A sort of homecoming

One year ago today, my mom came home for the last time.

It seemed like she had been away forever. Her leg broke on December 27. Her artificial knee joint was replaced and her leg was repaired within a week, and then she began the long and difficult process of learning to walk again. She was 89. Ten years earlier, even five years earlier, it would have been a different story. But at her age it took much longer to get her to a point where she was judged to be ready to return home.

She was not ready.

We took her out of the rehab center that day. My brother brought her home in his car, while I stopped at the drugstore to have her prescriptions filled. We trundled her into the house, along with all of her luggage and supplies. She was happy to be home, in familiar surroundings. To recline on her own couch, watch her own TV, use her own bathroom. Use her own phone to call her friends whenever she liked. Be with her beloved cats again.

I presented her with a Welcome Home cake. It was a replacement of sorts for the birthday cake we had never had for me.

Home health care wanted to come the very next day, but we felt it was too soon. We hadn't even had a chance to unpack. But their schedules were packed. If they couldn't come that day, it would be several more days before they could fit her in. Close to a week. We rescheduled for them to come back then.

We tried to settle into a routine. Meals, medicine, exercise. The cats were uncertain of her presence at first, but eventually welcomed her back.

There were problems from the start. Each morning she woke up, got herself out of bed, used her walker to walk down the hall to the bathroom. Used the bathroom, used the walker to head back to the kitchen for breakfast. Took a nap. Woke up a few hours later and was unable to walk.

We tried. God, how we tried. It was a struggle. Had she come home too soon? Why could she walk fine in the morning, but found it nearly impossible as the day wore on?

We worked on it, harder and harder. Each day she seemed to get stronger. Each day she could walk a little better.

Until February 8th, the day she fell. 

Me at 56

 Another year under my belt. And a hell of a year it's been.

A year ago my mom was finishing up her physical rehab following her leg repair and knee joint replacement. My birthday was on a Sunday, so she didn't have any therapy that day. We would have passed the day quietly with an unrushed hours-long visit and some quiet birthday wishes. At that point we must have known her time at rehab was coming to an end, that she would be returning home at the end of the week. That week we would receive training for dealing with her at home.

It didn't work out.

We're carrying on, as best we can. No cake today, but I made myself cookies on Saturday. I got pizza yesterday to have yesterday and today and maybe tomorrow. I went to the cemetery yesterday to change the vigil light candle, the first time in weeks. It was raining and cold and it was difficult to light the candle, but eventually I did.

I'll get a cake sometime. Last year we had one on February 3, the day she came home. Maybe I'll do it then.

I watched football yesterday, the Kansas City - Baltimore game. Parts of it, anyway. I saw Ravens QB Lamar Jackson throw a pass to himself. Got a glimpse of Taylor Swift sitting quietly in her box. My mom loved football - one of the last things she ever did was watch last year's Super Bowl. I imagine this year she would be enjoying the heck out of the Travis Kelce - Taylor Swift storyline, would have me bringing her up to speed on who Taylor Swift is, would be saying to me every time his last name was mentioned "Wasn't Kelsey the name of that girl you were seeing?"

I miss her. I have missed her every day since she's been gone, every day since the ambulance took her away December 27, 2022.

While trying to get my timelines straight, I reviewed my blog posts from my mom's time in the hospital, and the rehab, and the hospice. I am so glad I wrote down the list of Eleanorisms back then.

I went to the doctor on January 2 this year, the first time I've been since my femur developed a hairline fracture in late 2019, a fracture that only resolved itself after the world shut down in early 2020, allowing me to stay off the leg for a few weeks. This time we're dealing with some specific problems involving the other leg, which are coming along nicely. He also had me get a full fasting blood test, with the results coming back perfect as usual. Maybe this will be the year I get my life completely on track.

BONUS: Compare these photos, taken today and twenty years ago:

Another year ending

I spent the last day of 2022 in the hospital visiting my mom. She had just had the surgery to repair her leg, which included replacing her artificial knee joint, and would now begin the long, slow, arduous process of healing, recovery, and learning to walk again.

I stayed with her as late as I could, but eventually the hospital wanted all visitors to clear out. I made my goodbyes, wished her a happy New Year, kissed her, and told her I loved her, as I did every time we parted. I rode the elevator down with a collection of strangers, all at the hospital on New Year's Eve for their own reasons. Not all were headed for the ground floor. But as the elevator stopped at each floor, we all heartily wished any departing passengers a happy New Year.

My mom would be gone in less than two months, but we had no way of knowing then. 

She hasn't been gone a full year. She came back home February 3, but was whisked back to the hospital on February 8. It was during that ambulance ride with a fully unmasked crew that I believe she contracted COVID-19. She tested positive on February 13, and had a massive stroke the next morning, the morning of Valentine's Day. She went into hospice the evening of February 16, passed away on February 24, and was not buried until March 1.

The cats have all attached themselves to me. Amber, who would never let me touch her previously, constantly wants to be with me. Spooky, her littermate, is by my side whenever Amber is not, and has decided to be my bedtime enforcer, letting me know when my time on the Internet is over, sitting by my face as I fall asleep, and checking on me when he judges that it's time to wake up.

