Days have fallen into an uncertain rhythm, a sameness. I cram in a visit almost every day, and the two that I didn't make it prompted multiple text messages and calls from my mom, and once even from the nurses' station. She's become fixed on the idea that she is moving, and industriously packs everything, including the wall clock. When I thought to hinder the process by taking the tote bags with me, she stripped the bed and bundled all of her clothing along with playing cards, phone charger and a half-empty milk carton into a sheet. All of this was piled onto a wheelchair she found in the hall so she could be ready to go.
I start our time together with cheery conversation while I unpack and sort and restore order to this hospital room that she has been staying in for almost three weeks. And I'm learning where to hunt for missing items. Today I have no time constraints, so I settle into getting her mind back on track. Whatever that means. Within a half hour she is almost fully engaged so we begin shuffling and dealing out seven cards each for a round of Rummy 500. Her brain is still able to track the card values and devise multi-step strategies and she wins today, as she usually does. I watch her body language shift into something close to happiness, and she is triumphant when she plays her final set and discard. She can still tally the values faster than I, although she can't remember her score after she tells it to me.
But the conversation along the way is speckled with fictitious things she used to do, or is in the process of doing. Life as a member of a Wimbledon tennis team is taxing, because they always have to stay together as a group and don't get to go to school. She never enjoyed the stuff they make all the kids do because going into the water is so cold with all of the special places to stand and things to wear. Her ability to keep track of details is due to her work at AT&T where she had to read through all the different languages looking for the mistakes that were sometimes codes. Each falsehood is delivered so confidently, I can't help enunciating an appropriate encouraging response.
I leave when it's time for her to walk to the dining room; I always feel better about transitioning her to the company of other people. But I walk through the beige halls filled with so many discouraging sights and sounds and my heart is so conflicted. I hate this place that keeps her safe, and in her daily packing up I believe she is telling me she hates it as well.
Within twenty minutes my mother is sending me a text asking when I will come to visit her, and can I PLEASE bring her some chocolate and cough drops. NOW.
And my husband calls and listens to my angst, then reminds me that she packed up when she was at our house, and tried to leave from the top of a two-story house that doesn't have institutional locks and codes for safety, and yelled about how I would be happy when she fell and hit her head on the floor and died because then I would be rid of her.
Yikes.
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