The Yellow Wallpaper

Today is mild and rainy. The ground is covered with bright yellow leaves and there are still many more to fall. Last year at this time my mother was in the hospital with a pulmonary embolism, and I was frantically trying to arrange for her to move from rehab right into Garden Manor. That didn’t work, and so she would come home for another month and a half before the move.

We are facing a very different holiday season this year. I’ve had it in the back of my mind to formalize Thanksgiving plans, but I don’t want to think about it. I imagine that my sister and I will have dinner at Garden Manor–taking my mother out anywhere would be too disorienting for her. Our usual places will be closed that day, and I can’t see us taking her to a more upscale restaurant for a big dinner. I’m sad and nervous about it–I knew that the holidays as I’ve always known them would be yet another collateral loss, but you just don’t know how it feels until you’re there.

I’m still not sure how “comfortable” my mother is in her new home. It’s very hard to tell, and I’m only still developing the skills needed to read the clues in her behavior. It seems odd to be saying that at this point, but it’s true. I realized this one day when I visited and she was just beside herself with anxiety and sadness. She told me over and over again that she would die if I made her stay there, that she had never been as depressed as she was now. But during this jeremiad, whenever one of the staff or another resident would pass by us, my mother’s expression would light up and she’d wave brightly at them. I discovered that I could change such a black mood by suggesting that we go shopping soon, and asking her was kinds of things she needed from the store. She rarely actually want to go to a store, but expressing her “needs” makes her feel better. She says that she wants nail polish and lipstick and “school supplies” but what she really wants is to be heard when she tries to articulate her feelings. She wants some control, some response.

So I’m learning to see my relationship with her in smaller increments. I just can’t think too far into the future–she lives so much in the present that I have to accommodate. I’m not going to throw out the past just yet, but I’ve got to put it aside for now.

I’m still surprised at how emotionally difficult it’s been for my sister and me to come to terms with my mother’s disease and the decisions it’s forced. I’m still having a significant problem with depression, but I’m improving. I’m in a graduate seminar that’s a challenge, and I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned that I have another pup. I saw him on Petfinder and after a bit of an odyssey, he’s in his new home. He was listed by a Massachusetts rescue organization, but he was in Arkansas! I hadn’t been too keen on relocating a puppy from that distance, but when I talked to the wonderful rescue lady in AK and heard about all the dogs she’s trying to place, I took him. I’d been looking at his picture for so long by then and imagining him in my home, that he was almost mine, anyway. So the “puppy bus”–which makes the trip from Little Rock up to New England every couple of weeks–brought him to me, and in surprisingly fine condition. Waldo was presented to me with his tail wagging and beautiful amber eyes sparkling.

We think he’s a Catahoula Leopard dog–which I’d never heard of before. If you follow the Wikipedia link and scroll down to the picture of the patchwork dog, you’re looking at Waldo’s twin. He’s about 7 months old now and into everything. He counter-surfs and has successfully gotten out of the backyard twice. He and my 10-month-old Jasper have great adventures together (and also some squabbles) and are in the process of renovating my kitchen.

On a final note, I finally got to see Bob Dylan. He played at URI about a month ago, along with Elvis Costello, and I went with a friend of mine. The show was great–Dylan was his usual inscrutable self and sang some classics in unexpectedly new arrangements. We’d be bopping along with the music for a minute or so before realizing that he was playing “All Along the Watchtower” or “Don’t Think Twice.” Unlike Costello, who was positively garrulous, Bob didn’t speak until the encore, when he introduced his band. The older I get, the more his music means to me.

I finally got the thick envelope from the Veterans Administration, and I felt like a high school senior, trying to guess the contents before opening it.

The VA awarded my mother the full Aid & Attendance benefit, retroactive to the end of Dec. 2006.  Whew.  BUT because she has Alzheimer’s, they will designate her as “incompetent”, which means they will appoint a fiduciary–another delay before we get any money.

