Moving day came and went last Thursday, sandwiched between two days of heavy rain, and nobody died. In the morning, I spent two hours feverishly packing acres of knick-knacks, worn out clothes, and well-loved books no one reads anymore into boxes and garbage bags and tagging furniture for the movers while my mother reclined on her bare mattress, snoozing under a layer of fleece jackets. Right on time, the movers arrived, masked, eyes neutral, hands gloved. Within minutes, they loaded up the big red truck. The last thing to go was the bed. I rousted Mom and parked her outside in a patio chair. A few minutes later, the movers were on their way to drop half the load at my brother's garage. I fetched my car, loaded up the precious cargo, and off we went to the new place.
For weeks, Mom had been saying to me through the baby monitor, "Get me out of here. I want out of this place." I counted down the days with her, taping notes to her window every night. Five more days, four more days. The night before moving day, I took down the photo collage and all the notes. I thought, whew, finally she can grow old in a place that won't kick her out when she runs out of money.
When we got to the new care home, Mom sat at the marble dining room table with another old lady, displaying her best social skills, while the movers traipsed around the corner with her couch, coffee table, end table, armchair, end table, and a little round table to go next to the armchair. I directed them where to place things in this new room, a quarter of the size of her old apartment. The new care home care manager, Eren, helped me make the couch into a bed, laying down a foam rubber slab over the old couch cushions and covering the mess with a king-size dark gray cotton sheet. I thought it looked pretty good.
Eren invited Mom in, and she entered, looking shell-shocked. Soon she was prone on the couch with her head under a blanket. I went back to the retirement place to fetch her clothes, lamps, and more hygiene gear. She was still sacked out on the couch when I returned to the care home. I thought, okay, is that a good sign or a bad sign? I went home and ate dinner. At 5:45 pm I walked over from my place for my usual after-dinner outside the window visit, now at a new location, through a new window.
Mom was sitting on the couch, awake and cranky.
"How is it going, Mom?" I asked through the baby monitor. Eren hovered near the closet, putting away clothes.
"She ate a good dinner," Eren said, coming through loud and clear over the baby monitor.
Mom glared. She looked like a two-year-old woken up too soon from a nap.
"I just want to sleep," she said.
"Okay, Mom, I love you, I'll see you tomorrow," I said and hiked home, enjoying the fresh air, thinking, okay, maybe this will work. She'll settle in, start enjoying all the attention . . . right?
The next day just after lunch, my phone rang.
"Your mother wants to talk to you."
"Hi Mom, what's up?"
"Carol? Come and get me out of here!" The desperation in her voice made my heart fall into my stomach.
"Why, what is happening?"
"How soon can you come and get me? I want to go home."
"But Mom . . . we can't go back to retirement home. We had to get you out of there."
"No . . . I don't know. I just want to go home." Terrifying visions of taking her to my house passed before my eyes.
"Mom, take it easy, you need to give it a little time."
"I don't like this place."
"Okay, let's see how it goes. Everything is new, it's scary. It will take time to get used to it. It's like going from grade school into high school, right? Remember how scary that was? Take a nap and things will get better."
Poor old Mom. Nothing is going to get better. Dementia is a terrible disease that kills in excruciating slow motion. I look at her and wonder how anything that decrepit can still be walking and talking. But clearly I have no clue what her world is like on the inside. My mother lost more essential brain cells in that move, and it's all my fault. Over the past few weeks, when she begged me to "get her out of there," I thought she meant out of the retirement home. What she meant was, get me out of here, this horrible present where nothing makes sense and I can't control anything.
I visited her later in the afternoon and she didn't remember anything about her tantrum. Eren told me Mom had bolted out the front door, heading for the gate. Where would she go? She has no idea where she is. In the evening, I brought her a map and traced the route from her new place to my place. It's all uphill, she'd never make it. We would find her expired in juniper bushes.
Three days later, she's still alive, still cranky, and from the good people on the internet, I know that when a demented person asks to go home, they mean back to where they felt safe and in control. Mom hasn't felt "in control" since 2014, when her brain still worked pretty well, she was still smoking and driving and eating what she liked. Now she thinks I moved too, and keeps asking me where I moved to. Good news, a hair stylist came and gave her a haircut. Mom looks like her usual disheveled self, but with less hair.
In the evenings after I return from my visit outside her window, I sort through the boxes and bags of stuff I moved from her old place to my place. My living room looks like a thrift store. The bedroom is in similar disarray. I'm taking inventory: Boxes full of cards from everywhere, mostly France. A box of Dick Francis paperbacks. A hardback dictionary and a thesaurus. A softbound medical dictionary and pill book, with her maladies and medicines bookmarked. Even as she was losing her mind, she wanted to know the side effects of donezapil and mirtazapine. Open seed packets in a rusted coffee can, pruning shears, three huge plastic bins full of mostly acrylic yarn, Christmas decorations, including the felt stockings my grandmother made for our family when I was a kid. (Do I still have mine, somewhere? I don't know.) Handwritten notes, including instructions for writing a private Facebook message. The birthday of her youngest great-grandchild on a heart-shaped sticky note. I found a diary she started in 2005 . . . not many entries, pretty terse. Fell outside Carol's apartment, broke pelvis, in rehab for three weeks. The final entry was four months before she moved into the retirement home in April 2017.
When we moved Mom from the condo to the retirement home, I remember standing in her derelict condo, looking at the detritus she left behind, thinking this is how it will feel when she dies, but she was still half-alive, like Schrodinger's cat, just downsized to accommodate the loss of her brain. I have the same feeling now, but the clock is closer to midnight. She's slightly less than half-alive.
I am resigned to a long drawn-out death. I don't know why this is her path or mine. Our paths intersected when I was born, split apart for many years, and then cleaved back together in 2015 when she realized her brain was going gunnysack. Now we are stuck like glue to the end of the ride. Thelma and Louise, frozen in our descent.