Tomorrow marks the 14th anniversary of me grabbing Spooky from where he was sleeping on our back porch. He and Amber were born sometime in early or mid 2009. Peaches was not related to them, at least not through the mother, but was born about the same time. She passed away in October 2023. Both Amber and Spooky are showing signs of age, but I will continue to let them be cats as long as possible.

Mama Cat has also attached herself to me. She always wanted to spend time with my mother - mama-to-mama, I always said. But now that time is spent with me, and her surprise jumps cause me to wince with pain much as they did my mother.

Bojangles has always been my little buddy cat, even as he has grown to enormous size. He continues to be the Diplocat, having friendly relations with every cat in the house (though sometimes he will have epic battles with his mother.) He is especially friendly with Amber - jealousy of this closeness may explain why Mama Cat is especially hostile to her -, and Amber will sometimes beg me for treats only to then run away until Bojangles comes to eat them. (He usually leaves a few for Amber.) 

Spumoni continues to be a schnook, wanting only to be with her mother Mama Cat.

Nobody can say what 2024 holds. I can only hope that deaths and disasters are kept to a minimum.

Best wishes on this, the last day of 2023.

One year since The Fall

It all started a year ago today.

My sister and my mother had made plans to meet with one of my mother's friends for dinner at Red Lobster. It would be my first day back at work after Christmas - Christmas Day had fallen on a Sunday, so we had had our holiday on Monday the 26th. I was just settling in to get my work day started as they left the house close to 4:00 PM.

Before I could even get set up, I could hear my sister calling me from outside. She was standing over my mom, who was sitting on the sidewalk, her leg tucked under her in a way that seemed unnatural. My sister was already calling an ambulance. They had been walking down the steps, my sister first, followed by my mom, when my mom announced that something felt wrong, that she felt like she was about to fall. And she did just that. My sister kept her from hurting herself as she fell, but still my mother had wound up on the ground and was sitting on the sidewalk. I quickly grabbed a blanket to keep her warm while she waited for the ambulance.

(The fall, we would soon learn, happened because her femur had snapped above the point of attachment of her artificial knee. The artificial knee was strong and did its job perfectly, but all the while it had been transferring stress to the bone around it.)

There was something about my mom's position on the ground, the way her head hung low, looking more dejected than injured, that told me she realized everything that was about to happen.

For three years I had kept my mom safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. I did this by keeping her isolated, and by strictly limiting my own contact with the outside world. She left the house only for doctor's appointments - she typically had one to three appointments each week - and only then while wearing an N-95 or KN-95 mask. I left the house for work (one day a week in the office), grocery shopping, other occasional shopping trips, and to take her to her appointments - always in an N-95 respirator. It was a hell of a way to live, but infinitely preferable to the slow, lingering death promised by a COVID-19 infection for an 89-year-old cancer survivor. (She was only going out to dinner over my strenuous objections.)

And now that protection was gone. Soon she would be transported by an ambulance crew to an emergency room, and then would likely be admitted into the hospital. Each of these steps would involve environments where exposure to COVID-19 would be almost unavoidable.

We managed to thread that needle. Throughout her stay in the hospital, her time at the physical rehab center, she managed to come out without COVID-19. It was only on a return trip to the hospital in early February that she contracted the COVID-19 that would create the blood clots that would give her a massive stroke the morning of Valentine's Day that would result in her death on February 24, 2023.

Goodbye, SuperTiff

One of my first blogger friends has died.

Tiffany's first blog that I knew of, If I Were Queen of the World, was hacked long ago and is gone. Her self-owned blog, supertiff.com, is also gone. Another one exists, with posts from 2004-2007 and then again from 2013. It also bears the SuperTiff name.

Tiffany was fun and funny and full of life. That life was not without problems, problems that she was very open about. When she was going into rehab in 2011 or so (it actually was 2009, just two years after I met her online) - which she described as an adventure, for which she would be packing her adventure hat - she sent me an address where I could write her. And write her I did, once a day, every day, in a different format each time. One was a traditional letter printed out from my computer. Another was hand-written. Another, written on a napkin. Another was written on vellum. Another, a recaptioned Dinosaur Comics panel. Still another had been cut up into a puzzle.

She wrote me back once, in a letter I have treasured for over a decade.

She moved out to Pittsburgh three years ago. We joked that now that she was so close to me we would have to get together. Now that I look at the actual conversation it really wasn't a joke.

One trip to New York had her swing within twenty-five miles of my house. Alas, we never got to meet in person.

(Later in that same conversation I found this, and it broke my heart.)

I don't know how she died. I just know that she died the evening of Tuesday, December 19. She had been posting to Facebook shortly before she died. I found out about her death when one of her friends posted to her Facebook page referring to her in the past tense.

SuperTiff is gone, and this world is a less wonderful place without her.

