Shit you wish you never had to do

This isn't a history-oriented post at all and I apologize for using this as a journal.

I put my mom in a nursing home today. This is by far the most fucked up thing I've ever had to do. My mom is one of those women who, through pure force of her will and the preservative powers of bitterness and venom, you thought would live to be 130 and be sharp enough to make your life miserable until you died and she buried your ass. It's been bizarre and confusing to come to grips with the fact that she's a frail old lady with dementia (and maybe worse) at the relatively young age of 74.

I have a hard time looking her in the face now.

Her dementia has been a creeping problem for the last 6 or more years. When I moved back to California after leaving Yale in the summer of 2004, I was shocked to observe how much she'd declined since I moved away 5 years before. When my parents lost their house in 2008, she seemed to fall off even worse. In the last couple of months, she has no short term memory left at all. She asks the same question every 5 minutes. Things that happen every week at the same time on the same day take her by surprise. She doesn't leave the house. She forgot how to do laundry. She can't cook or clean anymore.

It really got fucked up on St. Patrick's Day. In retrospect, it was coming on slowly, but the signs were all there. At any rate, on St. Patty's day she seemed to go wonky all of a sudden. She couldn't walk. She mumbled complete nonsense. She thought I was her sister, Roseline. She thought my husband was her brother in-law, Bobby. She thought my daughter was her nephew, Derrick. When we took her to the emergency room, she gave her maiden name as her last name but passed all the stroke-recognition tests. She conked out in the ER cubicle on the gurney and pretty much didn't wake up for longer than 10 minutes for the next 4 days.

The ER doctor diagnosed a urinary tract infection, put her on Cipro, re-hydrated her, got her potassium levels stabilized, then released her 4 days later. Within two hours she was back in the ER, incoherent again. They kept her another 2 days and then, 2 days later, she was back in the ER again. They let her go that night, then another 3 days later she was back again. The doctors theorized everything from Effexor withdrawal symptoms to fluid on the brain.

The ER visits are exhausting, mainly for me and my sister. My dad turns 78 this year. He's just too old and tired from taking care of her other needs to cope with the ER drama. I don't blame him, I feel sorry for him. He loves my mom with this patient, protective ferocity. He doesn't want any kind of outside caregiver to help him with my mom. He says "I'll take care of her as long as I can." That means wearing himself out cooking, cleaning, helping her remember to take her pills and dress and pay bills and pretty much everything, and, most of all, enduring her constant complaining and questioning.

That came to an end Tuesday night when my mom came home, disoriented, from her 4th and most recent ER trip (a 9 hour affair at the Stanford Medical Center) and mistook the desk chair for the toilet. Although we're periodically able to laugh about that night (mainly so we don't cry), the experience of bathing my mom after that incident continues to haunt me. The next day she didn't remember anything of what happened, but even in her normal state, I still can't look at her the same way again. It's like she's possessed and I can't trust that the person inside is the real mom.

I know this is childish. I'm supposed to bring my daughter to the nursing home to visit this afternoon, but I just can't bring myself to leave the house. On one hand, I can't reconcile normal mom with the incontinent woman I scrubbed down in the bathtub, so I'm profoundly uncomfortable in her presence. On the other hand, because she was normal mom when I took her to the home this morning, I'm overcome with sorrow when I see her--young-looking and clear-headed--in this meat locker full of octogenarians asleep in their wheelchairs in the hallways.

Dad just called. He says she's "happy as a clam" because she got to attend mass today at the home for the first time since she broke her wrist at Thanksgiving. I hope so.