They refused to consider my legal power of attorney when I first applied for the benefits, so I had my mother sign the application, even though she understood only broadly what she was signing.  My only alternative was to go to court and get guardianship of her, which would have taken too much time.  I understand from reading VeteranAid.org (I could NOT have applied without the help of this website and its creator, Debbie Burack) that the VA now has a form that assigns representative power to someone other than the applicant at the outset of the application.  My recommendation is to complete that form, even if the applicant is still aware of what’s going on.  I don’t know if it will prevent a delay like mine, but it’s easy enough to do.

Anyway, I will send the VA another letter, along with another copy of my power of attorney, and request that I be appointed my mother’s fiduciary.  I’m feeling like this is a time-consuming pantomime–do they really believe that someone with dementia could complete that application, just because they signed it?  At least I know that the money is coming at some point, which is an ENORMOUS relief.

My mother is doing as well as I can expect at Garden Manor.  I really have no complaints about her care–they have a wonderful staff and the place is clean and cheerful.  There is a regular round of activities–exercise, rides, cookouts, parties, music and get-togethers.   There is a monthly group for family members, run by the staff social-worker.

For me, the caregiver, it’s a challenge to straddle that line between accepting the inevitabilities of the disease and trying to keep some kind of meaning in my mother’s life.  I remember thinking–only a year ago–that once she could settle into assisted living we’d be able to coast for awhile, that there would be a holding pattern, just so I could catch my breath.  There is, and there isn’t.  Now that I don’t have to worry as much about her safety and physical care, I can notice more of the disease itself.  The gradual fading away of affect, the effort required just to negotiate her world, where she is continually puzzled by her mother’s absence, where she is still responsible for “the kids”.  Conversations, such as they are, are a great effort on both of our parts.  She is usually just THERE, while I try to tease information out of her.  She can’t remember whether she ate lunch, but can recall where each of her siblings went to high school.

So it’s a hard experience all around.  She’s slowly disappearing.

A quick entry, just to say that I’ve posted at least once in August.

I continue to visit my mother three times each week.  Some days I find her settled, other days–like today–find her agitated.  She’s usually fretting about someone she cannot quite identify.  Today it was someone named “Lily” (the name of my recently-departed dog) who might be coming for supper, but my mother didn’t have any money and what should she do if Lily didn’t show up?

I can tell within seconds of arriving what her mood is.  On days like today she is enormously relieved to see me, as if I am bringing with me the answer to all her worries.  When she realizes that I am not, her expression tightens.  I try to change the subject, to reassure her that I will take care of things, but I can’t break the spell.  “Don’t you ever see them?” she asks.  “What happened to them?”

My doctor has increased my antidepressant and added something to help me sleep. I’m not crazy about taking sleep remedies but I am also not crazy about finding myself beyond exhaustion by the end of the week.  I thought I’d be on more of an even keel at this point but the waters are still choppy.  Maybe my expectations were too high.  Or maybe I’m catching up on the grief.

My mother has now been living at Garden Manor for six months, and here is where we stand:

• On the Aid & Attendance front, I reapplied in late February–four months ago–and have not yet received a decision. I had originally sent the application to the Providence, RI, office of the VA, but received an acknowledgement from the Philadelphia office shortly thereafter so I imagine that’s where the application is sitting. I send them a printout of the cancelled check for my mother’s assisted living rent each month, just to remind them of my situation.

My question for them at this point is: If you won’t allow folks to apply for the benefit before they commit themselves to a care situation–forcing them to OVER-commit themselves financially while crossing their fingers and hoping they’ll receive the monthly benefit–how do you expect the average middle-class potential beneficiary to manage? I DO appreciate that the benefit is awarded retroactively, but my fingernails are chewed to the quick at the possibility that they will pull some little-known subclause out of the darkness and refuse my mother benefits. And my mother is in a relatively good situation: she has a decent pension, she is in a reasonably priced assisted living home, and–maybe most importantly, not to blow my own horn–she has a family member (me) who is stubborn, tenacious and may also have an inflated opinion of her own ability to get things done on her own.