First snow, December 7, 2023

 

My mom loved the passing seasons. She would get excited about the first snow. She loved to see the colorful Autumn leaves. She adored the blossoming of the trees in Spring. And year after year she noted how much bigger the trees of "Penn's Woods" grew in Summer, a phenomenon we chalked up to the warmer, more humid Summers.

I've become something of a recluse since her death. I rarely leave the house except for my one day each week in the office and to go grocery shopping. And for weekly trips to the cemetery, lately to change out the vigil light candle. Used to be I would be taking her out to weekly appointments, sometimes two or three times a week. Those were my outings, my times out of the house to see the changing landscape. Sometimes the appointments were downtown. Sometimes they were a few miles away in Wilkes-Barre. Sometimes I would take the scenic route home, taking her to visit the cemetery or for a ramble through the wooded areas of the Back Mountain. I did that last October after a blood appointment downtown; rather than driving straight home, I took her home by way of Hillside Farms in Shavertown so we could see the brilliantly-colored trees. Neither one of us suspected that in less than five months she would be dead and buried.

This morning she would have run to the windows to see the falling snow, as enthusiastic as she would have been at the sound of passing fire trucks. She would have marveled at the snow-covered landscape. She would have called friends and family to see if they, too, had gotten a measurable snowfall.

Me? I looked out the window and commented to the cats that it had snowed. I stepped out on the front porch to take the picture above and saw that the steps needed cleaning. I didn't have a broom handy, so I half-assed it with a shovel. Temperatures are supposed to be well above freezing for the next two days, so I expect any lingering snow will melt soon.

I'll head out to the cemetery again this weekend.

ADDENDUM:

Today is Pearl Harbor Day, the eighty-second anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. My mom was eight when it happened. Today I wondered: what was that day like for her? Was it a snowy day, like today, maybe the first snow of 1941 in Nanticoke? Where was she when she heard the news? How did my grandparents and their children respond? In all these years we had talked about her experiences during World War II, the terror of air raid drills and evacuating the school to shelter in the basement of the convent next door. But we never spoke about her experiences during December 7, 1941. And now, the first time it occurs to me to ask her about it, I cannot.

The unofficial start of Christmas

 

The day after Thanksgiving marks the unofficial start of the Christmas season in the United States.

Technically, it's not even Advent yet, the season of preparation for Christmas. That doesn't begin until Sunday, December 3 and runs through Sunday, December 24. Christmas is December 24, and the Christmas season runs through January 6 (Epiphany), January 7 (Orthodox Christmas), January 8 (Feast of the Baptism of Jesus, who was baptized by his cousin John at the age of 30), or February 2 (Candlemas/Feast of the Presentation).

My mom's leg broke December 27, 2022, resulting in a series of hospitalizations and sessions of physical rehabilitation. She came home February 3, 2023, but had a fall February 8 and was taken back to the hospital by an unmasked ambulance crew. She tested positive for COVID on February 13. The next morning she had a massive COVID-induced stroke. She went into hospice the evening of February 16 and would die on Friday, February 24.

I had planned to turn all the lights on for her February 8 when I took my lunch break. She had her fall five minutes before that happened.

I never took the tree down. So now I've just plugged it back in.

Keeping the Vigil

I knew we had a vigil light in the garage somewhere. This isn't the one I was looking for. There's an old metal-and-glass version somewhere, I think, that we probably last used twenty or so years ago. This one is all plastic and seems to have never been used. Fortunately, I also found a candle for it, though finding the wick was a bit of a trick - I had to dig down through an inch of wax to locate it. I set the vigil light up shortly before sunset on Sunday afternoon and took this picture. As far as I can tell, this is the only one in the cemetery. When I was a kid, the cemeteries around this time would be flickering with dozens of vigil lights. Times have changed, traditions have been forgotten. Now I just have to locate a source for replacement candles - each one is made to last about a week, and I'd like to keep this going through all of November at least.

(The small handbell on the tombstone was placed by my brother. It is something that he received for participating in the Remembrance Walk sponsored by the Hospice of the Sacred Heart, the hospice where our mom spent her final days.)

Peaches, July 2009 - October 9, 2023

Peaches died in my arms shortly after midnight in the early morning hours of Monday, October 9, 2023.

Peaches was born during the kitten season of summer 2009, when so many kittens were born, and so many died. Her mother was a tortoiseshell we called Tortoise, and I have always counted Peaches as a pale Tortoiseshell, though others call her a Calico. She had a littermate we posthumously named Cream, a white kitten even more sickly than Peaches who died in the neighbor's garden after just a few weeks. Peaches lived in our yard for a few weeks, watching me from what she must have thought was a position of concealment, hissing at me if I looked her way or acknowledged her existence. After a while my mom decided the kitten needed to come inside, and she managed to catch her barehanded.

After she got a clean bill of health from the vet - or maybe before - we set ourselves to the task of naming her. My mom wanted to call her "Cloud." The neighbor lady suggested "Precious Face." We agreed to my suggestion, "Peaches," because she had the color scheme of a somewhat overripe peach.

