Back in August, less than two weeks after I’d returned from an uneventful check-in visit with my mother out in Loma Linda, California, we got calls from her assisted living community as well as her traveling hospice provider that she’d become extremely lethargic and was probably getting close to the end. But by the time my sister and I had rushed out there, a few of her lowest-paid (yet most hands-on) caregivers had figured out that a new pain medication she’d been prescribed, Lyrica, was the culprit. Once they took her off those meds, she slowly made her way back to general consciousness, and a somewhat reduced physical baseline, but nowhere near death.
She’ll be around another year! said one of the second-shift unlicensed med techs who’d known her for a long time.
It was my seventh trip out and back since July 2021 to address an earlier near-death emergency, check on her health status in the aftermath, fix an unending series of medical-bureaucratic problems, and hassle various banks and investment institutions to honor my attorney-in-fact status. I had been run ragged by the routine, not to mention by my mother’s often belligerent, paranoid, and stubborn personality.
It was unclear who had prescribed the new med that nearly killed my mother. I went on a paperwork hunt and buttonholed various caregivers and managers to figure it out, but nobody seemed to recognize the name of the nurse practitioner on the order. Taking on my mother’s paranoid mindset, I went around raging for a few days, assuming that somebody had fucked up in a big way and that too many others were engaged in CYA. After a bit of detective work over many days, I was finally able to contact this mysterious nurse practitioner who’d put in the new order. Long story short, he was associated with neither the facility nor the hospice program. The staff at those institutions weren’t CYAing after all—they just had no idea who he was or how he’d ended up seeing my mother.
It turned out the NP was associated with my mother’s cardiologist. Aha! Here’s who fucked up! But why had he even shown up to treat her in the first place? She was in hospice protocol as a heart patient, meaning she was not supposed to be treated for heart disease anymore. (If they’re still trying to cure your condition, i.e., if you’re not technically in “dying” mode, Medicare won’t pay for hospice.) Since nobody picks up phones anymore, and since every phone tree in the medical universe of greater Loma Linda seemed to lead to nonworking numbers or full voicemail boxes, I continued to assume that somebody had done something wrong.
Who did I need to get fired? Who did I need to sue? Mind you—this is not the way I normally think. This is and was my mother’s perennial attitude about everything that goes wrong: FIND SOMEONE TO BLAME.
Egged on by this feeling that my mother was utterly unsafe, I started making vague plans to completely upend my life and move out to live near her for the next however long I needed to be here. I even started pricing out car dog carriers for my 17-year-old dog Kammie, a surprisingly healthy mutt, but likely not long for this world, either. In my worst daydream nightmares, elderly mother and elderly dog would manage to die within a few days of each other.
Realizing Mom was not at death’s door and I would not have to stay out for another month executing her estate, I cut my trip short and flew home in a state of total wreckage. I was sitting at my own kitchen counter in a state of now-chronic jetlag when the NP finally returned my messages. Within a few minutes on the phone, it was clear what had happened. The cardiologist had never been informed that my mother was no longer in charge of her own healthcare—they didn’t know she had signed a POA putting me in charge. I, meanwhile, had no idea she was still even in contact with her cardiologist. But she had called up to complain that hospice wasn’t giving her enough Gabapentin for neuropathy, and the cardiologist said well, I’m also listed as your alternate primary care physician and sent along this NP to see her.
It’s true that hospice probably hadn’t responded quickly enough to my mother’s requests to increase her Gabapentin dosage—and that the NP was being a bit whimsical in deciding to try her on Lyrica instead. But the precipitating event was that my mother, used to being her own boss, of course, had taken matters into her own hands and had almost gotten herself killed. I had been running around looking for someone to blame for my mother’s condition and the truth had boomeranged back. Perp and victim were one and the same. There was literally nobody to blame, sue, or get fired. It was just a thing that happened because a person is old and disoriented yet remembers being young and in charge.
This reality broke me.
