I fall asleep when it’s dark outside the half-open blinds, when the twilight is burned by the golden street lamps. First, I search for the oversized moon, whose light beams through the slats, and then close my eyes.
When I fall asleep, my dreams are fears about my mother. I tell her that she needs to move to an assisted living facility so someone can help her shower. She says she’s fine. My brothers and sisters can take turns helping her shower, cleaning her house, and cutting the lawn. She’ll pay them $10 an hour.
In the next scene, I’m sitting at my desk, looking at the application for Sunrise Assisted Living and Memory Care. I see one of her doctor’s bills and remember that she needs a TB shot to move into assisted living. I call Mom and ask her to tell her doctor to give her the shot. “I don’t want it,” she says.
I turn over on my other side in bed, and, as I do, I feel my shoulders tense up. My jaw tightens, too, and I fall back asleep.
In the next dream, Mom is sitting in her recliner with the massage pad that she uses to alleviate the pain running down her right leg. I ask her what she wants for lunch. “I’m not hungry,” she says.
“I’m having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” I say. I toast two pieces of the whole grain bread that I have brought her, spread one piece with peanut butter and the other one with strawberry jelly.
“Cut me a quarter,” she says. I cut the sandwich into four pieces like she did for me when I got home from Kindergarten. When I was five, it took me half an hour to eat those little four pieces, and my mother prompted me over and over again until they were gone.
Mom takes the little quarter sandwich that I hand her and nibbles on it in her chair. Nibbles. By the time I have eaten my part of the sandwich, a banana, and a bottle of water, she has finished her single quarter and is licking her fingers.
I flip over onto my other side. The pillow that I have bunched up beside me on this side is a little firmer and feels better between my knees.
My mother says, “I need to take my pills.”
“You just took them ten minutes ago,” I reply, wondering what happens when I am not watching her. The pill bottles cluster like condiments in the middle of her round dining room table.
Dawn peeks through the blinds, and I think about my mother as the light grows brighter over the distant mountains. I know she’s scared to go to sleep in her empty house. She won’t use the stove because she can’t read the numbers on the dials anymore; instead, she buys packaged meals high in sodium and low in nutrients to warm up in the microwave. Or, she doesn’t eat because she says it’s not fun to eat alone.
My brother Joe cuts her lawn every week on his day off. Don blows the millions of leaves into piles and puts them into the two big garbage cans on Saturdays. Margaret sorts her pills into daily am and pm doses on Sundays after she has graded papers for her second-grade class. And somebody has to scrub the floors, clean the bathrooms, put the washed sheets back on her bed, make sure she has groceries in the house. I live two hours away.
Twenty years ago, she asked me to take over if she couldn’t make decisions. Now, she asks, “Who gave you the right to run my life?”
I swallow hard, looking around for the back door. “You did, Mom. Look, you took good care of your children for years, and now it’s my turn to take care of you.”
“I don’t want to leave my house and be cooped up in a home.”
“I get that, Mom. But, if you live at Sunrise, you can still go to church, go shopping, see your friends, do anything you want. You won’t have to cook or worry about when to take your pills. Also, three of your friends live there. You can see them every day.” How do I get my mother from living alone in her big house to feeling safe and happy at a place where someone can take care of her?
Back in bed, I swing my legs off the side, grab my robe, and scour my memory. What did my mother say to get me to eat that Kindergarten sandwich, one small quarter at a time?
I asked my 91-year-old mother if the Corona Virus Pandemic was as bad as World War II.
“It’s worse” she said. “During World War II, we could go outside. We worked. We played. We walked in the sun.”
She was in eighth grade when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and a junior in high school on May 8, 1945, the day the Axis powers surrendered.
“When we heard the war ended, everybody ran outside and celebrated. We partied all night,” she remembers. “I don’t think that’s going to happen this time.”
What I heard in my mother’s voice was hopelessness. As we talked on the phone, she sighed over and over again, anxiety filling each breath with fear.
During the last six months, I’ve been on a clear journey of trying to develop my own cultural humility so that I can become a stronger college professor and help my marginalized students better succeed. When I heard my mother’s sighs, however, I recognized that I could work on developing some cultural humility within my own family relationships.
Two and a half years ago, when my mother became unable to care for herself at home, I and my siblings helped her move into an assisted living facility. Since we have a LARGE family, all of us have contributed to visiting her regularly, taking her shopping, driving her to her doctors and dentists, paying her bills, completing her tax returns, buying her supplies, taking her shopping, and planning family holidays and birthday parties for her to attend. From the perspective of being loved, she has been the luckiest mother and grandmother in the world.
My mother, however, has macular degeneration, can’t read small type, and finds it difficult to sign her name. Instead of engaging in activities such as reading, she has created a new life for herself at her assisted-living home by socializing with other 90+-year-old women, exercising, playing BINGO with giant BINGO cards, and participating in discussions about topics found on Google. I am impressed with her ability to form relationships with new neighbors and, also, with her caregivers. She keeps track of their lives and even gives them some of her firmly-expressed advice.
“Don’t go on walks by yourself, Miriam,” I saw her tell one of her new friends. “You could fall and break your hip.”
“Did you run that marathon last weekend, Sylvia?” she asked one of the waitresses at lunch when I was eating with her one day. I didn’t even know my mother knew what a marathon was and was even more surprised that she was interested in people who ran them.
