HOW TO VISIT THE PERSONAL CARE HOME |
Ann Green
1) Plan for the trip, pack a bag. Stop at the store for travel food, prepackaged dinners, maybe a premade salad. Try to be healthy. Snacks for the car. Flowers for your mother. Pack your laptop and the students’ papers.
2) Break up the drive by stopping for gas at one of the two turnpike rest stops. If you feel like terrible fried chicken, stop at the first rest stop. If you just want terrible coffee, stop at the second. Walk the dog if she is with you. Pee.
Each visit out of the personal care home feels like walking a high wire. You remember the documentary on the man who walked between two tall buildings in New York. You could never do that. You couldn’t even watch the whole thing. There are too many variables: wind and birds and what you had for breakfast disagreeing with you. You would fall. With your mother, it is the same: Will the people who see her be kind? Will they help you if you can’t open the door? Will they look away because she is loopy? Will you remember the extra Depends? But she is always happy to see you.
3) Arrive at the personal care home. Find your mother in the shared living room. Hand her the flowers or the piece of cake you brought. Watch her smile, happy to see you and happy to have the flowers. Take a picture with your phone for your sisters and text them. If the dog is with you, bring her inside. The old people love to see her, to pet the dog. Your mother loves the dog, too, but doesn’t recognize her as hers. What a pretty beagle, your mother says. What is her name?
4) Remember the handicapped hangtag, so you can park in the wheelchair spot. Hope that the spot is free. Hope that someone will assist you with the restaurant doors because most places are handicapped accessible in name only and the doors are heavy.
5) If it is early afternoon, take your mom for ice cream. If it is summer, take her to a drive-thru for a hot fudge sundae. If it is winter, take her to the restaurant where she and your father dated fifty years before. They know her there. They know she likes the extra whipped cream.
The familiar places are best for everyone. You know which restrooms have grab bars. You know that she is happy anywhere but loves it when people talk to her, ask her how she is doing. She is always happy to be somewhere outside of the personal care home. Even the familiar is new to her.
6) Hope that your mother does not need to use the restroom. Hope that you get one of the waitresses that knows her who is kind, or the one who is comfortable talking to someone with dementia, the one who knows she likes the extra whipped cream.
She lets you order for her. When she reads the menu, she doesn’t remember what she read. Her eyes read the words, and she speaks to you, “This is such a large menu,” but she does not remember what she has read. You didn’t know this happened with dementia. Once, in her room at the personal care home, you tried to read to her, and she was insulted. “I can read,” she said, and that’s when you realized how this worked. “You decide,” she says. “You know what I like.” She likes to hold on to the menus and reread them while you wait for food. You order her ice cream: a brownie sundae; a hot fudge sundae. She stopped drinking when she broke her hip and her dementia began. The sugar in the desserts replaces the sugar from the booze. You have always wanted a sober mother, and you have her, now. She is the essence of your mother, distilled and elemental and eager for sugar.
7) Drive your mother back to the personal care home. On the drive talk to her about what she remembers. She asks you if the appliances in the house are OK since you moved it. You reassure her. She replies, “That’s good. It is hard to move a house without damaging the appliances.” Her house, the white house in the middle of the hayfield next to the collapsing barns and two small silos, the house you grew up in, is of course, in exactly the same place as it has always been. You will drive past it on your way back. She is the one who has moved.
You wonder if she knew that the previous weekend the icemaker exploded, water pouring out of the freezer and on to the kitchen floor while you frantically tossed dish towels and paper towels at the mess, until in a panic, you called the neighbors who helped you move the refrigerator and shut off the valve.
8) Pull into the driveway of the personal care home and into one of the handicapped spots. Get the wheelchair from the trunk but remember to lock the car doors. You don’t want a repeat of her climbing out of the car on her own, breaking another bone.
9) Hope that she will remember where she lives now and not have a tantrum and refuse to get out of the car. That you were hurting her by taking her back to the personal care home to put her away.
10) Help her inside and to the restroom. Sit with her. At 4:30 when the residents start lining up to take the elevator downstairs for dinner, line up with your mother. Answer as your mother introduces you to everyone who you know from all of your previous visits. “This is my daughter,” your mother says, proud. You are not sure she knows which of her daughters you are. Sometimes she says, “This is my sister,” and you gently correct her, “I am your daughter, Mom.” She doesn’t miss a beat, still smiling, beatific today. “Oh, yes, my daughter.”
11) Sit with your mother at dinner. For five dollars, you can eat with her. As your aunt would say, cheaper than McDonald’s. They bring a ham and cheese sandwich and some soup. There is coffee, all decaf, and water. There is juice. The portions are old-people tiny. Sometimes when they serve goulash, there is an alternative option which your mother prefers. Sometimes there is ambrosia salad, the odd whipped concoction with bits of canned fruit in it. You sit at a table with some of the other residents with varying degrees of memory loss: Donna, with her beautiful blue eyes and upbeat personality, always smiling; Barbara with her dyed red hair who has almost no words any more except “good.” How is your supper, Barbara? “Good.” How are you feeling Barbara? “Good.” Your mother finishes fast. She drinks her V8-juice and picks at her food. Can we go now, she says, and you wheel her up to her room.
12) “This is my daughter,” your mother says again, and one of caregiver responds, “I know, because she looks exactly like you.” You listen to this and think that, in your entire life, no one has ever told you that you look like your mother. You have spent years hearing that you look like your grandmother. That you now, in middle age, look like your mother sounds foreign and strange to your ear.
13) Mom, you say, I should go now. I should go home. You want to unload the car at your parents’ old house, which has not moved. You want to turn on the heat and water and make sure nothing has broken since your last visit. You need to check the mouse traps. You want to call your husband and talk about the drive and the dog and your mother. Throw out the salad. If you have the energy, you want to grade a few papers, but you will probably end up streaming Gray’s Anatomy or some British procedural that will hold your attention while you drink a beer. Your Mother doesn’t want you to go. “But can’t you stay longer?” She asks. I will be back tomorrow you say. The next day will be much the same as this one, but it will begin with donuts from the drive thru in town. Your mother loves a good donut.
At the brightly colored donut shop you guide her and her walker through the line, let her pick a donut. Guide her to a table. Your mother is eating her treats—Boston cream and hot chocolate—when a man approaches the table and says hello, asks her how she is doing. She answers, perfectly sensible: “And how are you?” After he leaves, she looks at you with a sparkle in her eye and says, “Do you know who that was?” You have no idea. She continues to eat her donut wearing her bright orange winter coat, smiling. While dementia has taken many things, she remains polite, her manners perfect.
Ann Etta Green is a teacher and writer who lives outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Green has published op-eds on issues of caregiving in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Chronicle of Higher Education and her writing about teaching in prison has appeared in Blarb, the Blog of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her academic writing includes reflections on community-engaged teaching, and she has written with some of her former students who are or who have experienced incarceration. In her free time, she haphazardly gardens and reluctantly birds. Green is working on a memoir about caregiving for her mother in a rural, politically red area with limited healthcare resources.