She also had a healthy savings account (now practically gone) and a life insurance policy that I cashed in. It’s true that my mother has a house, which is not included when her total assets are assessed by the VA. I am holding on to it for now for several reasons. The first is that I believe she is entitled to the A&A benefit and this extra monthly income will cover her AL rent without my having to liquidate her property. My father served this country for almost three years on a small boat in the Pacific during World War II, and he is a perfect example of the veteran this benefit was created for. When he returned, both parents worked from Day One for this house. If I sell the house now, my mother will no longer qualify for Aid & Attendance–this logic might seem disingenuous, but we are facing a very open-ended illness. My mother is in good physical health right now, but I have to consider the possibility that the Alzheimer’s will carry her along until she needs a nursing home–which we CANNOT afford. I spoke to a professional from the local Alzheimer’s Association who recommended that, if and when the time comes for a nursing home, my mother should at least start off as a “private pay” resident, if possible. That’s where the house will come in.

• I began seeing a therapist about a month ago, after the depression and anger began interfering too much with both my work and home life. I was sleeping and eating too much, dreading the weekends and feeling totally overwhelmed. I couldn’t understand WHY this was happening now that my mother was in assisted living and I was back in my house. I’d expected a letdown but not this. I like this woman very much–she’s professional and warm–and so we talk about what I think and what I feel, which don’t always jive. And I’m gradually feeling better. I’m recognizing that while a situation can be tackled intellectually, I can’t always set an emotional timetable for myself. Acceptance, grief and letting go can’t be pencilled into a calendar. It’s messy, especially for someone like myself who is most comfortable with a script. Things aren’t always what they seem.

• My mother seems to be “home” most of the time at Garden Manor. Yesterday when I was visiting, one of the aides brought her her pills.  “She is always smiling,” the aide said to me.  Of course there are wrinkles–I try to get to the bottom of my mother’s anxiety when I sense it.  “What are you worried about right now?” I asked her yesterday.  “I think you’re hiding something from me,” she said.  I am, I suppose.  She still asks regularly about “Ma”–where is she, where does she live?  I think her anxiety is related to “Ma” but I’m still feeling my way around here.  Redirect is still the best advice.

So this is the six month state of affairs.  It’s still caregiving, but it’s a different kind of caregiving, for me.

My mother is much quieter when I visit now. Today being Sunday, we took off for our usual lunch and drive. My sister comes along, as does Jasper the Sheltie (who really doesn’t like going for a ride, surprisingly–he runs and hides when I approach with his harness. This is pretty uncharacteristic for a dog and I’m hoping he grows out of it). Garden Manor has a Sunday afternoon barbeque, and today my mother seemed uncertain about whether she wanted to stay for that. Making even a simple decision is almost impossible for her at this point. A choice between coffee and hot chocolate, for example, is prolonged by her insistance that someone else pick for her. It’s a frustrating development at a time when I want to preserve what little choice she has in her life. At first I would not let her off the hook, but now I’ll just pick what I think she’d prefer. So today I suggested we forego the barbeque and go for a drive.

And this we did. She says next to nothing as we drive, which bothered me at first. I’d question her about her sleep, her meals, her activities, and she’d always answer me with vagueness–”I guess so,” or “I forget.” So I’ve backed off a bit. Every so often I’ll ask her if she’s comfortable or does she want to stop at a store, just to tune her in. I’m getting better at translating her silences–sometimes she’s just pleased to be out and othertimes, like today, she’s unsettled.

