Scream (20 page)

Then he told me a long story about Eckhart Tolle. “He was a very ugly man who was a failure,” he said. “When he was in his twenties he decided to kill himself. He lay on the floor when he had a revelation: he should stop feeling bad. So he got up and wrote a bestselling book, which enabled him, although ugly and a failure, to make a lot of money and get a beautiful Japanese girlfriend.”

I didn't quite follow what the doctor said.

Then he gave me a prescription for some anti-anxiety pills and told me to make a follow-up appointment.

The follow-up appointment was going to cost less than the initial visit of $250, but I still didn't have another $150 to get the rest of his life story, so I just started taking the pills.

Even though he said Adult Protective Services wasn't going to come back, I was still upset. All I had been doing, day in and day out, was trying to look after my kid and my mom. What kind of hospital would tie an eighty-year-old woman to the bed for six hours and then turn in the person who had brought her for help? So I wrote a letter to the hospital.

There was no answer. I wrote again. I saw an ad in the paper; all the people who were on the fundraising board of this hospital were going to hold a grand benefit gala. I sent my letter to all those people on the benefit committee. I wanted to tell them: you are fundraising for a hospital who leaves old people bound to a bed for six hours, while the nurses and doctors gather for a party at the nurse's station.

After I sent out the letter again, a man telephoned. “Are you Tama Janowitz?” he said. “I'm from hospital publicity. I looked you up on the computer. You're famous. Will you come to the hospital to discuss our writing a letter of apology to you?”

I went to see him. The man in PR was very intrigued with me. He brought in the head nurse and they both looked at me. “We're not going to write a letter of apology to you. We just wanted to see you in person.”

MOM FELL MORE FREQUENTLY
. I took her to every type of doctor, for every type of test. We went to a neurologist who was young and from some South American country. He hit her on her leg with a hammer. “Ow,” my mom said.

“Oops,” the doctor said. “Sorry, I was aiming for your knee.” He hit her again and her leg twitched. “Very good!” he said. “Now, listen to this sentence: a brown fox jumped over a sleeping dog.” He looked out the door down the hall. A receptionist was leading a young cute girl, his next patient, to another room.

“A brown fox jumped over a sleeping dog,” my mom said.

“Okay,” he said. “Now I would like you to draw a picture of a clock, with the hands at twenty to four.”

Her image was as good as one of Salvador Dalí's. She had made an oval, with a few numbers in random places on the clock face and two lines pointing down.

Mom could never draw real well anyway.

“Okay,” the neurologist said to my mother. “You're fine. You can go.” He turned to me. “Your mom has no signs of dementia.”

“I didn't bring her to you for dementia,” I said. “She's always been like this; me, too. I brought her to see you because of her legs. Her legs!” I said. “She came here because her legs hurt her, terribly! And she falls.”

“I don't know,” he said. “You might want to take her for some other tests.”

“What about the sentence?”

He was looking anxiously out the door, down the hall, to the next patient. “What sentence?”

“The fox jumped over the dog!” I said. “You asked her to listen to it. Aren't you going to ask her to repeat it now that some time has passed?”

“Oh,” he said. “No.” He looked down the hall once more with eager trepidation. “That's not why I said that sentence.”

Eventually I took my mom to a nursing home. It was a small place in an old house that only took six residents and where there was a lot of staff. After a week, the owner called. “You have until the end of the month to find a new place for your mom,” she said. “I'm sorry, she requires too much care, much more than we can provide here.”

“Whaaa?” I said. “You said you could look after her! What did my mom do?”

“She falls. She's angry at her roommate. She might wander out. We have stairs here. She goes in other people's rooms. Don't get me wrong, we are all very fond of her.”

This was all very strange to hear, but nonetheless I found another place. The new place was nearer the hospital where my mom had been left tied up in her own waste for six hours, but it was also closer to her house. I wouldn't be spending an hour each day driving to see her. It was more institutional than the old farmhouse had been, but it was still nice. She had her own room and there were other people there, in bibs and diapers, who hung out in the big room at the front where a nurse's aide would play “memory games”—questions out of a big book. I took my mom in to participate on one such instance. I sat her on the couch. Dale, another resident, came in. Dale was very agitated. “How are you, Dale?” I said. “Have a seat!”

“Oh, thank you,” said Dale. She sat down heavily, seemingly on top of my mother.

“Who wrote, ‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo'?” the nurse's aide said.

No one responded. The aide turned the page for the answer. “It was Paul Revere!” she said. A general malaise flowed on the surface of the river of Alzheimer's and dementia in the room. I couldn't contain myself and I squeaked. The nonverbal discomfort escalated.

“Oh, wrong page!” the nurse's aide said at last, turning back a leaf in the book as she announced, “It was Shakespeare.
William
Shakespeare.”

THE INMATES CAME AND WENT
. Sometimes when you got there, everybody had been herded into the back of the dining room; someone was dead, and they were waiting for the ambulance. There was Dale, she would come into my mom's room and get in the closet. There was Joan, who followed me around, saying, as she did to everyone: “Ma'am! Ma'am! Can you help me?” But no help could be provided. The people with dementia and Alzheimer's, they are scary. They grab you, they glare, they touch you, they throw things. If they were babies, and cute, you wouldn't mind so much and it would seem normal. With the old people, no. Drooling, snot, it's excusable only in formative years. Otherwise, it is not attractive. Joan followed me into the business office. I was scared. “Ma'am! Ma'am!”