I spent August and most of September back at home and in a walking daze. It was slightly more than a year since her first false alarm, when she’d ended up in a rehab facility and was so angry, belligerent, and paranoid that I was in a constant spin, trying to listen to her and be her equally loud, belligerent advocate, then turning around and apologizing to various medical personnel and social workers with whom I’d gotten snippy once I realized they were right and she was wrong.
The truth is, my mother has never been a reliable self-reporter, in sickness or in “health.” She was the first and most powerful Lying Liar in my life, the one who kept telling stories about everyone else who’d ever wronged her but almost never admitted to wrongdoing, the one who made me alternatively a sucker for and a keen sniffer-outer of other such prevaricating poltroons throughout my years. I was about to upend my life, and my dog’s life, too, for this woman who could not be trusted. Oh, I know. She’s an old lady. She didn’t do it on purpose. She was self-advocating, or at least, trying to do so. Her short-term memory is failing. She is confused about the chain of responsibility. She forgets that she puts me in charge. The medical personnel should have been more careful and savvier. All true.
And yet….I was broken by the realization that yet again I had leaped up to be her champion only to realize she’d been self-sabotaging (and therefore me-sabotaging) all along. I spent the fall in my apartment, doing the last bits of client work before I quit my music marketing job, barely holding myself together, eating way more takeout Indian and pizza and Chinese than I could afford in dollars or pounds, and living like a hoarder-in-training with un-unpacked luggage and months-old recycling all around me.
My usual thing: therapy, therapy, meditation, therapy. Baby steps: a trip to the grocery store to buy some dark leafy greens and chicken thighs, and nice tart fall apples to cut up for me and my doggie to share. A cocktail or two with friends. But it wasn’t working…and this was when the Big Bad Feeling started to infect my shoulders and sternum and entire being. The annoyingly new-again Big Grief about last year’s Mister Heartbreak. A brand-new, surprising, and six-month-delayed sadness about the nice guy, still my dear friend, who’d broken up with me in the spring. The shitty client encounter in late September. The sinus infection in early October. All the things that built up into that crushed and crumpled and encircled-with-rage sensation I was experiencing before shouting it all out of myself, exorcism-like, on that Sunday morning, November 6, with my therapist acting as secular clergy via Zoom. The moment that became—it would seem—my self-induced trauma recovery.
Whoosh.
The truth was plain and now I didn’t just “know” it, my brain/body/entire being KNEW IT. My mother could not be relied upon for fact or feeling, but that had always been true. So what? So, fucking, what? Now I was the grownup in charge—legal documents to prove it. I was parent to the parent, I was no longer a child, I was ready to put aside all that lifelong rage and reaction to childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood filled with various and complex mother-created micro-traumas. I had released the rage and was ready to do the work.
I am doing the work right now.
I am writing this from San Ber’dino, CA, a few miles away from my mother’s increasingly inadequate assisted living community. I am basically going to rescue her from her not-safe-enough home and move her to a much better one. It helps that she saved her money for exactly this kind of inevitability. I don’t need to bust into my own retirement savings to effect this rescue, but I am doing the work. She can no longer enrage me. She barely even annoys me, what? (although I did quietly shut down a conversation in which she tried to shame me for encouraging my son, a college sophomore, to study things that interest him, such as sports management, media production, sociology, and art history instead of physics and computer science).
Tiger-Grandma educational snobbery aside, my mother’s response to my newly embodied chill has been fascinating. She has become weirdly compliant, pleasant, and grateful, even on topics—such as leaving her home for the past 12 years—with equanimity. This is not a word I would have ever used about my judgmental, intransigent, and often unteachable mother.
It’s fucking weird, is what it is.
And it turns out that I don’t hate her anywhere near as much as I once did. Even if I hesitate to use the word love, I am aware that I have become, despite everything, the self-invented loving daughter she could not create for herself. I have become, in one stroke, the good mother of my not-so-good mother and the good mother of myself.
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An atheist gins up some Grace, Part 2