Lately she’s seemed like someone walking around with a pebble in her shoe. Always a little “off” but unable to pinpoint why. Constant, low-level discomfort. I don’t know how much this discomfort is turned up when my sister and I are around. I’ve asked the staff how she’s doing and they tell me she’s doing fine. And when I’ve arrived to find her sitting with her card-playing friends, she seems in good spirits and very engaged. She tells us that she does nothing all day, but I know otherwise. The staff photograph many of the social functions and then put the pictures on bulletins boards around the lobby. I originally thought that was a sweet little extra, but now I see that it is probably for the families who can’t get anything out of their loved one. I’ve spotted my mother in a few pictures–eating ice cream or listening to music–so I know that she joins in occasionally.

So I’m thinking that her taciturnity (is there such a word?) might be a little more complex than merely the verbal loss that accompanies Alzheimer’s. She’s been at Garden Manor for a little over five months now, and she seems to be making her own sense of it. On the other hand, I have my own sense of where she “is” and the two don’t often mesh, I think. I operate under the assumption that she remembers how she came to be here and my role in that change. I visit the woman who–I believe–thinks about her old life and wonders why I don’t show up more often. But she’s not that woman, and so I think my assumptions puzzle her.

I’m not saying that I need to map her reality, because I don’t think I can do that. But maybe I can back off and stop trying to fix what isn’t broken.

For example: one subject she invariably raises when I visit is her mother. “How’s Ma?” she asks me. “Where does she live?” “Did you have a fight with her?” “Does she know where I am?” I usually improvise in a very sloppy way, but I think that this is a theme I might have to consider more carefully. Or maybe it’s part of this stage of her adjustment to her new life.

On a personal note, I finally let go of my beautiful 14-year-old collie Lily yesterday. I was hanging on to her, despite her crippling arthritis and doggie dementia. But my poor girl developed a horrible pressure sore, and I knew I couldn’t put her through any more. She’d had a good, long life–and a healthy one, until recently–and her welfare was more important than my need to hang on to the past. I’m less distraught than I was when my boy Dustin died last August. His illness and death were unexpected, but I’ve been considering my Lily’s life for months now. She was a lively and inquisitive collie, so seeing her deteriorate was awful. I think my sadness now is alleviated by relief at being able to release her from her difficulties.

But, oh man, I’m starting to get severe “decision fatigue”…

I didn’t want to let April go by without a word. I’ve started several posts over the past two months but have been unable to finish them. I knew that I would have a period of adjustment to my mother’s new living situation, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to find myself depressed. When I was living with my mother I would imagine this time–when I could finally return to my house and have some time to myself–as being light. In some ways it is. Having the time to be alone is a good thing for me. But beneath the moments of solitude and the freedom from worrying about her safety is a lot of grief, I now realize.

To be honest, I’m having a very difficult time right now. I’m having a hard time motivating myself to do a number of things–to keep up this blog, to read, to clean the house. I wake up each morning anticipating a long day. Once I get dressed and out of the house, my mood picks up, but I am still struggling to concentrate at work, to organize my thoughts and plans. Little annoyances become vastly important and weigh me down. I’ve been here before–I know what this is. It’s been awhile since I felt this “down” and so I have to remind myself that what I resist doing–writing and reading and meditating–are the very acts that will make me feel better.

What I want to do is watch TV, eat, and sleep. I do knit, which is about the only thing I do that’s productive and calming. Wait–I also garden. Weeding has always been therapeutic, and God knows, I have quite a bit of THAT to do. But fifteen minutes outside, inspecting my neglected garden for signs of life, is worth an hour of therapy. I’ve lost some of my favorite plants, but the clematis and the tulips and the peonies are back, and there’s nothing like seeing them poking out of the dirt to remind me that not all is lost.

I know that this mood will pass. I believe that depression is NOT something that must be avoided at all costs, that I can learn from being thrown off my stride. It doesn’t always feel good, but what does? Times like this remind me of the heart/mind dynamic–the borderline we learn to straddle as we get older. I go over my mother’s situation time and time again–my intellect has “gotten” it but my heart still needs the chant. Whenever I start to feel sad that my mother must be in assisted living, I have to remind myself that it isn’t the assisted living that is the problem. It’s the Alzheimer’s, and I can’t control that. The assisted living has at least given her companionship, routine, challenge. Were she back at her house, she’d be sitting like a ragdoll on the couch, unable even to watch TV. Now she takes walks around the building and sits with her group of ladies. She has her well-being monitored day and night. She goes to exercise, and to Mass, and to socials. She has her hair done. I now visit three times a week–on Sundays we go out to lunch and for a ride. I need to repeat all this to myself on a weekly basis, because it’s so easy to fall back into the habit of shaking my fist at the gods.

