Remembering Mom: She Wanted to Live and Go Home the Last Time I Visited with Her

A memory came up in my Facebook feed today. It was the third anniversary of a post I made after visiting Mom for the last time. We did not know it was the last time at the time. My post was not about it being our last face-to-face visit. March 9, 2020 was also the date that more than 100 cases of COVID-19 were discovered at a nursing home in King County, which prompted an immediate halt to visiting patients in nursing homes and hospitals the next day. 

I don't recall if my older sister told me that Mom had been transferred to a nursing home the morning of the 9th or the day before, but it was the day Mom was transferred. I am thankful to this day for her keeping me advised about Mom and what was going on. I would not have liked visiting her in the hospital and finding an empty bed where I expected to see her. 

She also told me in that conversation that our sister who had "the plan" for Mom to live with her was probably going to have her move into a long-term care facility rather than accommodate her home for something as unpredictable as Mom was going to need accommodations for a wheelchair. 

Who could possibly have predicted that the person I said would need wheelchair accommodations ten years before she moved in would not be able to navigate the two stairs that my sister had in her home without accommodating for a wheelchair to navigate them . . . besides me, of course . . . well, and anybody who was observing her decline in mobility? If Mom had known that my sister would consider her too much of an inconvenience to accommodate her needs within two years of moving in with her, she may have preferred my plan that I buy a place that would accommodate wheelchairs that would work for her as she aged and would then work for me as I age. 

To me, this was another consequence of my sister's pattern of always waiting to deal with predictable problems until they become emergencies. However, I also knew that my sister wanted to move to Texas as soon as possible, and Mom put her foot down that she was not moving to Texas. I took Mom's side on that argument. After all, it was similar to when Mom had my sister tell me that she was putting her foot down about selling her house because "the plan was for Mom to move in with her when she was unable to live in her own home," except that Mom was obviously not aware of the part of "the plan" that they would be moving her to Texas. By then, it had been about a dozen years of declining mobility since when I told Mom and my siblings that we should deal with her ability to function in a two-story house with a basement, and that I could deal with my future needs in doing so. They all refused to discuss the problem even as she was told that she needed a walker to navigate flat ground. 

Here she was, destined for life in long-term care because she did not truly know what "the plan" included. Anyway, sour grapes aside, here is my post from three years ago today:

I am going through a bit of depression today, but the source of it is easy to identify. I went to visit my mom today. She is in a nursing home recovering from some complications from a recent surgery. That isn't the depressing part. She would have needed rehab after this surgery.

She had been having trouble walking prior to the surgery. It is also a massive job to take care of her needs. I know. I did it, and the magnitude of the job has only increased since I was relieved of my duties to care for her.

Though I have no duty to care for her, I love her and care about her.

One of the administrative people came in while I was visiting. She wanted Mom to sign some papers after making the decision whether or not she would like to have a DNR order on file. She did not want that. It seemed to surprise the lady, as if everyone but mom knows that she is more likely in hospice than rehab.

That isn't even the depressing part. It is good that she has the will to live. It is why she has the will to live that is depressing. She says that she will get to go home when she is able to walk, but she was getting so bad at walking that I was told that we should get together to talk about what to do if she needed to be in a wheelchair.

Apparently, the plan that overrode my suggestion nearly a decade ago that we get a place that can accommodate a wheelchair was that she would move into my sibling's home. What was not part of the plan was to make some modifications to accommodate a wheelchair because, you know, I don't know why. Perhaps, it was just with the deep seeded hope that Mom would die before needing a wheelchair.

It was a crappy plan, and it was made crappier by a decision to give standing only to the person with the plan that didn't include her needing to use a wheelchair, which is the likely reality for the rest of her life.

I sure wish I had gotten into more fistfights rather than not dealing with predictable problems to keep a false pretense of peace. If not that, I wish I could be blissful about things like this, and then pretend that Mom getting older was some sort of surprise.

I recall the surprise on the social worker's face when Mom said she did not want to sign a DNR order. I remember the sullen feeling I had when she said she intended to go home, but she had not been told by my sibling that she was not coming home. If she were to recover, the plan according to what I was told was to find a place that could accommodate her because my sister had no plans to make her home wheelchair accessible.

She hadn't bothered to tell Mom that. It was not my duty to tell her, and I certainly didn't want to be the one to bear the truth to her since my siblings like to attack the messenger rather than deal with the truth.

I wonder if Mom would have approved "the plan" that I was not in on developing if she had known that "the plan" would only accommodate her if her declining health somehow remained static from that point forward. She may have then listened to the logic that a plan that does not take into account time, and the effects time has on aging and predictably declining health, was not a good plan for her.

If my sister had been honest with Mom that she only intended to care for her if she would move to Texas with her when my sister was ready to move, Mom may also have considered a different plan. 

It will be three years ago tomorrow that the no visitation order would be put in place. Even then, I did not know that would be the last time I ever saw Mom alive. It will be three years ago that she died in about a month-and-a-half. 

What was said about David Letterman when Bill Hicks died could also be said about my sister and her plan for Mom: dying means never having to say you are sorry.