Final Hours

I’ve been working on this for a few years. Don’t we all love our Draft folder? Enough time has passed, and enough words have been massaged that sharing this feels ok.

The call finally came. The one I knew would come. The one I’d been expecting, at some level or another, for many years. Whether it would be an auto accident with ancillary damages, the house burnt down around her, or that she did herself in stoking the fire, tipping onto the antique 16” wide iron cleat that fronted the fireplace, knocking herself out on its cauterizingly hot iron… too much to drink on top of Ambien, who was to know. 

These were only some of the nightmares I toyed with while mom was living independently in two homes, with Alzheimer’s, that required a ferry ride to navigate between. You see, she still drove despite my attempted interventions. There is a small island attorney who will confront St. Peter, and lose her argument that representing someone, anyone, is not worth the $10,000 she earned when she knew that her client had dementia (I have proof). Mom won the right to retest for her license, passed that test, and hit a car the very next day… 

She wiped out the 23 mailboxes of her country neighborhood subdivision on January 1, 2017. After I was unable to keep the local (and only) car rental/sales gal from renting mom a car, mom drove that car down a 10’ embankment on January 10th. This, ultimately, landed her in a very swanky, off-island, assisted living community where my daughter ran healthcare. It was ideal.

Mom struggled to adjust, for almost 4-years. She had lots and lots of good times (music, art, playing cards, outings, flower arranging, gardening, a cessation of isolation, which included making friends, joining the Men’s Club because the Women’s Club was too boring), and never let go of confabulating the next tale of why and who said it was OK for her to return home.

This call was the fourth serious one. Others were about falls. Distressing, yes, and foreboding. This call was about finding mom on her bathroom floor.

It was the May of 2020. The community was in Covid lockdown. Every resident was visited 6-times a day. This was likely Mom’s 6th visit… After dinner. She had hit her head on the bathroom counter on her way to the floor. We don’t know if the fall caused the stroke (not at all likely), or the stroke caused the fall (very likely).

It was a hemorrhagic stroke. When they found her she was able to speak. When EMS got there, still she was able to speak. When they got her to the hospital, she was speaking still. By the time I arrived, she was silent. The damage from the stroke had exerted its toll.

I declined heroic measures while driving 80MPH to get to Mom. The ER doc, when I asked her why this decision was such a clear one to make while driving at excessive speed, was very kind, and asked me to make sure I would not be her next ER patient. 

If Mom had survived the stroke, she would never have been able to access rehab in an efficacious way, never have been able to follow through with all of the therapists’ instructions, never had what she would have considered a reasonable quality of life again. Surviving a significant stroke, if indeed she had, doesn’t fix significant dementia. In the best of her assisted living days, she was unable to independently follow through with physical therapy exercises without direct help. She was starting from a place of such neurological deficiency, before a stroke, that to torture her with an attempted recovery seemed cruel. The ER doctor said I was giving my Mom a gift. The gift of letting go.