09.06.09
Big Changes
I just couldn’t bring myself to write until today. Last Thursday, I got my Mama out of her assisted living apartment, in the building where she’s been for 4 years, at 8am…so that the movers could come at 8:15…unbeknownst to her….to move 3/4 of her remaining stuff to her new place, in the memory care unit of another facility.
It’s been very confusing for Mama…and very traumatic for me.
If I can look at the BIG picture….I know that this is where Mama needs to be. She was spending every day holed up in her apartment, getting so scared and panicky…going down to bug the nurses, on the days that she remembered they were there….she needed help finding the dining room, the bathroom…and they just aren’t set up in assisted living for that.
I started telling Mama about the new “adventure”, the new move, around noon on Thursday. (I had tried to bring it up the week before, and all it did was freak her out, and then she didn’t remember we had talked about it.)
I spent Thursday night there with her…slept in my Dad’s recliner…was pleased that she found her way from her bed to her bathroom several times during the night. On Friday after breakfast, they recommended that I dissappear for a few days. Oh my God..that was so hard to do. I did speak to her many times…she thought she was in a hospital and they were doing “procedures” on her…now she’s not thinking it’s a hospital any more, but she still finds it confusing, of course. I spent a couple of hours with her today…sang to her…played the piano over there…spoke Spanish with her. And when I left, I felt that same pain in my gut…as if I were abandoning my 5 year old.
This is so awful. If I didn’t need to make a living…I would seriously consider moving her in with me. She is so comfortable with me….AND the last several times she spent an afternoon over here, I could get nothing accomplished.
There are only 17 residents at her new place….and it is a locked wing, because there are “wanderers”. One woman is MY AGE. Holy crap.
One man is really out of it…he rambles and rambles incoherantly…and gets very angry very easily. I was really freaking out at our first meal there on Thursday evening. And my Mama’s only comment….”isn’t this a nice, small dining room?” I’m feeling like we’ve been dropped into “The Cukkoo’s Nest” and she was quite comfortable.
I took lots of the remaining pieces of my Mama’s life up to Goodwill yesterday. It’s just stuff. I know that.
And I sobbed…..and I’m sobbing now. I’m looking for the good…she knows who I am…she loves me and can tell me that….she has money to stay in this nice, well-staffed place for 15 months…
I actually wrote these words in my big hit song, “How Can I Help You Say Goodbye”….”life’s about changing, nothing ever stays the same”…
I sound so wise, don’t I? So calm. So philisophical. Guess it flows better than “oh my God this sucks and my heart hurts and I HATE it”.
Big changes.