Finally, where I went and what I did.
9:20 p.m.
The house was cold and the water was turned off and I needed to use the toilet and couldn’t figure out how to turn it back on. I got the furnace up and running and my brother arrived shortly after I did and got the water flowing again. We made a supermarket run to buy necessities for breakfast, and then our brother came over to go over the plans for the next while. My niece came too, and I had not seen her for a very long time. She’s a really nice girl. She ended up taking bags and bags of seasonings from the drawer in the kitchen. After they left, my brother and I disappeared into separate bedrooms.
The next morning, Wednesday, we awoke to snow.
We visited my mom at the home and stayed there for lunch with her. It was incredibly exhausting, just being with her, repeating ourselves, explaining what we were doing there, and having to tell her over and over again that there was nothing she could do to help us in our task. After lunch I started going through photographs and other items in the back bedroom which used to be mine for 21 years. I found my mother’s slides from her various trips to far-flung places--Costa Rica, Scotland and Wales, Iceland, Israel, etc.--and phoned the president of the retired teachers’ association, to which my father belonged and of which my mother is an associate member, who picked them up for their travelogue evenings. She also took many of my father’s boat paintings and all my grandmother’s china for an auction to raise money for food for impoverished students, and items I found in the house to donate to the education library: old text books, normal school (that’s what they used to call teacher’s college) yearbooks, photographs. My dad was an educator for 47 years and never threw anything away.
That evening my brother and I dined at my daughter’s place. Her boyfriend made us a delicious supper, and we had a delightful evening with them. Probably the best part of this trip was the time I got to spend with my kids.
On Thursday my brother and I went to see the doctor at the home to discuss our mother’s medication and condition. There was much talk about the type of drug she’s on and possible alternatives, but what I wanted to know was why she only started taking this particular medication, aimed at prevent further deterioration of memory in patients with dementia, just a month before when I had been told by the nurse in August that she would start getting it the day after I brought in the prescription. The doctor more or less admitted that he may have screwed up. After this meeting we had lunch with our mother again. She seemed a little more alert and after eating we went with her for a walk around the block.
Friday was a beautiful day. The temperature was so mild I was able to wear a T-shirt with no sweater outside. My brother and I drove downtown to donate four boxes of secular books from my grandfather’s library to a used-book store. The owner said he would treat them respectfully. That morning my mother phoned to tell me she had promised the turntable and LP collection to the pianist who sometimes comes to the home to give concerts and music appreciation lectures for the residents, her reason being that he has to schlep his own equipment for that purpose. My husband had said I should bring all the stereo equipment home, including my dad’s reel-to-reel tape recorder and the audio tapes, which he could always use in his electronic music course.
I called the home and talked to the director of marketing who hadn’t a clue to whom I should give these items for safe keeping. She did give me the name of the pianist, though, and I was able to find him in the phonebook. I gave him a call and ended up having a delightful conversation with him. He is a really nice man, retired from being a financial analyst or something like that, who spends much of his time entertaining at various retirement homes across the city. He could not remember my mother, but assured me that he uses CD’s and that the home has its own facilities and he doesn’t need my mother’s analogue equipment. In an amusing twist, he asked me if I would be interested in taking a record collection off of his hands, and I told him that I couldn’t, I didn’t have enough room in my car on this trip, but the next time I was in town I would come over with my husband and we would meet and possibly take them.
When I told my mother about my conversation with him, she was rather upset. She was sure he had been rather enthusiastic about the equipment, and I told her that he was probably being polite. She was also upset about several things, and started to become rather difficult to deal with over the phone. I had to mollify her about a radio that she was convinced was still in the kitchen of her house when it was in fact on the headboard in her room, saying that we would be over for dinner and my brother would check it out for her. It turned out that the radio was upside down, which is why she didn’t recognize it.
That evening was surreal. The memory drug my mother has been taking suddenly seemed to be working. Her memories were flooding back something fierce and she was more herself than she had been in months. My brother and I sat in her room telling her what had been going on for the past several months and how she had been lost and confused. She had many complaints about the home, mostly about how she had no autonomy and wanted to be more independent. We said we would see what we could do about it.
The next day, Saturday, she woke me early wanting a pair of shoes she was sure she had left at home. My brother ended up finding them the next day. I picked her up and brought her to the house, as she insisted on seeing it while we were working on it, and then took her and my brother back to the home for lunch, which gave me a few hours by myself to go through more photographs and to take stuff off the walls. Both my kids came over and we loaded up the remaining chesterfield/loveseat into the back of my Subaru to take to my daughter’s apartment. From there we drove my brother to the house of a friend of his which I calculated to be close to 15 kms away.
The friend lives in a very nice neighbourhood and has a big fancy house where my brother is storing his paintings. The wife insisted that we stay until her husband got home and she kept trying to ply us with food and drink, which I refused. Then she brought out these little sweet red-bean filled Korean pastries which she insisted we try, so to be polite I ate one. It was awful! The dough was mushy and raw tasting, and I only finished it to be nice. Just as we were leaving the husband arrived home, so I did get to see him and say hi (he and my brother have been friends since high school), but on the way back to my daughter’s we three were complaining long and loudly about how awful those dumplings were. Gah! The drive to and from took so long that we decided to forgo the movie we had wanted to see, and ended up instead at a restaurant called Asian Monsoon where I had a fabulous stirfry. Afterwards we watched Bruce Almighty, which I had already seen, at Little Princess’ place.