She was mostly a quiet cat and kept to herself, at least at first. Eventually she buddied up with BlueBear, but after he died in 2017 at age eight, she was terribly lost for a while. In the last few years she had attached herself to my mom as her "special cat," competing with Babusz and Amber. Peaches was a plump cat with her fur stretched tight, making it difficult to pick her up by the scruff of the neck.

After my mom died Peaches attached herself to me, sitting at my side as I worked, and sometimes sitting on my hand as I tried using the mouse. I didn't mind. I knew she was going through a lot - we all were. She kept this up for a few months until one day she stopped. She suddenly wasn't there. Instead she had moved onto the kitchen table - sometimes sitting on any open surface, sometimes sitting on top of old stacks of mail. Sometimes she would sit and stare at the wall a few inches away. Sometimes she would stare at the wall and yowl.

She kept this up for several weeks until suddenly she wasn't there anymore. I did a quick search and found her in front of the oven on the other side of the kitchen. She mostly just lounged there, sometimes staring into the reflective surface of the black oven door. But sometimes she would let out yowls, something she had never done before she had moved onto the kitchen table. And sometimes she would let out another cry, a screaming, squalling cry like the sort a baby would make upon waking up hungry, frightened, and alone. If I were in the next room I would call to her and offer her assurances that the was not alone, that I was right here. That I loved her, and her mommy loved her, and everybody loved her. That was often enough to calm her.

Until one day in August she wasn't there, either. Where could she be? I searched the house twice and couldn't find her. Then I thought to look in the bathtub, and there she was. The weather had shot into the 90s and the air conditioning was struggling to keep the house in the low 80s, so the bathtub was the coolest spot around. That became her new place of refuge. I would pick her up and take her to the kitchen every few hours for meals - she had lost weight, and it was now becoming easier to carry her by her scruff.

In the morning, leery of startling her, I would sing songs to her as I approached, often made up on the spot - songs like "Peaches, Peaches, You're So Sweet" to the tune of "Biggie, Biggie, Can't You See," and "Little Peaches" to the cadence of the traditional "Hari Krishna" chant. And of course "Peaches" by the Presidents of the United States of America.

Her crying continued, irregularly, and when I would rush to see what was the matter I would often find her sitting on the tile floor, waiting for me to come get her.

This continued until about two weeks ago. Then, suddenly, something came over her. She would no longer wait for me to come and get her for her feedings - she jumped out of the bathtub on her own, came out to the kitchen on her own, and jumped onto the kitchen chairs to get onto the kitchen table and her food bowl. Her appetite got stronger, so I had to open extra cans of food just for her. (She no longer wanted the kitten food that she had been eating for weeks, now she wanted the same food everyone else was eating.) She seemed to be gaining weight again.

That stopped a few days ago. She became less energetic, less willing to come out on her own. She eschewed the bathtub for other resting spots in the bathroom.

Saturday she became very picky about her food. Uninterested in anything as I opened can after can for her. For the first time since my mom went into the hospital, I found myself throwing away food.

Saturday I spent much of the day holding her while she dozed. Sunday more so. At first she would sleep only a few minutes, then awake with a start and decide she wanted to be somewhere else. On Sunday, early on, I decided that the somewhere else should be at the food and water bowls. It worked the first few times; she ate and drank with gusto. But as the day turned into night, she lacked the energy to even try to eat and drink.

As midnight approached, I knew the time was drawing near. I took her back into the parlor, sat in my chair, wrapped her in a blanket, held her in my arms, and covered her with another blanket. I sang her songs. I told her her mommy was waiting for her, how lucky she was that she would be the first of us to join her. I petted her, stroked her peach-colored fur, kissed her on the head. Bojangles came to join us for a few minutes.

After a while I knew she was gone. I kept petting her, kept singing to her. I checked the time - it was just after midnight. I sat holding her for the next hour to be sure. then I laid her out in a box and covered her with a blanket.

She was still dead in the morning.

This afternoon I took her to be cremated.

Amber in close-up

As I mentioned in my previous post, I recently downloaded a magnifier app for my phone. I can save images from it, making it a good camera app for macro images. Today Amber jumped up on me for the umpteenth time. While my mom was alive Amber wanted absolutely nothing to do with me, but in the subsequent months she has completely attached herself to me. Like Peaches, like her littermate Spooky, Amber is fourteen years old, and I know she won't be around forever. I wanted to get a zoom of her amber hair, but she kept moving around, blurring the image. I did have a little more luck getting portrait shots of her, though.

All the things she doesn't need anymore

Newspaper text imaged with phone magnifier app

When I worked in the entertainment manufacturing business, it seemed I was constantly noticing news about music, movies, manufacturing, and the latest developments in ways of getting music and movies to consumers. When I was in the travel business every other commercial seemed to be for a travel website, every news report about this major weather event or that failure of an airline's computer system. When I moved on to work at a cable/telephone/internet provider, every commercial seemed to be trying to get me to switch to another provider. In my current job, almost every commercial and news story seems to be directly related to what I'm doing.

