Wait Until Tomorrow (30 page)

I go to my mother's place to play a long game of Scrabble.

AUGUST 2009

My heart has been a lonely hunter, searching for something this long, empty summer. When Emmy is with me, we are a couple of merry pranksters, but when she's gone I might as well be on the moon. It's cold and barren. Should I get another dog? I wonder. A bird? Or a hobby? I need to learn a musical instrument, the cello maybe. I tried pottery earlier in the year. That was good for a while, but it's not enough. Visiting my mother occupies me, but there's only so much time I can spend with the old folks. I walk. A lot. And sometimes that's enough. Sometimes it isn't. Hank and I are no longer screaming at each other on the phone. Silence stretches between us like the desert.

Then one day an email pops up. A desperate plea: “Help. I'm losing my apartment. I'm going to have to live in a shelter or in my truck. I'm disabled and I lost my job, but I can pet sit. Please, if you need someone to take care of your pets, let me know.”

“Who are you?” I typed.

“Lorri. A friend of Colin's.”

My friend Colin had forwarded the email to everyone on his list, and I was the one who responded. Darryl is going to Paris and needs someone to look after his German shepherd, so I set them up. Three weeks later, Lorri moves in with me. During the day we sit outside on my front porch with our laptops and work.
Lorri, it turns out, can make websites, and I happen to need a new website. We like the same TV shows. We make salads every day and drink smoothies. I decide not to get a bird right now. The cello can also wait.

 

I want to get away. Mom seems to be fairly stable. School doesn't start for a couple of weeks. Emmy is happy and working at a bookstore, waiting for the semester to begin. As far as I can tell, Hank has no intention of returning, and I don't know what to do about the back of the house where he ripped off the rotted siding but didn't replace it. The master bathroom now has no shower and a hole in the ceiling. I don't have the money to fix it. Now seems like a good time to get out of town. Lorri can take care of the cat while I'm gone and even go check on my mother once in a while.

So I head down to Tallahassee, where I fill my time drinking decaf at the Black Dog Café, eating lunch at Cabo's, hanging out with friends, catching up on stories. I visit Theo, eat French cheese at Pam's, and buy Emmy some fabric from an imported clothing store.

Thursday afternoon I need to go see Dean, the hermit. I love the beach house where he used to live with Wendy. It's still a shrine to her, with her books and pictures of the two of them displayed on the living-room shelves. Dean and I walk the beach, talking of sea turtles, guitars, old friends.

“Tell me the name of those again,” I say, pointing to tiny clams that disappear bottoms up in the brown wet sand.

“Donax,” he says.

“That's right,” I say, and laugh. “I always want to say ‘gonads.'” I'm sure that Wendy once wrote a poem about them.

Returning to the thin arm of sand stretched before the low beach house, Dean sits on the towel while I wade into warm water, my joy meter ticking upwards as the waves canter toward me. And
I dive into the murky Gulf, thick with salt and seaweed. Far across the water, the horizon stretches in a long flat line.

“It always changes,” Dean had said. And he's right. It used to be you had to walk miles for the water to reach your shoulders. And now I'm just twenty or so yards out and it's plenty deep enough. And yet it's always the same, too, I think, laying my body on the surface as waves jostle and knead and tease me like a cat with a toy mouse.

Yes, this is why I came, for this. And a voice in my head says, this would make a nice poem. Not my voice, of course. It is Wendy whispering, not wondering why I turn up like a bad penny. She never scolded me when she was alive, just gave me that look sometimes that said, “Simmer down.” Now she exhorts me to clutch the seaweed, the long water grass, to breathe in the pungent, ancient scent, to stop simmering now, and live life at a full boil.

Feeling refreshed and happy, I am driving back to Tallahassee when my cell phone rings. It's a nurse from the Sanctuary. She's afraid my mother has had a stroke, and she's called the paramedics to come get her. I begin to calculate the hours it will take me to get back home.

