Further Away

I saw Grammy last night. I made the 45 minute drive to Melrose after work, part two of my day. I parked at the train station and walked to her building, and up the covered ramp where I let myself in through the dirty glass doors. My mother gave me my own set of keys to her building, her mailbox, and her apartment door. Her sparkling diamond studded letter E keychain is permanently intertwined with my other responsibilities. The elderly oriental lady was sitting in the predictable corner, I waved, and she nodded. The carpet is dirty and the elevators are worse, the floor puddled and sticky from something thankfully unknown. I arrived without mishap at the fifth floor and was greeted by the odor best described as urine and weed.

My mother is in the corner unit, safely tucked away at the end of the long hall. My footsteps announce my approach, the uneven gait betraying remnants of my own history. She is happy to see me every time and I tuck away my overtired selfishness and match her enthusiasm. She is bent over and shuffles with her walker to see me, peering up from her permanent view of the floor. She eyeballs me, taking stock of my appearance, satisfied at the apparent wellness of my being and we begin our visit. She tells me about her day, which aide came to assist her, how her blood pressure cuff gave her trouble. I open the refrigerator and look for hidden prohibited “goodies” and go about preparing our meal.

Grammy has a limitless sweet tooth. She will buy sweet treats on a Monday with the intention of rationing them throughout the week. Usually everything is gone by Wednesday. I have a video of her listing out the “goodies” she ate the previous week: brownies, peanut butter cups, whole cakes, whole pies, donuts at coffee hour. You get the picture. I have definitely inherited this gene. It is a battle to find restraint and honesty about the quality of the food we consume. Knowing better means nothing to people like us. We know it’s available and that pervades every thought like punctuation until the object of our lust is consumed. This week it appears Grammy is back on her diet and I am secretly disappointed.

I change lightbulbs, reach things she cannot, find her missing phone apps and fill her cup. There is an expanding list of things she cannot do. I wash any dishes and set the table. We eat together, she chews slowly and carefully without teeth, a tissue tucked into her sleeve. We talk about the kids, her sisters, her neighbors, her plans for Christmas gifts and what birthdays are coming up. Her days are quiet, filled with ADLs, getting on and off the sofa, throwing scraps of paper away, “exercises”, and visits from aides, doctors and neighbors. She isn’t comfortable. Her spine is curling and her circulation is pinched. She is shrinking at 4’6″ and has a hard time seeing the countertops. There is a parade of medication that unbelievably does not trip over itself causing interactions that we know of. There are so many pills it would be hard to tell. I have been filling her weekly pill boxes with anti anxiety, anti psychotics, and general health maintenance pills for years. The pharmacy just began providing her pill packs and it is such a relief that responsibility is being assumed by the pharmacist, who is clearly much more qualified.

She left us when I was 11 or 12. The school secretary told me that my mother called and I needed to take the bus home with friends. I was told that she was gone and not coming home again. Dad and I were relieved quite honestly. She was exhausting. Her manic episodes and days on the couch were a lot to unpack. She would throw unexpected things in the trash, or down the cellar stairs where they sat smashed until someone asked about the tape recorder or the salt shaker. My best memories of her as a mother were watching her pirouette across the living room from corner to corner, practicing her ballet, sitting on the floor in front of the stereo listening to Jim Croce or Donna Summer, and making dinner with her in the kitchen. I was assigned to salad and I was allowed to add fancy lunchmeat strips and olives or whatever I wanted. A week before she left she showed me how to make spaghetti because “I was going to need to know how”. I found a sad poem she wrote in her coat pocket once. It was full of regret and the sorrow of a woman in turmoil. She would call the principal at my school to complain about crazy things and he would come up to me in the lunch room and in front of my friends ask in exasperation “What is wrong with your mother?”

My best friend Dianna slept over one night and my mother woke us all up and put us in the car. “We are leaving your father.” She declared. It was after 11pm. We drove around for a while and she stopped at Kitty’s restaurant and she made me call my Dad at work from a pay phone in the lobby to tell him goodbye. He asked me where I was calling from and I told him. “I will find you” he said. Dianna cried and begged to go home. Mom finally agreed and we brought her home at midnight waking up her very unhappy mother. I don’t remember much after that. I do remember an intervention with all of Mom’s family and a trip to the hospital. She ran from everyone in the hospital grabbing my hand to escape with her into an elevator and my uncle pulled me back telling me I was not allowed to go with her. I was taken to visit her in the mental hospital one time and I was so scared and angry. There she gave me a pendant, a quarter with a hole drilled into it, hanging from silver yarn. I kept it for many years in my jewelry box holding out hope for a normal life with her until one day I just threw it away.

In my twenties my grandmother had not heard from Mom so I would call her phone number and she would answer the phone and scream “George!” It sent chills down my spine and she wouldn’t respond to me, just screamed his name over and over. I found her apartment in Malden and surprisingly she let me inside. The dark and dirty rooms nearly empty except for a table and chairs. In the very center of the table was a giant ashtray piled high with cigarette butts. Her apartment smelled like smoke, her shades were closed, ripped and grimy. I went to the Salvation Army and bought her furniture, a couch and a dresser, night tables and a picture for over the couch. Some months after that she turned the water on in the sink and walked away. The apartment flooded, inches of water flowing out the door. The ambulance came to commit her again and the next time I saw her at my grandmother’s house I had two babies and she was barely 100 pounds. I raised more babies with no sign of my mother. She was making her way through life with her partner George who had his own issues. His parents had left him at an orphanage as a child. He was a veteran and could not hear so he yelled all of the time. He was jolly and good to her, the two of them were surviving their life together. I rarely visited because George and Mom together were a little too much for us. The loud talking and difficulty communicating was frightening and they smoked in their apartment. I wouldn’t expose my babies to that, so I raised the children without her. One year during a rare planned summer vacation up north, Kristina was sentenced to summer school. I asked Grammy and George to come stay at the house for a week so an adult would be there. George fell up the steps and they left to go back home, leaving Kristina by herself. She was the adult.

I survived my life without her until George died. He passed away during Covid. He was in the hospital with complications from the virus and the hospital would not let my mother go see him. The staff had accidentally thrown away his hearing aids and he was unable to communicate with anyone. He and my mother were so distressed at being separated. A nurse called my mother and said George was getting worse and they would break the rules and let her see him. She planned to get a ride in the next morning and he died during the night without her. The fact that he died without her there to comfort him haunts her still. The tragedy of that keeps me coming to her house every Monday. No one deserves to spend the end of their life alone.