My mom had many physical issues in her final years. She hadn't driven in nearly ten years, since an accident that landed her in the hospital overnight and did minor damage sufficient to total her previous car. (Except one time she apparently snuck out of the house and used the car she had bought as a replacement without anyone knowing. I noticed it later when I found that the seat and steering wheel had been adjusted for someone much smaller than me, her assigned chauffeur.) She was losing dexterity and strength in her hands; she couldn't hold things without dropping them, had difficulty writing, and couldn't raise her hands above her shoulders. Her chronic joint pain caused her to slather her knees with pain-killing ointments. The posts on the caps on her teeth lost purchase in her jawbone, requiring removal of all of her upper teeth and replacement with an upper denture plate. Her blood chemistry was problematic, requiring regular blood tests and frequent tweaks to her medications. Her breast cancer, once dealt with, never returned; her heart valve replacement served her well; her knee joint replacements were problem-free, until the day her one leg snapped just above the knee joint.  

After my mom died, every commercial seemed to be for something targeted towards her. Some were things she already had, or was already using. Others were for things she could have used, things that would have made her life better. Things she doesn't need anymore.

She was losing her eyesight thanks to macular degeneration, a condition we dealt with through frequent trips to a specialist for treatments and the purchase of a great many magnifiers of all sorts. She loved to read the obituary pages every day, and regularly read Reader's Digest and the weekly checkout magazine Women's World. For the last few years I had subscribed her to the large print edition of Reader's Digest, but there was no such option for the daily newspaper of Women's World. Most magnifiers top out at 1.5x, a rare few at 3x. We experimented with many different styles and types of magnifiers, and had settled on a lighted rectangular 3x magnifier for the kitchen table, and a slightly less powerful handheld magnifying glass for the bathroom. Even with these, she still had difficulty reading.

Today during a meeting it occurred to me that I would like to get a USB-connected microscope for my Chromebook. No special reason, I would just like to get one to look at stuff. Later, while doing a search (on my break), I came across mentions of a magnifier app for your phone. I had considered full-page magnifiers for the newspaper for my mom, or something that could connect to a Chromebook. My mom was never interested in computers, which is why we never considered simply having her read the online edition of the newspaper with the text set to Large. Nor did she care much about the smartphone she had to trade up to when her old flip phone became obsolete and unsupported. (Her lack of finger dexterity made the new phone virtually unusable.) So I never even thought about the possibility of using the camera on her phone to magnify the text in the newspaper.

Seven and a half months after her stroke, I can report that the magnifier app would have worked just fine to address her reading issues.

Carved in stone

 

A lifetime summarized in a dash. My mom lived to be nearly 89 years and 6 months old. It took more than six months to get this engraving done. (The engraver was delayed initially due to a hip replacement, and then...he forgot.)

Another dream of my mom

This past Friday would have been my mom's 90th birthday. She had really been looking forward to it. She fell short by six months and a few days.

I had another dream with my mom in it. I wanted to capture if before it fades.

I was in graduate school. Graduate school for me was a truly miserable experience - I have described it as feeling like being mugged while drowning. This version was not much better. I was doing horribly, and so was everyone else around me.

On a whim, inadvisably, I chose to take a weekend off. I spent it with some friends in the Poconos, doing the things we did back then: drinking, hanging out, watching movies, screwing around. Outside of the dream, it was fun remembering those carefree days.

But then it was back to work - or in this case, school. The professor declared that we had all been doing terribly on tests and he wanted to get to the root of the problem. So he gave us another test, but this time he wanted us to write out our reasoning for each answer.

This was graduate school for physics, but the test focused exclusively on advanced mathematics. For every question I was completely stumped: not only did I not see a path to a solution, but I didn't even understand what question was being asked. I scrawled that on the test, noting that I was a physics major, not a mathematics major. I tossed the test aside and felt like a miserable failure.

I heard a ruckus outside. My mother was there, confronting a school administrator. She was young, not much older than I am now, about the age she was when I was in graduate school. She was smartly dressed all in gray, with a gray scarf and gray topcoat. She looked like she had just left work and driven straight to where I was going to grad school - in real life, a nearly three hour drive.

I left the room to speak to her, and she immediately began berating me: Why hadn't I called? Why had I just vanished this past weekend? Why didn't I let her know what was going on?

This made me furious. How dare she embarrass me like this! Why wouldn't she just let me be my own person? I would call her when I damned well felt like it! 

I stormed off back to the classroom, telling her not to call and not to come and visit unannounced. I would call her at some point, maybe.

And that's where the dream ended.

My mom visiting me in Delaware in 1990, after I had dropped out of grad school.
She had come to pick up Josie, a cat who was being given up by her
owners because they had to move and couldn't take her.
She was 56 or 57 in this photo. I'm currently 55.