My mother has had her ups and downs but I can sense her settling in. On Thursday I sat with her and one of her friends, who began to talk once again about going “home.” “Which one?” my mother asked. The woman pointed to her room. Home is a concept I haven’t yet been able to pin down. More and more I see it as the hope that they will still have control over their lives–that they will continue to be able to make crucial choices for themselves. I have no right to take that hope away from them.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m struck by how my mother sometimes wants to go home “next week”, or some other time in the future. She admits she doesn’t want to live alone and asks me if I will find someone to stay with her. I have no intention of doing this–if anyone stays with her it will be me–and yet I hate to mislead her, so I’ve often wandered down the wrong path of trying to reason with her. She can sense my ambivalence, which agitates her even more.

What I’m coming to realize is that, like most subjects, this one is more metaphorical than not. We aren’t really talking about her moving home, but about her independence. I’ve read so much about the anguish of “lying” to a loved one with Alzheimer’s, as if we are still able to communicate as directly as we did before the disease. Communicating with my mother has passed beyond the unequivocal exchange of words. I have to look for patterns, for contexts, for tone. How else can I respond to her repeated questions about her mother–why isn’t “Ma” coming to see her, does “Ma” know where she is, did I have a fight with “Ma”? I now say “Everything is fine,” which may or may not be a lie. And when she asks me to look for someone to stay with her, I say “I’ll see what I can do,” which also may or may not be a lie. I think at this point it’s not the words that count, but the fact that she has someone to whom she can try to express what might be beyond words, over and over again. I can be there to absorb some of the anxiety, to reassure her, rather than trying to take a literal measure of reality. Like so much of life, this is not a situation that can be solved with one or two conversations, but will need to be repeated again and again, like a ritual.

I’ll end on a positive note. The photo at the beginning of this post is my newest love, Jasper, the 4-month old Sheltie who has entered Lily’s and my life. I’ve had him for about a month. We are going to “puppy kindergarten” (where the other puppies are twice his size–but he is twice as fast and not afraid of them in the least). We also visit my mother weekly, where Jasper is a great favorite with the staff and residents of Garden Manor. He loves my 14-year-old collie Lily–he snuggles with her all the time. I was a little in shock for the first week–I’d forgotten how peppy puppies are–but it took him no time to settle in. He’s affectionate and talkative and very busy. It’s nice to find myself at the beginning of something.

I talked to a friend whose mother moved into a nursing home last July. Jen confirmed what I’d heard about adjustment: that it’s incremental and can take several months. The going was rough for awhile–her mother needs care primarily due to physical problems but the physical and emotional stress of failing health and a new environment probably had something to do with the dementia that arose. I remember talking to Jen a few months ago and she was extremely discouraged. But her appreciation for her mother’s home has increased with her mother’s acceptance of it. Her mother, she told me yesterday, is now “at home.”

My mother has been at Garden Manor for two and a half months, and I’d say that she’s definitely in the middle stages of her adjustment. She is no longer angry at me, and she no longer demands to go home. She still wants to go home, but I can tell by the way she talks about it that she no longer blames me completely for her situation. When she brings the subject up I acknowledge the difficulty of her transition and then tell her how much I would worry if she were to live alone. “I didn’t think that you wanted to be alone,” I usually say, hoping to suggest that she has some control over the situation. “I don’t,” she now says, “but if we could get someone to live with me, I could go home. Please don’t tell me it’s impossible.”