On Sunday my alarm woke me and I was a little pissed to realize that we had reverted to standard time and I could have slept for longer. It was my turn to have lunch with my mother, and she was definitely more confused than she had been the previous two days. I commented that in Eskimo cultures, old people who are no longer contributing to the community and become liabilities are allowed to wander away across the snow or are left on an ice floe for the polar bears to take care of. Then I started laughing and said, “That’s the problem: we don’t have any polar bears here. We don’t have any large predators at all, and this is why we have to put our old people in old folks homes.” I was probably out of line, but I thought it was funny. My daughter arrived as we were having our tea, so I left shortly thereafter and returned to my job of emptying the house.
That evening was interesting, though. I met a friend I have known for years but had never before encountered in the flesh, another of my internet acquaintances. We had tried to get together before when I was in town, but this was the first time it actually worked out. I met him at a restaurant where I had to fish a piece of eggplant out of my felafel sandwich, after I had told the waitress I was allergic to eggplant, and we talked as though we had always known each other. Later we hopped on a streetcar and went to a karaoke bar where we performed Sim0n & GarfunkeI’s The B0xer as a duet. It was fun, but I really don’t like karaoke. I prefer my music live and performed by real people. But it was an education. There’s a lot of really, really bad music out there, and some people have absolutely no taste.
Monday, November 3, a crew of three guys came to the house, with the overseer and an enormous dumpster on the driveway, to empty out the crawl spaces and to take the large garbage. At the end of the morning the dumpster was filled to the top with boxes and bags of things my father had stored behind the nee-wall: old mattresses, styrofoam cups, styrofoam packing peanuts, styrofoam forms, string, my brothers’ and my camp trunks, old dressers, lawn furniture. You name it, it probably got thrown out. I took a stack of aluminum pie plates to a neighbour who asked for them, but everything else got tossed. A guy came later and took away the large metal items: an old fridge, an ancient stove, and my parents’ first dishwasher which my dad used to keep filled with potting soil for his tomato seedlings. Getting the refrigerator from the upstairs resulted in a cracked landing window. These things happen.
My brothers and I had dinner with my mother that evening. She was back to a state of complete confusion, not knowing where she was or where she lived. She was very happy to have her three kids with her, though, and it was quite nice, I will admit. Almost like old times. But my younger brother (not younger than I but younger than our other brother) kept the conversation very tightly controlled, whether consciously or not. He has a story he repeats to her almost verbatim, about how she found the home and decided to move in there. He told it twice that evening. Sadly, she forgot it almost immediately.
Tuesday was an exercise in frustration. I had arranged for piano movers to come in the morning to take my mom’s upright grand from her house to the residence where it will stay henceforth, but they never came. At 1:00 p.m. I started going through the Yellow Pages looking for other piano movers and actually found a couple who were willing to come at short notice to move the beast. One was on his way to the city from a small town a half-hour north, and the other guy was going to charge almost twice as much. So I went with the first guy and I’m so glad I did. I wish I had contracted him in the first place, in fact. He and his partner are both Newfoundlanders, really sweet guys, and they did the job quickly and efficiently and with good humour. I paid them in cash, adding a tip and a hug for each. Then I returned to the house because I was waiting for other movers to arrive between the hours of 4:00 and 7:00 to pick up a couple of bookcases I wanted to take home with me. They never came. At 6:50 p.m. the phone rang and the guy said he would be there after 9:00. I just about exploded. Instead I made him promise to come at 7:00 a.m. the next morning, which he in fact did.
Finally free to leave the house, I brought the ironing board and a few other things to Little Princess’ place and made her feed me. Her BF gave me some of my favourite wine, and I finally started to unwind. They were watching the American election returns on CBC, and I hadn’t even been aware that the vote was that day. This is how out of it I was.
Speaking of out of it, my brother also had a frustrating afternoon. For days he had been preparing my mother that they were to see a lawyer after lunch as both he and she are joint owners of the house. They went with the real estate agent, who is also the next-door neighbour. When they arrived at the home to collect my mother, she had nothing ready, no I.D., and got very angry with my brother that he sprang this on her at the last minute. He had called her just an hour earlier to let her know he was on his way. In order to establish my mother’s competency, the lawyer asked her a few questions, such as, “Where do you live?” She couldn’t answer them. Luckily my younger brother has power of attorney for her, and my older brother granted him the same as far as the disposal of the house is concerned, so he is able to sign for both of them.
On Wednesday morning, after the mover took the bookcases, I started loading my station wagon with stuff. I somehow managed to get it all in there: a reel-to-reel tape recorder, turntable, cassette tape deck, two speakers, two boxes of LP’s, three more boxes containing books and other things, paintings wrapped up in blankets, plus my bag and my brother’s two suitcases. There were photo albums, jars of preserves, two storm lamps still with some coal oil in them (I didn’t bring the can of coal oil with me), containers of beans and rolled oats, and all sorts of odds and sods that I wanted to take home. There were lots of things I left behind, which will end up being destroyed no doubt, but you can’t hold onto everything.
The real estate agent came by for my brother to sign papers saying he was hiring her to sell the house, and then we went to see my mom for a last time, staying for lunch. Leaving her was hard. She was so confused, so lost, so diminished. My mother was a huge presence in my life, and now she is a tiny little old woman who can barely remember any of her past accomplishments.
The trip home was uneventful. Even though my brother offered to share the driving with me, I found myself able to keep at it for the entire eight hours, not feeling fatigue at all. He’s had a very restful visit with us and leaves on Tuesday morning back to his own home. I hope life returns to normal after that.
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