Mom is fine. She just had a severe iron deficiency. They pumped two bags of blood into her and sent her home. I was at the hospital for six hours, mostly sitting in the room with her. If she’s not watched, she starts fiddling with the tubes, removing the blood pressure cuff, unsticking the sensors they’ve taped to her chest. My job, then, is to distract her.
When I first got there, they had Fox News playing on her TV. Horrible. I changed it to PBS, which was still playing animating educational stuff. We learned about gardening and birthdays in Puerto Rico. A cartoon grandmother and granddaughter sat together and Mom said it looked like her and my daughter. Not in so many words, but I knew what she was referencing.
Then I read to her a bit from “The Dead” by James Joyce. She remembered Joyce’s name, and when I showed her his picture on the front, I reminded her of his statue in Dublin, just off O’Connell. There’s no pedestal, so it’s like he’s standing there on the street with you, leaning jauntily on his cane. She remembered, she said.
She had no memory of the story. When I told her the title, she laughed and said, “oh, you want to read this because you think I’m dead?” I told her I didn't, that I thought she was very much alive.
It is true that on the car ride over I had been wondering if this was going to be the day I’d need to decide to let her die.
Isaac, the physicians assistant, had called me after she arrived, while I was still getting ready to head over, to clarify that I was willing to approve a blood transfusion. It’s a procedure that’s officially denied by a Do Not Resuscitate, which my mother has. As her Health Care Proxy, I could give my permission to override the DNR, and did. Then I wondered if I was needlessly prolonging life. Should I be letting her body shut itself down, if that’s what it was doing?
It was a relief to discover, when I got to the hospital and heard the results from her blood tests, that it was just an iron deficiency. She’s just not eating enough food, so they’ll give her an iron supplement every day.
We’re prolonging her life, which is what medical professionals are supposed to do, and is maybe what I am supposed to do. Until I’m not.
If you’d asked my Mom ten years ago if she wanted to be living like she is now, she would have said absolutely not. From her perspective then, her life now would have looked really pitiful and small. She wears a diaper, can’t walk, doesn't read books anymore. She is completely dependent on people who will always be strangers to her.
Still, there is joy in her life. She wheels herself through the halls of her care home saying hello to everyone. She flirts with male fellow residents. At the hospital, she bonded with Derek, the handsome, muscly, tattooed nurse attending to her. When he wasn’t in the room with us, she’d make me look out the door to see where he was.
When a tray of food came for her, she only ate a couple of bites, then spent two hours sorting it into piles and putting things in their proper location. She broke apart the crust of her chicken pot pie and lined the pieces up by height. She put the carrots in one corner, the chicken in another. She read the labels on each packet. Every five minutes, she’d ask me “Iodized salt? What’s that?”
It was exhausting for me to sit there with her on alert, answering the same questions over and over. I had brought my laptop hoping I might get some work done, but only used it to play Bach for her. And for Derek, who loves Bach, as it turned out. I wanted to keep him in the room as much as possible, so any bait was useful.
She had gotten tired of me reading “The Dead” about halfway through it, but had been engaged with it up until then. She laughed at the descriptions of faces, and the concern about a guest who might show up drunk. It’s a lot of conversation, which she seems very attuned to these days. She’s not able to have a lot of real conversations now, so I suppose she’s drawn to depictions of them. It’s certainly what gets her attention in movies we watch together. She particularly like romantic scenes, close-ups of people falling in love. “Oh, that’s nice,” she’ll say.
This is her life now. Observing, sorting, questioning everything. This is who she’s always been, it’s all just a bit smaller now. It’s still worth prolonging.
Beautiful 🥰