Poem: On the Habits of Cats

On the Habits of Cats 

Cats are creatures of habit

what they do today, they probably did yesterday

and will almost certainly do again tomorrow

Peaches is doing different things

My mom caught her fourteen years ago, barehanded

she had lurked in our yard for weeks

hiding in the garden, watching me mow the lawn

hissing at me if I looked at her

Her mother was a feral tortoiseshell we called Tortoise

she had a single littermate, a white kitten we called Cream

Cream died after a few weeks

and then their mom vanished

and we knew we had to take in the little peach-colored kitten

My mom died six months ago

all the cats took it hard

Amber, the amber-colored tabby, sulked for weeks and then attached herself to me

Peaches did, too, sitting at my side at all times

sitting on my hand as I tried to use my mouse

until one day she wasn't there

She had moved onto the kitchen table, curled up on an empty spot

or perched atop a stack of mail and documents

that my mother had set aside as important

napping throughout the day, or sometimes

staring at the ceiling, or the wall

until one day she stopped

Now her spot was on the floor

curled up in front of the oven

sometimes staring at its reflective surface

often napping

and waking up crying like a frightened baby

like she didn't know where she was

or where anyone else was

maybe crying for her Mommy

until my voice assured her that I was there, we were all there

that I loved her, that we loved her

that her Mommy loved her and would love her forever

Yesterday she wasn't on the floor in front of the oven

she wasn't on the table, in either of the boxes I had set up as beds

I searched the house for signs of her

for a glimpse of her eye, a spot of her peach-colored fur

twice I searched the house

and finally thought to look in the bathtub

there she was, sitting, contemplating

whatever it is she contemplates all day

she did not object to me bringing her out to eat

but each time she returned to her bathtub

I gave her a bowl of water

and the bowl of lasagna sauce she loves to lap up

last night she fell asleep in front of the stove after her late-night meal

but this morning she was back in the bathtub

I do not know how long this will last

or what will come next

When she dies I will pluck some of her hairs

and have her cremated

and take half of the ashes and work them into the soil of her mother's grave

the rest I will keep for myself

but for now she is in the bathtub

and it's almost time for lunch

New Chromebook, August 27, 2023

I never made a record of when I got my first Chromebook. It was sometime in 2012 or 2013, I believe. It served me well for several years, but then began to experience multiple breakdowns, and I eventually bit the bullet and bought another one. The new one was also an entry-level device, also with a 10.5 inch screen, also priced under $120. It also lasted only a few years before it, too, broke down. (I believe, more specifically, it shorted out; perhaps the cool patterned-aluminum case was not the best idea.) It was followed by a third, and a fourth, with each gradually breaking down before a complete failure, giving me an opportunity to back up many of the photos and files stored locally. 

The most recent failure signaled its arrival for several months, first as a physical failure (the hinges crumbled and broke, first the left, then the right), then as a failure of the right-hand charging port and the charger itself (a replacement charger also failed after a while) and then increasing difficulty convincing the Chromebook to turn on. Finally yesterday, it shut itself off at one point and refused to turn back on, regardless of how much coaxing I did. I tried recharging it through its working charge port, and it took a charge but still refused to turn on.

I could probably get this most recent Chromebook repaired, but at what cost? Is it worth it for the handful of unbacked-up photos, files, and scans, most of which came from other devices or were subsequently preserved in emails? Last night I decided it would be better to buy a new Chromebook. None were available for the prices I had paid before (my last one was purchased new on sale for the deeply discounted price of $70), but I found a model that represented a significant upgrade - and could be delivered the next day. I ordered it, it arrived, I fired it up and here we are.

This time, though, I splurged on the two year extended warranty.

A Dream of my Mom

It's been about five and a half months since my mom died, and I finally had my first dream about her. I want to write it down before it fades.

In the dream my mom had suffered brain trauma similar to the stroke that ultimately killed her in real life. But in the dream she had not died, but had recovered, in what could best be described as a lobotomized state. She was awake and ambulatory and aware of her surroundings, but could not communicate or be communicated with. If you spoke to her she might appear to be listening, or might just as often completely ignore you. She was living in a nursing home with a companion nurse who watched her and exercised her and generally took care of her needs. One of her greatest needs was a photo ID; she had lost all of hers and the only thing that came close to serving was a photo ad for the nursing home that featured her prominently.

One theme in this dream was me needing to get ready for work as time ticked away. I kept seeing a clock, with its hands showing later and later times each time I looked at it.

Another theme was me trying to get the latest COVID-19 booster. It turned out I wasn't eligible because it is only being made available to people over a certain age (which is also true in real life.)

At the end of the dream I heard my mother's voice. She said "Get up, it's nearly 10:15." I got up and checked the time. It was nowhere near 10:15.

I had sleep apnea three times last night. Bad sleep apnea, the type I used to get where I realize my airways have blocked, and if I can't unblock them I will die. I shoot upright in bed and force my airways open. It has worked every time, so far. I think I know what brought it on, and will try to avoid it in the future.

Fireflies

A memory I want to preserve before it fades.