And so I say that nothing is impossible, although finding someone to move in with her will be a challenge. “But I never rule anything out,” I say. I think this makes her feel better, and that’s what’s interesting to me about this stage. She no longer needs to go home NOW, but she still needs to hope that she might go home, given the right circumstances.

Sometimes it’s like walking a tightrope–real hope on one side, false hope on the other. I visited her after work today and we took a very short walk outside, the weather being mild. Then we sat on a park bench, and I could feel my mother sinking a bit. “I never thought I’d ever be this unhappy,” she said. “You’re the only one I can tell–I can’t tell the others.”

I inhaled deeply, trying to find the right response. My mother looked over my shoulder and said suddenly, “Look at how big that rock is. This place is so pretty.”

These “in-the-moment” shifts are still mysterious to me, but I took this one and ran. I reminded her that St. Patrick’s Day is coming up, to be followed by St. Joseph’s Day. St. Joseph’s Day brings with it the sublime Italian seasonal pastry called the zeppola that we both love. “I can bring us some zeppole,” I promised and she brightened up. I brightened up, too, because it was a promise I could keep.

I almost adopted another collie last weekend. I’ve been sneaking a search or two on Petfinder during my workday, and one day I spotted the picture of a beautiful 4-year-old collie up for adoption in Connecticut. I filled out the application and the rescue organization responded enthusiastically. But the owner would be the one to decide, and she wanted–understandably–an adopter who would not have to leave the dog while at work. So that was that, but I couldn’t help myself thinking, “So you don’t think I’d be a good enough caregiver, huh? Your loss.”

But I’m still feeling a strong impulse to get another dog. It doesn’t have to be a puppy, but I’m wondering if that might be the path of least resistance. How nice to have a being in my family who isn’t fading or pulling away. I was in Petco on Friday and standing beside me was a man holding a Bichon puppy. A tiny, wet-eyed, pink-pawed little creature, still too young to be frisky. “Look at his eyes,” the man told me and I saw that they were Delft blue. The sales clerk offered the puppy a piece of Milkbone, but he was too bewildered by his surroundings to take it.

I’m trying to reimagine my relationship with my mother. I visit her for an hour after work on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we go out for lunch and a ride on Sundays. The weekday visits are turning out to be interesting because we often sit in the common area. Before you know it, we’re joined by some of her neighbors. Their conversations can be funny and poignant, especially when I hear how the others attempt to come to terms with living there. Nearly everyone I’ve spoken to has expressed an intention to return home, which isn’t surprising, but for some this will happen when they “get better” and for others it will happen in the vague future. “I guess I’ll stay here for awhile,” said Margaret, after stating that she didn’t want to live alone at home. Even my mother has told me that she’s decided to go home “next week”–at which point I will presumably have found someone to move in with her.

Otherwise, much of their conversation revolves around what day it is (”They could tell me it was any day and I’d believe them,” Connie stated flatly), and when and where they will eat dinner. They eat at the same time every day, and each person sits in the same spot in the same dining room, but they are continually surprised by this. What I am coming to love and learn from is how they accept each other at face value. Of course there are little disputes but when Cecile repeats for the nth time the story of her husband’s sudden death, everyone listens as if hearing it for the first time.

My mother has lately been returning to her role as schoolteacher and she’s often worrying about where “the kids” are and when they are going to return. I think this might be triggered by some of her neighbors going out to an activity, but on Thursday she was especially anxious about the whereabouts of someone. She left me to go look for this person a couple of times, the last time returning with her roommate Irene, who’d been lying down in their room. “Everyone!” my mother called out to the people sitting with me at the table. “This is Irene. Irene, do you know everyone?”

I almost said, “Mom–everyone knows Irene,” but the others were saying “Hello Irene” and “What was her name?” so I kept quiet. My mother went on to instruct Irene about the whereabouts of their bathroom and the dining room. “And if you just want to relax, you can sit in the bedroom.” Irene looked perplexed. “I’m just going to follow you around,” she finally said.