My mother never was a strong reader. At one point during her retirement, she joined a Bible group at her church. She attended two of the meetings and then gave it up. “Why’d you stop going?” I asked.
“I didn’t understand anything,” she said. “That’s why we have priests.” Instead of thinking too much about spiritual values, my mother is comfortable just following rules and using already-prepared prayers to get her into heaven.
Clearly, she is not the philosophical type, but she’s excellent at belting out orders to her children or care-givers. If she had been born later in the twentieth century, she would have made a formidable general in the military; she knows how to command and expects complete compliance.
She’s strong at math as well and likes to think about how much money she has in the bank and plays Solitaire. She also loves to pull the handles on slot machines whenever she can manage to get a ride to a casino. A numbers gal, for sure.
Which means, when the Corona Virus Pandemic forced her assisted living facility to shelter-in-place, her strengths did not prepare her for staying in her apartment all day by herself. She’s a social animal, not a solitary thinker.
She’s endured the slowly-dwindling social activities at her facility. First, visitors had to use hand sanitizer, then they were locked out. The residents played BINGO while sitting six-feet apart, then they perched in chairs at the doorway of their apartments and followed their exercise leader while using their own personally-assigned exercise props. Now, all social activities are terminated, and, if residents want to talk to each other, they have to make a phone call.
The trouble is, unless my mother has your phone number programmed into her cell phone, she can’t phone you. She can’t see well enough to punch in a new number on her phone, and her children can’t visit her in order to program new numbers for her. This means she can only call people who are already in her phone, albeit, she has nine children, numerous relatives, and several friends already ready to dial.
But as we’re all finding out, a person can only spend so much time on the phone, watching movies, or doing whatever it is he or she has found to do during this shelter-in-place.
It’s hard being old, and harder being aged when you can’t even fill your days with pleasant activities. Being cooped up in an assisted-living facility might feel like being in prison. You’re probably not planning on going on a vacation the next summer or even buying a new home. The activities that you can look forward to—going out to lunch, visiting nearby lakes and theaters, or shopping at Raley’s once a week on the facility bus—all have been cancelled until further notice.
My siblings and I are sending letters to my mother in large type (48-point font) so she gets more mail that she can actually read. A few of us have sent her flowers, which she loves to watch bloom on the desk in her room.
Two of my sisters have created word puzzles for her; unfortunately, word puzzles are related to reading, and not one of her favorite things to do. She admitted to me that she tries to cheat on the puzzles by asking her care-givers to look over the puzzle and point out a word or two. I thought she taught me not to cheat, but I never experienced a pandemic during my childhood, so maybe there are exceptions.
This is why my mother is making heavy sighs over the phone. She has played too much Solitaire, watched too much news, listened to too many soap operas, and spent too much time waiting listlessly for the next meal.
My quest for more cultural humility seems to apply here. I might be able to help her weather this shelter-in-place.
Cultural humility encourages me to develop empathy for how my mother feels and what she is experiencing, not as I would, but as she does. I asked myself, what can a person do if she can’t see or talk to another person very often? In addition, what would help my mother attain a greater level of peace while she socially distances during this pandemic? Since my mother is a doer and socializer, not a solitary thinker, my ideas must keep that in mind.
Perhaps I can also consider what her life achievements have been; in my mother’s case, she grew up on a farm, worked as a bookkeeper, was married for 52 years, raised a brood of children, served on the school board and church council, worked in voter polling places, and practiced traditional Catholicism her whole life.
As I thought about ideas for her, I kept seeing that red recliner in her apartment, situated so perfectly in the corner of the room, so she can hear sounds from both outside her window and from all parts of the apartment. I also thought about how to help her decrease her anxiety.
Since she is a doer, I felt that short activities would be best, and, for the anxiety, I thought that I could suggest activities that encouraged a meditative state—because, on her own, she would never engage in meditation, thinking it was too foreign and too hard. This is a woman, remember, who wants fast results.
Also, my ideas would have to be typed in 48-point font, meaning that I can only list as many large-type activities as I can fit onto one or two pages.
So, at four o’clock in the morning, when my sleep was interrupted by my thoughts about her, I got up to type my suggestions. I set up my computer to 48-point font in a landscape layout and typed up “Corona Virus Shelter-in-Place Things to Do.” Here is a sample:
1. Pray the rosary for your own intentions.
2. Breathe slowly 5 times.
3. Stretch your fingers and toes, one at a time.
4. Picture flowers,one at a time, and name them out loud.
6. Think about people you love, one at a time.
7. Create math problems for your great-grandchildren, then call them and tell them to solve them.
8. Create a new prayer and say it out loud.
9. Compliment a care-giver.
10. Lift your arms 5 times.
11. Close your eyes and think about a candle burning.
12. Remember funny events, one at a time.
13. Tell a joke to a care-giver.
14. Watch a talk show on television.
I typed half of these suggestions on one page, put them in an envelope, and mailed them today. I put the other half in a second envelope to mail to her next week.
I’m not sure if my attempt at cultural humility toward my mother will help her navigate through this crisis. I’ll have to wait until she lets me know.
Oh, believe me, General Mom will be letting me know.
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