“Joan?”

“Ma'am!”

“Joan?”

“Ma'am!”

The director cut in. “Joan! That's enough now!”

“Why? You're spoiling our duet!”

There was a woman who sat silently at a table at every mealtime, not eating, tears streaming down her face. There were people who brought in service dogs, there were a couple of cats who lived there, and there were fish. There were students who came in and played the violin and the piano; there were religious groups who came in to preach. It was a vivid setting, it was overwhelming, you were involved in the daily routine and activities. There were sing-alongs. There was searching for my mom, who would always manage to get in someone else's room and get into his or her bed for a nap. There was the staff.

There was an aide who was affectionate with Mom, maybe too affectionate; whenever I was there, she was with my mom, playing with her hair, stroking her, telling her, “I'm your other daughter.” She liked to hug me, too. “Where are you going?” she said.

“I have to go shopping.”

“Oh, bring me something!”

I bought her a pie.

“Can we have a spa day together?” I gave her a gift certificate for a massage at the spa. Then they moved the aide away from patients—into the kitchen. I liked her, but it was a relief in a way to not have to see her. She and her husband lived with his parents. I got an e-mail from her saying she had been fired and had no money and her unemployed husband had left her. I didn't know what to do. These people become your family.

You can't stand being there. You have to be there, you look at the clock, it's your mom, you take her out, you go to a restaurant, you can't get her out of the car, you get her back to the nursing home. You go home, you come back the next day. I walked into the library. There was a family sitting with one of the patients, the beautiful woman who wept at each meal. The man looked familiar. Maybe I had seen him before. I smiled at him but he just scowled at me. What did he think? He acted as if I were trying to get his autograph. It wasn't a private room, it was the library of ancient
National Geographic
s and large print
Reader's Digest
s. I left.

Then I went to my mom's room. I thought, That was John Lithgow, the actor. My life had become very sad indeed. If I was going to hallucinate a movie star at this nursing home, did I really have to hallucinate John Lithgow? I was alone too much. My daughter was living with me, but she had a boyfriend and she was busy with after-school activities, and now I had sunk so low that I was inventing visiting movie stars at the home, but not sexy or hot movie stars or ones that I liked, just a scowling, irritated John Lithgow. “I'm going to move in here,” I told my mom. “As soon as a room opens up.”

“You can have my bed,” my mom said.

It turned out it
was
John Lithgow, though. He came a couple of times a year to visit his mother, who was the weeping woman. Then she died, so I didn't have those hallucinations anymore.

My mom lasted a year this time before they told me I had to get her into somewhere with an even higher level of care. By now she couldn't walk at all. Her legs did not support her, not even to get up out of bed. Her doctor told me here as well, “But there's nothing wrong with her.”

I found her a new nursing home. I did the paperwork, I got her into the car, I got her to that new place. If I had taken notes, this kind of thing would be an entire book. You don't want to remember. You don't want to dwell.

During this entire debacle, I still went into that supermarket to get her the candy she liked.

Let's recount this again. Let's say you want a bun. You would go to the aisle that says “Bread.” You would not start looking for the “Bun” aisle. No. You might as well put crunchy peanut butter in a different aisle than creamy. WHY DO I KEEP GOING BACK TO THAT SUPERMARKET? I'm sick, that's why.

DAY AFTER DAY, VISITING MY MOM
. It was so sad. I wanted my mom. My mom was vanishing. Parts of her mind disappeared. Then, the next day, something would be back. It was like trying to call someone internationally, someone up on Mount Everest, with a bad connection. You could hear a word, you could hear two, you got excited, you were going to speak. Then the wind got too strong.

Now, most days when I went to see her, she was further away. She was lying on her bed every time I went there, kind of contorted, and she couldn't seem to look at me. Even I was starting to realize, the holes in her brain were getting bigger. The Swiss cheese up there was melting.

“Hi Mom! How are you?”

“I am looking for my box.”

“Your box?”

“I am looking for my lockbox.”

“Your . . . lockbox?”

“My
lox
box. A flying lox box.”

“Huh?”

“Where is my box? Where is my lox box? Where is my flying lox box?”

I could join in with her, sometimes, for a little bit. We could riff on lockboxes and lox boxes and flying lox. It was better than not connecting at all.

As different areas of the mind got eaten away there would be a brief burst as a different part took over. For a while, if you could get on that level, you could almost have a conversation. Actually, she did make sense in a certain
Alice in Wonderland
wordplay kind of way, and I knew her humor.

Sometimes, we could both just jump on the same page—like, the phone was ringing and she said, “What is that sound?”

“The telephone.”

“The telephone? What's it doing?”

“It's ringing, Mom.”

“Who is it?”

“How would I know who's on the other end? It's ringing.”

“That's not a telephone.”

“That's the telephone. It was invented by Alexander Graham Bell.”

“No, he did not invent the phone.”

“Yes, he did. He said, ‘Watson, can you hear me?' ”

“Who was Watson?”

“The guy on the other end!”

“The other end of what?”

“On the other end of the phone.”

“How did he know to pick it up?”

“Good point. I don't know . . . I guess . . . it was ringing?”

“And so he picked it up and said, ‘Hello'?”

“I don't know. I guess.”

“How would he know what to do, unless it was ringing?”

“Right.”

“So why did Bell call him?”

“I mean, there was nobody else to call! There was only one other phone!”