8/9/17

Last night my sister called, and I answered the phone. We spoke for two hours.

In all likelihood, mom won't be returning home. She's a great quitter. She told her physical therapist to go fuck himself. 

The prevailing thought was we had 100 days until we had to worry about liquidating her house. But the system appears to be set up in such a way where they get everything organized (vis-a-vis financials) so that if/when a determination is made where if she is NOT returning home, the nursing home sets mom up on self-pay until such time she runs out of cash (which at this point will be roughly 9-12 months, depending on how much her house sells for).

I'm pretty numb, or insulated or maybe I am too logical or perhaps it all hasn't hit me yet. It's a lot to process to think that before Thanksgiving is even here, mom's house won't be hers anymore.  

I'm processing how the last visit I planned (first, for Mother's Day, and then later, in the beginning of July--which ended up getting cancelled), would have been THE last visit where mom was still reasonably still "herself" and in her home with her things, her precious books, and above all else, intimacy/privacy (which a nursing home doesn't afford). It's a lot to process.

Is this what death is? You die a thousand deaths, some at the molecular level, until the day you draw your final breath.  

There's a lot to unpack from the conversation with my sister, stuff that is between she and I. But at the moment, our focus is on mom. 

And thinking about yesterday's conversation with mom, how I had that moment where I felt like this is what normal mother-daughter relationships are like. And it made me sad. She's capable of it. And I don't know if it's she's unwilling or incapable of being that way 24/7. It's almost cruel. 

I like to think the "real" mom is the one who was loving and affectionate to me yesterday. The problem is, the monster inhabits the same body.  

As of this moment, we know mom's pretty much giving up her will to live because: 1. She isn't eating; and 2. She isn't calling anyone. However, knowing how she's vacillating wildly from lucid to NOT (mostly NOT, but she really sounds like she's normal up to a point), it might be just as well that she's not calling people, as the monster is the prominent personality, and who the hell knows what kind of awful things she'll tell "outsiders."