Hospice Recert
When Colleen came from hospice yesterday to check on Mom for recertification, I was a little worried. Mom’s vitals, as reported weekly by the case nurse, have been looking pretty good to me. What if Mom becomes ineligible for hospice care?
We’ll just have to make do without their help, and thank God that Mom is doing better.
When I asked Colleen how Mom looked to her, she answered immediately, “Oh, she’s recertified all right.” Her tone and expression said “Duh.”
Mom hasn’t looked good to me in a long time. When we had a new caregiver in last week I told her bluntly, “You’re going into that room, and what you’re going to see is a skinny old woman lying in a bed with a catheter.” Which is terrible sentence structure. She’s been that way ever so long. Forever, even. But the photos I have been sorting tell another tale.
Last night Claire and I spoke of things Mom used to to, and when we realized she had stopped doing them. My mother, a lifelong reader who never set foot outside the house unless she had a book tucked into her purse, stopped reading several years ago. It dawned on my sister one day when Mom wanted Claire to entertain her in a doctor’s waiting room.
My mother, who used to make crossword puzzles, stopped doing them months ago. She used to complain that the puzzles they put out these days were too easy. The last puzzle book I bought her was Great Crosswords for Kids. It still sits on a table by her bed, a vestige of her past life. About a dozen of the puzzles have a few words filled in, in her increasingly shaky handwriting. In some cases, I can see where she scrawled the answer next to the question, but apparently could not figure out where “15 down” was.
What’s really hitting Claire, though, is that fact that she can’t get Mom to cooperate in tooth brushing any more. “Our mother,” says Claire, incredulously. “who used to brush and floss assiduously, can’t even swish the water around in her mouth and spit. She just swallowed it down.”
To me, this is just in keeping with everything else. Claire goes on, “I had to throw away her electric toothbrush, the one she was so excited about when I first bought it for her. Just seeing it there in the trash….” she trails off.
Mom used to take us to the dentist every six months for a cleaning and checkup. When the exciting new WaterPik came out in the 1970s, our penny-pinching mother bought one for us. She saw to it that our teeth were straightened. Until recently, she expressed pride in the fact that she still had all her teeth.
I think that Claire is mourning, and I am putting it off till later. Sometimes the whole thing hits me, and I have to pull off the freeway and have a good, blinding cry. But I always drive home afterwards and walk into Mom’s room with a smile. Because she doesn’t know what she has lost, and she is not mourning at all.
It is better to go to a house of mourning
Than to go to a house of feasting,
Because that is the end of every man,
And the living takes it to heart.
Ecclesiastes 7:2
