But She's Not There...

So I visited ancient Mom on Tuesday, and she reached another negative milestone: she couldn't walk back to my car after lunch.

Watching someone into extreme old age really is observing the down side of a hyperbola. I've observed my Ds' milestones as they grew, and my mother is doing it in reverse: each day losing some new measure of physical or mental function.

So I wheeled her in her walker, and got her back to her condo. Her spirits were pretty high, though, especially when I assured her that I continued to take care of all of her practical affairs. "Oh David, I'm such an idiot, that if you didn't --we'd both be bankrupt!"

And then Thursday am, my sister called me to tell me the latest adventure: she called Mom, and caught her entertaining some guests --2 young girls. They were lost, Mom said, and trying to get a ride home from their mother. My sister asked to speak to them, but Mom said they didn't want to talk on the phone.

My sister immediately became concerned. Were they criminals? Mom has little to steal, but still...So she called 911, and the Palm Beach Sheriff said they'd send someone over. My sister and brother in law headed to Mom's condo.

The cops were there, and pretty sure no visitors had come. Or, is somehow 2 young ladies found there way to my Mom's condo, past the guard gate, and picking my Mom's unit out of the nearly 8000 old people homes there, well, they did no harm.

Mom couldn't offer more details, except that they mentioned they were friends of my cousin Janet's daughters. A quick call to Janet confirmed that wasn't so.

I called Mom later that night, and she insisted she WAS visited, but was cloudy on details. And then, she launched her pre emptive strike about refusing to move to an ALF, or anywhere else, but maybe she SHOULD start locking her front door...

My California sister weighed in the next day --a nurse she knew figured it all out: my mother should be on NO medication. I politely explained to her that her friend is a moron --diagnosing a patient he's never seen from 3000 miles away.

No --medical advice isn't the problem. Mom's cared for by Dr. Eric - a Harvard trained interninst and cardiologist who's known her for 32 years...

I emailed Eric, and asked him to check for more dementia at her next appointment. Eric, of course, suggested a neurologist consult. But that's not going to happen --when someone is 91, we all know what's coming, and all more medical intervention will do is make things more complicated and uncomfortable.

I'm reading Russell Baker's autobiography, written in 1982. He went through the same issues with his aging mother. She began living in the past, mentally.

So I wish the same for my mother. The hallucination came on a day she had no visitors --Thursday --and I think she simply invented some to help pass the time.

Last night our neighbor and friend Diane came over, with her pretty friend Cindy. Cindy just turned 50, like me. She reported that she's been going to a bunch of funerals for 50 and 60 somethings lately. The last 2 were of defense lawyers I knew as well. Her theory is that our "sandwich generation" is under stress from worrying about our children as we also worry about declining parents, and the stress lets the cancers and heart diseases gain footholds...

She's probably right, of course. All I know, or knew as I drank my 3rd stiff Middleton, is that the end is bad: either too soon or too late.

Diane and Cindy left, and Wifey and I went swimming around midnight. It was exquisite. The recent USAF planes spraying for mosquitos had done the job, and we heard nary a buzz.

We floated together in the moonlight, laughing that if the Ds saw us it would lead to months of psychological therapy to get the vision out of their minds...

But we celebrated our relative youth. And life. And no hallucinations...