Disability and Powerlessness
Age 30, Mom age 52
They wanted to release her. Release her? Where? This trip to the hospital – this time because she had been assaulted – had also resulted in the only home she had - her car - being impounded for having no registration.
She was just a little bit better off than dead. Release her?
Two nights before in her hospital room my only thought had been “tie her down with the straps. Please. She is weak. She shouldn’t move.” She was detoxing so violently that she was out of touch with reality. Hallucinating. Just strong enough to move and fall out of the bed in her flailing attempts to get me to “bring [her] a brewsky!”
She reached and clawed. The worst mixture of love, sympathy, empathy, disgust, sorrow, nausea.
That’s what I felt. It actually swallowed me. I was bound by it as sure as the canvas straps of her hospital bed bound my mother.
Her skin looked like some kind of leather dyed yellow; she was dying of alcohol-related cirrhosis. Her stomach was actually eating itself and she was found unconscious, hemorrhaging from mouth and anus in an abandoned gas station parking lot. The male voice that called the ambulance called to let me know, and remained anonymous.
Nothing soothed her. Not the Ativan, nor the pain killers. She was wild and virtually psychotic. I was completely helpless; I could not help her. To watch her was torture. So, I did the only thing that I could imagine. I began to sing a prayer that she used to sing to me. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound. Immediately she looked up at me, mouth agape. Her eyes attempted to focus. I kept singing: that saved a wretch like me. She began to sing with me, “I once was lost…” I smiled at her, and she at me, “but now am found, was blind but now I see.”
I tried to picture this woman who the doctor said should have been dead by now being discharged onto the Houston streets, right outside the Ben Taub County Hospital.
I demanded that they keep her. They told me I could take it up with the social workers on staff.
What would have happened to her if I hadn’t been there? Would she have been put out already?
I made my way to the social workers’ office where I found the concrete bricks for walls were painted a dingy yellow, and the offices behind the door window dark. Clearly, hardly anyone was there. Someone tentatively stepped out, “Can I help you?”
“Yes, I need to speak to a social worker. The hospital wants to release my mother but she has nowhere to go. She’s homeless and extremely ill, on the verge of death. She’s also an addict and in a state of detox, and not safe to keep with me.”
She was not just homeless; she was not just an alcoholic. She was violently, incurably ill. She needed round the clock medical care. But to society, and to this hospital, she was 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 was different. She was 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.
“Well, the social workers aren’t here, but you can fill out this paperwork to try to get her some disability insurance from Social Security. That usually takes a long time, though, and lots of folks die before the paperwork ever goes through.”
She delivered this mean fact like I had on a suit of armor that the terrible news could not penetrate. I got educated 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 was mortally wounded and at the same time trying to navigate a solution, completely unprepared and unequipped to handle my mother’s disease or her imminent death emotionally. This was the sea and I was drowning in it. I was also unprepared practically and financially, as was she, even though I was a hardworking, tax paying citizen. But the state would put her out on the streets. The lack of care and the dangers on the street were sharks in the sea where I was drowning.
I sat and did the only things I could. I held the old, brown clipboard on my lap and filled out the paperwork that had the ever-so-slight chance of getting Mom a place to stay once she was discharged from the hospital. In that state, it was hard to think of my name and address. It was hard to think of Mom’s. Well, the address was easy. But what should I write? How would I ever find her social security number? She didn’t even know where head was. Besides, there was no home in which to search through file cabinets with any files at all! It was impossible. It couldn’t be done. I thought I should just give up.
I argued with myself. I fought my own will and got through that God forsaken document one damned blank at a time. Mother's Maiden Name: done. Mother's Father: deceased. Check.
I handed it to the un-social worker, knowing that the chances that my mom would get to see any benefits from it before she died were slim to nil.
Then I prayed. This is the definition of powerlessness.
