My mother, Milli, is 87 and has been cheerfully planning her exit for years. Living will, executed power of attorney, key to the safe deposit box and the names of the lawyer, doctor and financial planner were sent to me decades ago, along with jolly “Death to me is just another adventure” missives. My name has been on her checking account for 20 years, so that I can start paying the bills before rigor mortis sets in, a Depression-era concern I have never been able to dispel.
“What do you care if they get the electricity check a few weeks late?” I say to my mother. “You’ll be dead.”
“The checks are in the bottom drawer in the computer room,” Ma says. “You won’t have any problems.”
Of course, when that check-writing day arrived late last month and I got the call that my mother had had a major stroke at her home in Daytona Beach, Fla., my right arm was in a cast because I had shattered my wrist in a bike accident three weeks earlier.
Yes, folks, the person my mother designated to write her checks now can’t write checks for herself (and that is why my column has been on hiatus since Sept. 14). “Man plans, God laughs,” the expression that makes me regret being an atheist. I can’t drive, either. But it was off to join my two younger brothers at the hospital to see what was left of our mother.
“You gonna write about this?” Ma says when I arrive a few days later. “You should. You got plenty of material.”
Sounds O.K. Then she’s instantly off the tracks.
“They’re torturing me,” she says. “They stole my orange. I had it on the bottom of the refrigerator and they stole it. I’m gonna sue when I get out. I’m thinking 10 G’s. That sound right to you?”
She cannot stand, let alone walk. Her left arm and leg are not moving. When the doctor asks what year it is, she says 1914. Her politics, however, remain intact.
“Who’s the president, Mrs. Wadler?” the doctor asks.
“Obama, the big liar,” Ma says.
Her personality has also remained essentially unchanged. She wants all the medical people who walk into the room to read an article I wrote about a road trip we took in California that stars her and was recently reprinted in Reader’s Digest. She’d had one of my brothers bring it from the condo, along with her Book of Psalms.
This is very flattering: King Solomon and me, neck and neck, though in Ma’s head it is more likely King Solomon and her, neck and neck. She even recommends the story to me, on one of the days she does not recognize me.
“There’s a funny story in that magazine over there,” she says. “You should read it.”
“I wrote it, Ma,” I tell her. “But thanks.”
This has to be one of the modern circles of hell, stroke. Or should we call it our plague? One day my mother is walking two miles on the beach and doing crossword puzzles in ink. The next day her brain explodes and she is talking about a new way to do CT scans, with a cat on her chest, hahaha.
Friends from the condo and the synagogue and the ham radio club come in, and you can read the fear of the future in their eyes as they take it in.
Stroke. Again. Oh, boy, and it’s bad. We sat next to each other at the opera club and now she doesn’t even know me.
Sometimes they drag me into the hall, hoping to stave off fear with good news from the miracle workers. What are the doctors saying? Subtext:
Will she always be like this? When it’s my turn, will I be like this? Please, God, let mine be mild. A little weakness in my arm, I can live with that. Just don’t touch the brain.
“They’re torturing me here,” my mother tells them, as Fox News, to which she has fallen asleep for years, plays silently in the background. “I’ve got Ebola. I have ISIS.”
My best friend, Herb, who has flown in from New York after my brothers have to leave, to drive me to the hospital and Ma’s financial planner and the Publix and to forge my signature on checks, figures it out. The crawl on Fox is shooting out scare words and Ma’s brain has them linked.
“ISIS isn’t a disease, it’s a terrorist group, Milli,” says Herb, who has known my mother for 40 years.
“I’ve got ISIS,” Ma insists. “I’m gonna make them test me.”
Which is not to say the basic personality has disappeared. It’s just a little rawer. I always thought Ma was pure id, saying whatever came into her head, but now we are really down to bedrock. Sitting in a visitors’ lounge or the dining hall, she shouts out news about her digestive tract that you would hesitate to confide to your primary physician.
On good days she’s close to the old Ma, joking with Herb, saying that the applesauce in the cafeteria is the only thing they haven’t managed to kill. On bad days she doesn’t recognize him or tells me about the batch of kittens that somebody dropped off at the hospital, and I sit on the floor out of her line of vision and cry.
Herb and I stay at Ma’s condo, a shrine to off-brand peanut butter and ’70s orange sheets and towels with ducks on them. Two days in, my guts are frozen and I am getting up in the middle of the night, every night. I set about organizing Ma’s walk-in closet.
I throw out interconnected, corroded, vertical skirt hangers that make the closet look like a World War I barbed-wire no man’s land. I remove wadded-up tissues and hidden $20 bills from cracked plastic handbags. I get skinny, bright pink and velvety black Velcro hangers and separate silky synagogue blouses and casual knit tops, trying to hang things up perfectly with my one good hand.
I throw out shelves jerry-built from plastic milk cartons and scraps of plywood. I make Herb drive to the malls, where I buy even more Velcro hangers, dozens and dozens. When my bad hand starts to throb, I sit down on the floor and admire how beautifully the closet is coming along.
Four a.m., 6 a.m., left to right: knit shirts, pedal pushers, casual skirts, dress skirts, good pants, synagogue blouses, good suits. Lower level, cold-weather clothes for going north. Boxes on opposite wall, waist level; shorts, because you wear a lot of shorts in Florida. Shoes where Ma can easily see them, though I have to get them where she can more easily reach them, off the floor.
“What are you doing?” Herb asks one daybreak, hearing me.
“I’m making it nice for her when she comes home,” I say.
Then I amend it.
“I’m trying to fix it,” I say. “I’m trying to make believe it can be fixed.”