Thursday, August 19, 2004
Yet another e excerpt:
August 19, 2004 - 0722
By the way, my mother is being released tomorrow...She's doing incredibly well, is ready to come home and I am more than ready to have her home again. I've decided I'm not going to give in to her desire to sleep all day and all night or sit in her rocker when she's upright and her eyes are open. Since she's gotten used to the routine at the nursing home of arising at a decent hour and doing something that involves movement every morning and afternoon and she's doing really, really well on that routine I'm not going to change it. I'm very pleased that I discovered, pre-nursing home, that I can "whup" her up when she refuses to arise. I think it's going to come in handy until she realizes that going home doesn't also mean going back to bed for the rest of her life.
...one of the...nurses told me that Mom thinks I'm her sister. That's cool. She and MS tried hard to take advantage of their proximity in the last years of MS's life and enjoyed a bond they'd never had a chance to develop during the first part of their lives. It was incredibly frustrating for Mom when MS developed serious health problems and dementia. I've been a lot of people to Mom since she and I began living together and she became "less intellectually agile". It's not only an honor to me that she thinks, somewhere in the recesses of her mind, that I'm MS but I believe this bodes well for our future. I could ask nothing more than to be thought of as the sister
Mom has always wished she could know better and with whom she could enjoy more time.
So, I don't know, MFASRF. It's possible that my mother will live to be 120, or, like Methuselah, of whom she has talked and joked ever since I was a kid, she won't die, she'll be "gathered up", in which case I guess I'd better plan on becoming immortal. Which means The Girls will have to become immortal. Not that I've wanted to live forever, I don't even want to live to be old, but if my mother lives forever and The Girls cooperate, being immortal would have its compensations.
It is so cool to accompany her walkering around the nursing home like a human dust devil, this tiny, old woman with her hair teased and piled on her head (I've insisted on keeping her hair done while she's been in the nursing home...having her hair done is one of the "secrets" to her continued existence and energy), her mouth tight with determination, stopping here and there to snoop into other people's lives through the doors of their rooms, making astute, funny comments about each resident as she wheels to the next door and the next discovery.
By the way, my mother is being released tomorrow...She's doing incredibly well, is ready to come home and I am more than ready to have her home again. I've decided I'm not going to give in to her desire to sleep all day and all night or sit in her rocker when she's upright and her eyes are open. Since she's gotten used to the routine at the nursing home of arising at a decent hour and doing something that involves movement every morning and afternoon and she's doing really, really well on that routine I'm not going to change it. I'm very pleased that I discovered, pre-nursing home, that I can "whup" her up when she refuses to arise. I think it's going to come in handy until she realizes that going home doesn't also mean going back to bed for the rest of her life.
...one of the...nurses told me that Mom thinks I'm her sister. That's cool. She and MS tried hard to take advantage of their proximity in the last years of MS's life and enjoyed a bond they'd never had a chance to develop during the first part of their lives. It was incredibly frustrating for Mom when MS developed serious health problems and dementia. I've been a lot of people to Mom since she and I began living together and she became "less intellectually agile". It's not only an honor to me that she thinks, somewhere in the recesses of her mind, that I'm MS but I believe this bodes well for our future. I could ask nothing more than to be thought of as the sister
Mom has always wished she could know better and with whom she could enjoy more time.
So, I don't know, MFASRF. It's possible that my mother will live to be 120, or, like Methuselah, of whom she has talked and joked ever since I was a kid, she won't die, she'll be "gathered up", in which case I guess I'd better plan on becoming immortal. Which means The Girls will have to become immortal. Not that I've wanted to live forever, I don't even want to live to be old, but if my mother lives forever and The Girls cooperate, being immortal would have its compensations.
It is so cool to accompany her walkering around the nursing home like a human dust devil, this tiny, old woman with her hair teased and piled on her head (I've insisted on keeping her hair done while she's been in the nursing home...having her hair done is one of the "secrets" to her continued existence and energy), her mouth tight with determination, stopping here and there to snoop into other people's lives through the doors of their rooms, making astute, funny comments about each resident as she wheels to the next door and the next discovery.
