Age 40, last year
“I don’t want to watch anymore.”
“I’ll fast forward this part.”
“No. It doesn’t matter. I’m already messed up over it.”
“Well, I was really looking forward to watching this.”
“So fucking watch it, then!”
“Hey! What is wrong with you? Why are you talking to me like that?”
I always had a mouth on me but even still my unsuspecting husband wasn’t used to me talking like this, much less to him. We had started to watch a movie/documentary. Most people would be concerned while watching but clearly my reaction was much bigger than that.
So I fling myself from the couch, shaking, lip already trmebling and barrel down the hallway, the scene from the film a virtual photograph in my mind that refuses to go away.
The woman in the film clip, caught on surveilance camera, was dropped off by a taxi in a hospital robe. She laboriously ambled into the street, turned around, and hobbled the other direction aimlessly. Later it was revealed that the woman, indigent and without resources or a home, was dropped off this way intentionally due to directives from a hospital where she had been discharged.
The woman was my mother. Not factually or literally my mother. But I had seen my mother in this state. My beautiful mess of a mother.
So, when I started to try to say what was bothering me with Joe’s arms around me, I did not know where to begin. He had a vague idea that my mother was an alcoholic, that she had been homeless for a time before she passed away and that the whole thing was tragic.
But it was in this moment that I got it that people could not imagine the impact of the details that made the whole – unless I told them. So, I asked Joe what he wanted to know. And that’s where this memoir started. He listed things he had had questions about, including why that movie freaked me out so much. I started responding, to which responses you are now privy.
Disability
Age 30, Mom age 52
I’m filling out the form that has the ever-so-slight chance of getting my mom a place to stay once she’s discharged from the hospital, which the staff want to do now.
I try to picture this woman who is days away from having called me a “Brewsky” in an awful state of detox, who the doctor says should have been dead by now, not even able to stand, and on so many medications that I doubt she could spell her name being discharged onto the Houston streets, right outside the Ben Taub Hospital – not an especially nice place.
What would have happened to her if I hadn’t been there? Would she have been put out already?
She’s not just homeless, she’s not just an alcoholic. She’s violently, incurably ill. She needs round the clock medical care. But to society, and to this hospital, she is a throw away.
Certainly she had a part in that. Some part of her had the guts and the defiance to turn her back on regular rules and tell it all to fuck off. Her choice.
I never expected any other individual or society or even myself to make her better or to save her from her own consequences when she ostensibly could have made another choice.
This is different. She is now physically, medically, mentally in every way unable to care for herself.
When this happens to your mother or grandmother, you call in a nurse, or put her in a nursing home, or assisted living. Well, when your parents are divorced, your mom never could get sober, her family is all dead or worse off than she is, and you are a single parent and teacher, calling in a nurse is not an option. Extended care at a hospital or other facility is not, either.
I get educated on these cold, hard facts the way getting struck by lightning educates someone to come in out of the rain. Or the way getting bitten by a shark educates someone not to swim by the Farrallon Islands. I am mortally wounded and at the same time trying to navigate a solution. I am completely unprepared and unequipped to handle my mother’s disease or her imminent death emotionally. This is the sea I am drowning in. I am also unprepared practically and financially, as is she, even though I am a hardworking, tax paying citizen. But the state will put her out on the streets. The lack of care as well as the dangers on the street are the sharks in the water in which I am drowning.
In this state, it’s hard to think of my name and address. It’s hard to think of Mom’s. Well, the address is easy. But what do I write? How will I ever find her social security number? She doesn’t even know where head is right now. Besides, there is no home in which to search through file cabinets with any files at all! It’s impossible. It can’t be done. I should just give up.
I argue with myself. I fight my own will and get through that God forsaken document one damned blank at a time. Mother's Maiden Name: done. Mother's Father: deceased. Check.
I hand it to the social service worker, knowing that the chances that my mom will get to see any benefits from it before she dies are slim to nill.
Then I pray.
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