/7 at my house if I took D home with me for hospice?” I'd already spent two or three days figuring out that wasn't possible. And that the 24/7 would be necessary since I also care for my mom.

Mr. Hospice Guy, henceforth known as The Tool then tells us nope, well, not really and begins talking about respite care only he keeps saying respice like it was a weak rhyme with hospice. If we need respice care, that’s 24/7, he says.  For maybe 3 or 4 days. Tool. He calls D “young man.” Tool. He keeps saying transition and transitioning. 

"You mean death and dying," I say. He keeps confusing Medicare and Medi-Cal every single fucking time he speaks. Could we please change the names of both of those programs? How about ElderMed and PoverMed so Tools can get it straight. When he leaves, I would chug a glass of poison if I could get my hands on one. Bartender, drinks are on me. A round for everyone at the bar.

Today:

A woman in an exquisite rose-colored polka-dot dress comes to fill out the hospice forms. She manages somehow to be simultaneously all-business and kind. After I get D settled in at the nursing home, the hospice nurse comes. She's wearing a pink smock with the name of the hospice and scrubs with hearts, but she's direct. Full of information about pain meds, and hope for being comfortable without being a zombie. She's asks if the goal is to get D to return home. "I would love to have him at my house," I say, giving her the facts of my seemingly impossible situation.
"It might not be impossible," she says. "Talk to the social worker. They have lots of community resources."

Tomorrow: Who the hell knows? For tonight, the man who loves me is in a nursing home. I'm sitting on my couch. Watching HGTV. I watched endless hours of HGTV after my divorce, never changing the channel. Maybe a couple of weeks from now, he'll be next to me, and the two of us will be staring a TV show where people obsess over granite countertops and his and her closets.

The Pie:

I was gone from 10:00 a.m. until after 6:00 this evening. M and her girlfriend stayed with my mom, bought groceries, reminded her to drink her Ensure,  made her dinner, AND they made a pie. Mixed berry. Gluten-free crust. It was beyond divine. Maybe this is a harbinger of the love and support that awaits us.

Red

heron with rocks and bougainvillea to take your mind off this post

8:30 a.m.

I am 61 years old, and I am wearing red pants. This is mitigated somewhat by the fact that my red pants and I are in a yoga class. But after this hour of serenity, I will drive to the seedy side of Hollywood, check my boyfriend out of a nursing home, and take him back to my house where he will take a break from the chemo and radiation that have been rendering him weaker and weaker. If chemo and radiation were assigned a color, in my mind, it would be red. So the red pants might be appropriate after all.

I do not like to buy clothes. Visiting the mall always propels me toward anxiety. I feel like a greedy consumer when I buy new things and much prefer a thrift store, but mostly, I don't shop anywhere; I just wear what I already have. I bought the red pants for daughter M to take on her 8th grade class trip. She has a master's degree now. When she abandoned the red pants early in her undergraduate days, I claimed them. They still look new, but usually I wear them only when my other two pairs of yoga pants, sedately hued in brown and gray and more than a decade old, are in the laundry. Today the gray pants were folded neatly in my drawer, but I chose the red pants anyway. I don't know why, but it seems important.

1:30 p.m.

We're home. I make fresh juice. Two kinds of kale, celery, carrots, grapefruit, lemon, blood orange. M and the boyfriend and I agree that it's tasty--though I briefly consider dumping some gin into mine. For the rest of the afternoon, it's managed chaos. There are meds to organize and discharge instructions to digest. We need a glucose meter and test trips, so M goes to Rite-Aid. I discover there's stuff, "an appurtenance," the boyfriend calls it, attached to the chemo port and taped to the outside of his chest. Tubes with dried red blood in them, a white clip and a yellow clip. He thinks a nurse in the hospital put it there on Tuesday. He has no idea if this thing needs maintaining. I make him promise he will not try to uninstall it, and I call the nursing home and then the hospital where he spent some time at last week. I call the chemo center and talk to the doctor on call. No one has anything relevant to say, so I Facebook my ex-sister-in-law who's a nurse, and then  I cook dinner. Rib-eyes on the grill, more greens with radishes and onions. Sweet potatoes.

10:00 p.m.

 I'm on the couch with M watching the watching the Clipper game. The boyfriend is in my bed, asleep. The blood in the tubes needs to be flushed, the sister-in-law nurse writes back. I fill my wine class, watch the Clippers win, all the while thinking of blood. Of red wine. My red pants. I might obsess all night over the blood in the tubes taped to boyfriend's chest. I might sleep, oblivious to all this terror, relieved that after two months away, he is finally lying next to me.

August is Sandcastle Month

That's what the bulletin board at my aunt's nursing home says. There's a lopsided construction paper cutout that looks like it's been faded by the sun--but the sun has no way to  make an appearance in the windowless room where the"old folks" eat their meals and visit with the people who come to see them. The other section of the bulletin board reports the day and the date as well as the season--"Summer!" and the weather--"Hot!" For some reason the section captioned, "The Next Holiday" is left blank. Maybe thinking ahead to the turn of the calendar page is too much when you're living in a place like this.
We took my mom to visit her twin Millie.  We sat on the patio with them while they smoked.  My mom stopped making the sounds that have recently become part of her repertoire.

"What's with the moaning?" I'd asked my brother the first night of my visit.
"It's not really moaning," he said. "It sounds to me like she's contemplating." I had to agree. Our mother is not moaning in pain. But if she's not actively engaged in a conversation when she sits sipping her coffee or her martini or just sits doing nothing, she vocalizes in a way that seems to be a non-verbal comment on something she's thinking about. Usually these "comments" don't sound all that positive.
My mother talks in her sleep, too.
"What do you dream about when you talk in your sleep?" I asked her the first day of our visit.
"I'm always talking to Millie," she said. "She's trying to help me. I'm in trouble, and she says, 'Hang on. Don't let go of the rope. Grab on to the branch. Don't jump.' "
I wonder if the waking "contemplations" are between her and Millie too. And that when they were together, that's why my mother could stop.

The weird thing was, as my aunt and my mother sat together on the patio, it was my aunt who began making the sounds.