 

“No morphine,” I tell the emergency room doctor who calls me as I'm driving that night on the Interstate toward Atlanta. I sleep for a few hours at a friend's house in Atlanta and then get up early in the morning and drive straight through to the hospital.

Once I get there, I tell them again: “No morphine. I know she says she's in pain. But no morphine.”

I tell the doctor about the last time she was in the hospital, when they loaded her up on Sister M and she got so loopy we thought she'd had a stroke. She couldn't complete a sentence. Thoughts were amorphous things floating like clouds far above
her grasp. Sentences fell apart in her head. Words got stuck on repeat. It lasted for months.

The doctor promises he won't give her any morphine, but that night someone gives her morphine anyway.

The next day I am sitting in the green chair in my mother's hospital room and she's methodically examining her cover sheet; the effects of the earlier drugs have not worn off. She has a pen in one hand and a partially completed crossword, but she is not doing the puzzle. Instead she runs the edge of that sheet through her fingers. When I ask her what she is doing, she has no idea. Finally, she drifts off.

When I tell the doctor what happened, he writes on her chart that she is allergic to morphine. Maybe that will stop the dope pushers.

Later my mother is sitting staring blankly out at nothing, wearing a green hospital robe, a purple DNR wrist band, and a heart monitor. She has expressly stated that no rescue attempts should be made in the event she gives out. But she's not really that sick. She's ninety-one. She's in constant pain. She's often confused, but there is nothing drastically wrong with her, nothing a few months of blood thinner and ten or so other pills a day can't cure.

In addition to a blood clot, she has a tiny fracture in her ankle, and the orthopedic surgeon wants her to wear a big plastic boot when she leaves.

My friend Patti says, “So many of my women friends have been taking care of their mothers longer than their mothers took care of them.”

Good God, I think. Decades.

 

Emmy is entering another year of college. I hope she remembers the instructions I give her on my cell phone as I sit in the parking
lot of the hospital: “Honey, if they want to give me blood thinner, antibiotics, anything, just say no to drugs. Let nature have its way. Do you hear me?”

She says that she does, but who knows what it will be like when we're there. Nightmare scenarios of nanotechnology prolonging our lives for centuries haunt me.

My mother says to me in the hospital, “When my time comes, I don't want you to be sad. I want you to be happy for me. My life as me is effectively over.”

“I will miss you terribly,” I answer. “But I will be happy for you.”

 

The third day: she's sleeping fitfully. You think of hospitals as busy places with doctors and nurses and med techs running around in the thrall of beeps and signals, doing important life-saving work. But hospitals are often more like holding pens for patients who are waiting for some number, some blood count, to rise or fall.

We've been here before. A ninety-one-year-old body needs a lot of repair work. During those other excursions, I planted myself in the room like a lodger. Today as well. But this time I won't stay here all day and half the night. This time they're not giving her morphine, and she doesn't have an infection. We're gonna make it outta here okay.

When my mother wakes up, it's as if she's catching herself. She looks around, confused. Then falls back to sleep. I wonder why I'm here, sitting in a little room with a sleeping woman.

A few days later my mother is sent back to rehab—another familiar place.

 

On Monday I leave work early to see about getting my mother recertified for Medicaid. She's in the rehab center while her broken ankle heals. Medicare covers twenty days in rehab but she's on
some insurance HMO plan that sucks out the Medicare money and doles it out the way they want to. For some things it's better than Medicare. But for others it's not. This, for instance. Instead of covering twenty days in rehab, it covers ten. She's on day seven. After that I have to start shelling out one hundred bucks a day to keep my mother there. That's why I'm driving to the Medicaid office instead of sitting in yet another meeting at my school.

During my lunch break I called the SSI office. A message told me I was “caller number twenty in queue.” I finally got to a human, but he managed to cut me off. So I dialed again and in only fifteen minutes I had another human.

“Please don't cut me off,” I said to him. “It takes way too long to get to a human.” He promised he wouldn't.