At this point I realized that my mother was more concerned with Irene’s situation, which actually made me feel good once I thought about it while driving home. I had hoped that she would form bonds with her neighbors, that she would be interested in them and enjoy sitting with them and worry about them. That they would engage each other. But it changes my relationship with her, and I’m not yet sure how. I used to take care of her and live with her. I ate meals with her and slept in the bedroom across the hall from her. I had time to sit with her and knit without talking, but now my time with her is limited. There are so many moments when I am actually shocked to find myself sitting alone at home and just plain loving it–and then I wonder what my mother is doing at that moment, when I am not taking care of her. Other times I wake up at night thinking that I hear the click of her doorknob turning–a sound that used to be like an alarm in the night. Can this be right?

Time will tell. In the meantime, I’ll keep one eye on Petfinder and the other on Lily.

I’m taking a bit of a hiatus from blogging here for a couple of reasons. The main reason is that I’m trying to hit my stride, now that I’ve got work, my home and my mother’s new home on my map. My mother is doing well–she’s still asking to go home, but not as desperately as a few weeks ago. I make a short visit twice during the week, and then we go out for a few hours on Sunday. It’s a slow progress, finding the right balance of time spent with her and time spent away. And I can’t always rely on her reports, which makes it harder to judge how well she’s doing. (She’s told me that all she gets to eat is “leftovers” and that no one has anything to do with anyone else. And a few minutes later she’ll mention the exercise class she has every morning, and the party she went to that afternoon.) All I can say is that she looks great–she had her hair cut and permed there, her clothes are always clean, she now puts on her lipstick everyday. Sometimes I find her sitting in the TV room, sometimes in the common area with a few other ladies, and sometimes in her room.

I’ve got some thoughts for future posts, but I need a break right now. I will be guest hosting The Unforgettable Fund here and there while Patty is away, so I’ll still be around.

I haven’t been wanting to write much lately. I’m feeling tired and uninspired, just trying to deal with the ups and downs of this spell.

A routine is starting to take shape: I visit my mother on Tuesdays and Thursdays right after work. I leave the library at 3:30 and get to Garden Manor by 4. I sit with my mother until dinner, which is served at 5. For the past two Sundays we’ve gone out to lunch and then for a short ride. This seems to be working well for her, although she has accused me of not visiting “for weeks” when I let two days elapse between visits.

We had a very nice visit today. I found my mother in the common room, watching TV with several others. She looked happy to see me and, although she did mention hoping to go home, she seemed calm and settled. We sat in the airy central area and were joined by a woman who is very sympatico with my mother–they react to each other the way I remember reacting to my best friend in grammar school. One day as I walked my mother to the dining area, this woman emerged from her room and they both lit up. “Have you met Mary?” my mother asked me as they held hands for a few moments. Today we discovered that my mother and Mary were born on the same day.

Today was what I hope will come to pass for my mother. Companionship, security, warmth and care. I hope visits like this one will become more frequent, that I’ll be able to relax when I’m not with her, that I’ll come to believe that she isn’t always sadly thinking about what was taken away from her.

The place isn’t perfect, but I can see that I can improve her care by being there frequently and getting to know the staff. There are a couple of CNAs on her wing that are exceptional. The place is very clean and my mother is always dressed in clean clothes, her hair brushed. She told me that the podiatrist visited the other day, and the local lab draws her blood for her there. There are pictures of residents at various activities posted everywhere–my mother has gone on a few outings. When I see the activities director he lets me know what she’s up to.

I’ll know she feels secure when the pictures stay up. I had brought several photographs for her room, and whenever I visit I find them stacked up on her bedside table. Each time I will put them back on the windowsill and the wall–where they belong–only to find them stacked on her bedside table the next time I visit. She claims she needs to have them packed up for her eventual move back home, and so they’ve become a symbol of this transition. As long as they are stacked on the table my mother is still making the journey. When she arrives, maybe the pictures will go up.