The Word to Word poetry reading on Friday, July 14 went off very well.The structure of the reading is unusual: three poets blindly send four pieces of poetry each to each other, and then endeavor to order them in a way that makes sense. The idea is that the poets will be "in conversation" with each other through their poetry. The problem was that we are three very different poets, and our poems touched upon very different topics. After weeks of pondering this, I noticed that many of the poems mentioned or could be placed in a time of day: the hours before sunrise, midday, the afternoon, dusk. That suggested an order that gave a nice flow to the poems, and gave the final poems a synergistic punch. The four that I chose were "Night, April 21, 2020" (set at 4:00 in the morning), "dancer" (which can be found here), "Ora Pro Nobis," and "Cardinal."

When the reading was over I made my way back to the car. I had had nothing to eat but a large stack of French Toast at midday, and now, nearing on 8:30 PM, I was hungry. I stopped at Burger King, the Burger King where my mom and I would sometimes stop to grab a quick lunch after one of her appointments. I got my usual two Whopper Juniors (two for $5) and splurged on some fries. I noticed a skinny gray-and-white cat in the parking lot, picking at a scrap of food. I tore off a chunk of one Whopper Junior and psspss'd to the cat. It watched me with curiosity until I tossed the meat in its general direction, at which point it retreated to the forested area behind the Burger King. Maybe it came back out to grab it before anything else did. Maybe.

I stopped at a supermarket on the way home, fifteen minutes before it closed. (The supermarket and its parking lot were a setting for a previous story involving a cat.) I dashed in to buy a horrible list of groceries: one small package of half pork-half beef to make meatballs (I was really looking for ground beef, but they were all out), two bags of potato chips (Middleswarth Weekenders, once 14 oz., now just 9 oz.), one container of ice cream (once a standard half gallon size, then 1.5 quarts, now 1.44 quarts.) I made it to the self-checkouts just as the store closed.

I came home and packed up the remains of my late supper  and my groceries, locked the car, and proceeded up the hill to my back door. 

As I climbed the hill I was greeted with a light show: dozens of fireflies, some airborne, some on the ground, all flashing their HEY BABY WANNA HAVE SEX? lights at each other. I chose my steps carefully, not wanting to tread upon any of the luciferous insects. I wished them well in their reproductive endeavors as I walked up the hill. May they be fruitful and multiply. 

Lord knows we need more of their kind to light up our summer nights.

The final breath

My sister and I were there when our mom died.

Her breathing had been getting shallower for days, but for the final hours it seemed merely a mechanical action, punctuated by a -click- at the end of each cycle. My sister was on one side of her, holding her hand. I was on the other side, typing on my Chromebook, trying to capture everything she had been in a few inadequate notes. 

Her breaths got shorter and shorter. Finally there was one last breath, and nothing followed. My sister spoke my name. I checked the time, made note of it. We waited a bit, then called the nurse. We had already called my brother some time earlier, to let him know this was it. 

We left the nurse with her briefly to do the things she needed to do. I posted the announcement of her death. When we returned to the room we saw the nurse had done the traditional thing we had only recently learned: she had opened the window and placed a candle - a small electric candle - in the window. My brother arrived shortly afterwards. He would wait with her for the funeral home to send someone to take away my mother's body. My sister and I quickly stripped the room of my mom's personal possessions, the artificial flower arrangements, the favorite blanket that had kept her warm these past eleven days and would now serve as a comfort to her beloved cats. 

We left my mother with my brother and headed home.

https://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2023/02/eleanor-jenkins-1933-2023.html

Memento mori

This started out life as a poem. That's not where it ended up.

Remember man, thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.

I tried to tell the priest who she was. To encapsulate her life in a brief conversation held two days before her funeral. He had never met her. He had never met me. He was four years younger than me. He took over the parish in the second year of the pandemic. By then we were well into the groove of watching the weekly Mass online, on the tiny screen of my Chromebook. He put an end to that a few months later. Pandemic over, no reason to stay at home, no reason to stream the service for those few holdouts who would rather hide at home.

She had already been cut off from her beloved church, the church she had grown up in, the church where she had been married, the church where she wanted to have her funeral, even if it were the last service ever held there. But it was not to be. The diocese closed the church at the start of the pandemic, as they did all churches, and then the parish - the combined parish - chose not to reopen it, even as other churches were being reopened. Their argument was that since it had been closed from the beginning of the pandemic, it clearly didn't need to reopen. The reasoning was bald-faced nonsense. But the decision held. In a few months the old parish priest, the priest my mother had gotten to know over the previous two decades, was forced into retirement despite previous assurances that he would be allowed to stay on beyond the normal mandated retirement age. My mother's only connection to the parish was now the online service which she attended faithfully until, without warning, the streaming ended.

We had asked that the old priest be allowed to conduct her funeral service. Nothing doing: the new priest was in charge of the parish, and he ran the show, and he would conduct the service.

So I tried to bring him up to speed, to let him know who she was. I told him her life story, her involvement with and love for the church, her work history, the story of our family, the story of her final months and final days and death. How do you sum all this up in a half-hour, an hour, a day? How do you encapsulate a life of nearly eighty-nine and a half years in any less time? But I tried. I'm something of a writer, and a poet. I tried.

