Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [91]
The first crisis came when Paul was forced to take away her car. She loved the freedom it gave her, but her driving was a danger to herself and others. Paul kept her car parked in a place where she could see it from her apartment window, but he took the keys and disabled the battery. Then her memory began to slip. She started to forget small things at first, like the days of the week, and then bigger things, like turning off the kitchen stove. One night, she left a burner on and a dishtowel caught fire. No serious damage was done, but it was clear that she could no longer live by herself. It fell to Paul to have the face-to-face conversation with her that it was time for her to leave her apartment and move into a senior housing complex where her meals would be served in a common dining room. She would lose her kitchen. Paul searched for a facility, found the right one and persuaded her to move in. He brought our uncles into the transition, and together they paid her new and much higher rent.
My divorce was then under way. The cost of it meant I was no longer able to send my mother checks for her rent. I was sick about it; I had resolved long ago to provide for my mother in her old age. When my marriage came apart, I came apart too. The marriage had been my bulwark against the demons of my childhood—instability, loneliness, fear of abandonment. When the bulwark collapsed, the first thing to go was my confidence. I was unable to make decisions about most anything. I then lost my ability to concentrate—not an insignificant problem as I was just beginning a new job. I was overwhelmed with a general anxiety that came into focus as a feeling that I was spinning downward, toward a life that had no meaning and would end in complete aloneness. None of this made any sense nor could it be justified rationally—it was craziness, pure and simple—but it felt real enough to put me in the hospital with my first episode of atrial fibrillation. That stay lasted seven days at Hahnemann Hospital in center city Philadelphia. The doctors shocked my heart back into a regular rhythm with two paddles while I was under general anesthesia. I left the hospital with singed chest hairs and a three-month supply of blood thinner.
I relate all of this because it explains how little help I was to Paul through the crisis of our mother’s decline. The good son had collapsed in a divorce. Paul had stepped forward and took on all of the responsibilities of being a good son. He had become the reliable one—the one to call when there was a problem.
The demands that our mother’s health put on Paul multiplied over the next few years. He drove her to doctors’ appointments two or three times a week, picked up her prescriptions and organized her medicines in a plastic box with day-by-day compartments. He checked on her daily to make sure she was taking the medicines. Often she did not. As he was attending to her needs, he was working at his job and helping his new wife in her restaurant. Through this whirlwind, he also regularly brought his children to our mother’s tiny apartment for visits in the senior housing complex, and he dealt with her growing number of complaints. She was getting more cantankerous as she aged. The two of them bickered and argued—just as they had in the old days, except now it was over her health and unwillingness to follow the doctor’s instructions or the rules of her new home. She was as fierce as ever, and Paul could be his rough self too. Sometimes they wouldn’t speak to each other for a few days, but they always eventually resumed where they had left off—Paul insisting that she obey the doctor’s prohibition against eating candy, or she telling Paul not to order her around.
As for me, I called her nearly every day from Philadelphia to check in, and she talked about the children, events at her church, a recipe