Hard to believe. It's been two years since this last voicemail from mom, the voicemail wherein she tells me she was informed the virus was in her nursing home.
I spoke to her a couple times on the phone after that, relatively casual conversations given the dire circumstances. I was reassuring her I was contacting the ombudsman and the NJ Department of Health in regards to it--to no avail. And the last few times I tried calling her, either she was on the phone with someone else, or her voicemail was full and I wasn't able to get in touch with her.
Quickly thereafter (within a week thereabouts), she was "presumptive positive." One by one, each resident in the wing of her nursing home either died in their beds, or were whisked off to the local hospital to die. Eventually her roommate went to the hospital. At this point, mom was hysterical, screaming out for my father (who died in 2008).
Hospice came in to sedate her before I even had a chance to say goodbye. She languished for another 11 days until her ultimate passing, pretty much neglected by hospice as well as the nursing home itself whose solitary task was to care for her. There was one CNA for 67 residents. They weren't even able to put her phone to her ear so I could talk to her.
The sad thing about having a vivid imagination is that I can totally envision the position of her body, I can totally smell the neglect, I can totally hear the shallow inconsistent breaths. I can envision her corpse being handled with disrespect, and I can envision her corpse languishing in a refrigerator unit for fifteen days until it was cremated.
I wish her final voicemail to me was something else. Something where she feigned being upbeat or cheery. Even one of her patented vague voicemails, in a terse clipped tone, "It's your mother, call me."
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