I failed. The priest took one small aspect of what I told him - she had worked as a bank teller from about 1978 to 1998 - and built his entire eulogy around that, around what he imagined a bank teller did. The old priest, allowed to quietly concelebrate the Mass, sat mute.

A priest had come to her room in the hospice on Ash Wednesday to offer her ashes. He gave us ashes as well, making the sign of the cross on our foreheads with his thumb. He tried to make conversation, but it was awkward, almost confrontational. We thanked him. She died two days later.

We went to the cemetery. I rode in the limo at the head of the procession. I did not know that the new priest had high-tailed it to the cemetery and left the old priest behind. My cousin saw him standing, looking forlorn, and gave him a ride.

At the chapel the new priest completed the final prayers, said a few more words, and declared things to be at an end. The old priest rose and said he wanted to say a few words. He told us about how my mom was familiar with the neighborhood he had grown up in, and the favorite candy store of his childhood, and how since he had become the parish priest she had always given him gifts of chocolate-covered peanut butter candies from local candy shops at Christmas, and Easter, and his birthday, and whenever else she felt like it. His personal recollection brought me to tears, and broke the spell of gloom. 

Our gravesite was just a dozen steps from the chapel, and I invited everyone to come join us there to watch the workmen lower her into the grave. I told my friends the story of how, when I was an altar boy serving at dozens of graveside services, my greatest fear was that I would slip on the wet grass around the hole and fall into it. My brother had randomly found a Hershey's Kiss on the floor in the pew where we were seated at church. He tossed it into the grave with her. They lowered her in, and now the ceremony was truly at an end.

My mom was born September 8, 1933. She lived a full life. The last three years of her life I had kept her a virtual prisoner, protecting her from COVID-19 and anyone who might have it. But I didn't think to protect her from the ambulance crew that took her to the hospital after a fall on February 8, 2023, just a few days after she had come home. She tested positive for COVID-19 on February 13, 2023, had a COVID-induced stroke the next morning, the morning of Valentine's Day, and died eleven days later, on February 24, 2023. Her wake was held the evening of March 1, 2023, and she was buried March 2, 2023.

Remember man, thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.

Two dreams, and a reading

I haven't had dreams that I've remembered in quite a long time. Now I had them two nights in a row. I want to record them before they evaporate.

The first dream was from Friday morning. (I don't go to bed until after midnight.) I was back in college, and had just taken a particularly brutal final in some unspecified Physics/Electronics Engineering class. (I have "back in school" dreams a lot, but these are usually the common "I started this class, forgot to go all semester, and now have to take the final/can't find the room for the final" trope.) In this dream we had already taken the final - we being me and two of my best friends from college, friends I have stayed close to for the decades since we graduated, friends I have grown closer to because of different tragedies in our lives (death, divorce, and life-threatening cancer "with a very good five-year survival rate.") We all knew we had bombed to the final exam, and we went to check the bulletin board where our grades were posted (a physical bulletin board, as was the standard in the 1980s) and confirmed it - none of us had gotten a grade higher than 45%. We commiserated in our failure, and sometime later checked to see our grades for the semester, and saw that thanks to grading on a curve our final grades had hardly been affected, and were all pretty good - 89, 92, and 94, enough for B+ and A- for the semester.

This morning's dream was quite different. I was at my house across town, and discovered two benign creatures sheltering there - a small skunk and a small red lizard that looked like a little tiny dragon about four inches long with huge eyes and purple wings. The skunk had the friendly, pleading face that skunks have, while the miniature dragon had a more fearsome appearance, but mainly wanted to cling to the skunk or climb on me. I gave the skunk a bath in my kitchen sink, and only as I dried it off did I consider the possibility of being sprayed. I carried the skunk and the miniature dragon across town to my mother's house. The miniature dragon appeared to undergo some distress, climbed up on a small (about sixteen inches tall) painted figure of a man, and seemed to die. A visiting friend noted that the dragon on the figure closely resembled a dragon-wearing character from a TV show about an imaginary Victorian London where magic and magical creatures abound, and then demonstrated that the dragon was not dead but resting and possibly in a state of estivation. Meanwhile, the skunk had found a square hole cut into a wall, crawled into it, and refused to come out.

No idea what, if anything, either of these dreams signify. The more recent dream followed a very successful poetry reading event last night as part of the "Word to Word" series, where I was one of three poets who read our poems "in conversation with each other": we had each presented the other two with four poems, and then agreed upon a sequence of readings that reflected their relationship to each other. Our poems had very little connection to each other, but many of them indicated a time of day setting. I toyed with an order that started with poems about the creation of the universe and a late night/early morning stargazing session at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and ended with two close of day poems that were also meditations on death and dying. The order of the poems, and the poems themselves, went over very well, and the night left me feeling very buoyed, despite the absence of several people I wished could have been there. I am realizing now that creatures resembling miniature dragons, known as "pseudodragons," are beasts appearing in Dungeons and Dragons who often serve as wizards' familiars, enhancing the wizards' magical skills through their presence. Perhaps this was some hidden memory of pseudodragons, telling me that I am ready to enter the wizard/sage role that I have been building towards all my life?