I told him my story: my mom had been on Medicaid eighteen months ago, the last time she was in the rehab center. I explained that when she got better we put her in a private pay facility because there were no long-term Medicaid beds available. But now she was back in rehab and we needed the Medicaid again.

He transferred me to someone else and I got a voice mail. She didn't call me back. So a few hours later I leave work and call her again. Lo and behold, she answers. In my utter naïveté I was sure that this was something that could be done by phone or online. Wrong. I am required to go to the office and fill out an application in person.

As I drive to the office, I wonder how this would get done if I were not here to do it—or if I had the kind of job where I couldn't leave to go take care of my mother's medical problems. Or what if I were sick myself, or disabled? This is how people's lives spiral out of control, how they go bankrupt, how they die forgotten and alone.

The Social Security Administration building in Charlotte is an imposing brick structure not far from uptown. As you approach
the entrance, you join the huddled masses yearning for health care. Most of the people milling about are minorities. According to a health care forum I went to recently, 35 percent of African Americans are without health insurance. I don't know what the figures are for Hispanics. For whites, it's 6 percent. I've been part of that 6 percent. I know what it feels like to simply decide you can't get sick. Many of the people here are women. They have children or they are pregnant or both. I wonder why so many Americans are so poor.

I go inside and a woman at the information desk gives me some form to fill out. No pen, but I've got my own. I find a little desk and fill out the form, then I go stand in a line. When I get to the front of the line I have to sign a piece of paper. Then go sit in another area and wait. Okay, maybe this is what the crazy “keep your government hands off my health care” screamers are picturing. I know it doesn't have to be this way. Government manages to do a lot of things pretty damn well. Education, road building, libraries, policing, fire fighting. But maybe this sucks because it's for poor people. Maybe if it was for everybody they'd get more efficient. (I'm still angry over a video I recently saw of a jet plane for insurance company executives with gold-plated dinnerware.)

This place has a kind of festive air about it. I watch a preteen girl herding her younger siblings; a dad and his severely disabled son; a lean, athletic young black man in a wheelchair with his hands in bandages. Everyone has a story. After an hour of sitting I'm still wondering why this process couldn't be done online or by phone. A couple of minutes before five, just before the place closes, a caseworker leads me back into the warren of cubicles for an interview. The cubicles are small; the walls brown. I sit down in a plastic chair and stare at a line of screws sticking out of the wall.

The caseworker, a strapping bald man, seems like a really nice guy, but I'm remembering a guy I knew who worked for Social Security in another town and who had a predilection for smoking pot and exposing himself to teenage girls. Whatever this particular guy does in his spare time, he seems perfectly willing to approve my mother's application.

There's just one problem. I'd forgotten that when you get on Medicaid, they take your Social Security check and leave you thirty bucks a month for spending money.

“But . . .but . . .how will we pay for her room at the assisted-living place?” I ask. “Her Social Security check pays for a good chunk of the rent. Then my brothers and I make up the difference.”

“My hands are tied,” he says with a shrug.

Tears start marching down my face. Words of doom and desperation swirl around my brain.

“But . . . but . . .” I begin again. “She's only supposed to need rehab for a couple of weeks and if she loses her place, then where will she go?”

“I understand,” he says. “Some people have mortgages and they have to choose between their homes and their health care.”

This makes me feel so much better.

“It's not going to work,” I tell him, trying to keep the whine out of my voice. We continue with the application.

Like a rat backed into a corner, my brain begins scurrying around the problem as I wait for him to print out the forms. What can I do? Will I need to yank her out of rehab? Surely the Sanctuary won't take her back in this shape. She can't put any weight on her right foot. She needs help getting off and on the toilet, getting in and out of the bed. Will I need to go over to her place and move all her stuff out? Money for movers, money for storage. What will I do about that albatross of a bed she has? Is it time for
her to move in with me? Will my new roommate be willing to help me out with her? If she moves in with me, will I ever get any work done again? Will I ever be able to travel? What about sleeping? And how can I get her in and out of my house without a ramp?