Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

The deed is done. You carry on.

Thursday, Aug. 14, 2008
11:51 p.m.
We moved my mother into her new home and it seemed to go smoothly. I think I behaved myself well, even though I was constantly feeling the stress and other strange emotions relating to the situation. The boarder had prepared dinner for us when I arrived, a store-bought vegetable lasagne, and we ate this after I finished wrapping the china tea cups and saucers from my mom’s corner china cabinet. My brother called and I ended up talking to him because my mother was unable to convey his message, and the upshot was that he would arrive at 8:45 a.m. the next day and the guy with the van would arrive at 9:00 a.m. In fact, they arrived concurrently, the latter actually being earlier.

They had the easy part, loading up the heavy items and transporting them. I had the hard job, packing boxes and keeping my mother entertained. While they were flexing their bulging biceps and other muscle groups, I was being worn down psychologically. For instance, my mother has a beautiful stainless steel tea set (pot, creamer and sugar bowl) that a cousin of hers gave her. She’s forgotten how she acquired it now, confusing it with another tea set, a pewter one, that she got as a wedding present, but that’s not important. When she decided she would make the move, she determined to bring that tea set with her (the stainless one) so she could serve tea. However, the last time I visited her, about a month ago, I could not see the teapot anywhere. I saw the two other pieces, and she had been brewing tea in the creamer. Then when I was looking to pack the set, I couldn’t find any of it.

On Monday night I slept in my mother’s bedroom and she slept in my old room as she wanted to take that bed which is newer and more comfortable than her old one. There was something that kept waking me up every hour, a mechanical voice, and the next morning before my brother came I started looking for it. I found half a recorder and various other items, and then I came upon the lid for the sugar bowl of the tea set in question. I also searched and eventually found the swab for cleaning out the recorder and the bottom part.

I brought the sugar bowl lid to my mother and put it in her hands and said, “What is this thing?” She felt it and said, “It feels like a bell.” I also handed her the top of the recorder and asked her what it was. She felt it and said, “Oh, this is a table leg.” Her eyesight is really bad.

Anyway, she had been packing up two suitcases with things like linens, towels and whatnot. I opened one and found a treasure trove: a round, stainless steel teapot, a creamer, and a sugar bowl without a lid but full of sugar. I removed them (and dumped out the sugar) and repacked them in a box and got on with it. The thing that kept waking me up turned out to be a talking watch which I removed from the room.

My brother and I were extremely cordial and got along very well during the whole moving process. To an outside observer, we would have appeared to be quite amicable. I guess that’s what it was all about, appearing amicable to outside observers. At the end of the day he thanked me for coming, saying that it had made the move much smoother.

I got to work unpacking my mom’s stuff and putting things away. I realized that there was a whole mess of things I’d forgotten, like dish detergent, tea mugs, drinking glasses and waste paper baskets. We had supper in the residence’s dining room (I was a guest) and another resident who knows my mother and who has a car offered to help me move the little things I’d forgotten.

After supper I let my mom walk me to the corner and we hugged and kissed goodbye, then I crossed the street and waited and watched until she returned to the home, not going until I’d seen her go in the front door. I felt the same way I had when my daughter got on the school bus for the first time and I thought I was going to cry.

The next morning (yesterday) I came to the residence to take her to her appointment at the memory clinic. We had to take the bus, which was fine, and got there quite early, except I had never been to this medical complex before and it took us 15 minutes just to find the right elevator. During the interview the nurse asked my mother all sorts of questions, some she could answer and others she could not, and I filled in blanks. My mom’s in pretty bad shape. She had seen a memory specialist in January who had prescribed a medication which is supposed to help elderly patients with dementia who are experiencing memory loss. She had never filled it. I recalled having seen a prescription just lying around in the kitchen and after I dropped my mom off back at the home for lunch, I returned to her house and looked for it. Sure enough, it was just lying on the stove and was the very prescription from January which had never been filled.

My mother’s friend came by with her car and brought me and the items I gathered to the home, and I took the prescription to the head nurse who said they could start giving her the pills as early as this morning. I can only hope that they have a positive effect.

I unpacked her china cups, washed them and arranged them in her china cabinet, and tidied up. Her friend came in then and stayed for a while, and then it was time for dinner. So we said our goodbyes and finally I left, headed for the street where all the restaurants are, thinking I would treat myself to some kind of ethnic cuisine. Then I decided I really didn’t want to be alone, so I returned to the house and called a friend whom I met at a restaurant downtown. He was very sympathetic and we had a nice dinner and a pleasant visit, but I started to fade and he drove me home.

The bus ride home was boring but relatively uneventful, the most exciting thing being that I arrived early enough in Montreal to catch the 4:30 p.m. bus (which I would otherwise have missed). As I was looking for my ticket, I realized it was gone. When I took out the ticket for that morning’s leg of the journey, I must have accidentally pulled the other out with it and dropped it. So I had to make a mad run to the ticket machine and purchase a new one, racing back to the gate and being the last one on the bus. I sat next to a lovely woman who spoke no English and we chattered away in French the whole trip home.

I called my mom as soon as I got home and she was very confused. She had an appointment this morning at the general hospital to have her pacemaker checked, but she got it mixed up with yesterday’s memory clinic appointment. Then I asked her if she’d had dinner, and she said that she had eaten downtown but now she was home in her own bedroom in her house. I explained (as I have done repeatedly) that she is no longer in her house, but living at the residence. She is surrounded by her same furnishings (which was part of the idea so that she would be comfortable) and thought she was in her own home. Well, hopefully this place will soon become home to her.

This whole thing has exhausted me, both physically and emotionally. My brother emailed me to say he’d gotten my message about the followup appointment with the memory specialist, and to say that if I wanted the piano moved to the home as a donation, I should arrange it. I wrote him back explaining that the movers were contacted and they will do the job whenever it is convenient to him, since he is the one who has to open the house for them. I obviously cannot do it from my end, and instead of playing email tag, it is a simple thing for him to call them and set it up. It is also incredibly cheap. Or, if he simply doesn’t want to do it, I will let it wait until I am back September 1 when we move our kids into their respective homes. The tone of his email shows me that nothing has changed, that the amicable détente was just that, and now that the job has been accomplished, we are back to our estranged status.

C’est la vie.

|

<~~~ * ~~~>