LOSING MOM - Part 42

One morning, about midway through my week alone with Mom, I woke up to an email from Lib, back home in California, saying that when she’d called Hospice to get an update the night before, the nurse reported that Mom had told her earlier in the evening that she ‘just wanted to go to Maine’.

“Maybe she’s holding on to get there?” Lib wondered in her note. “Crazy I know, but maybe there’s a way to talk to her and let her know we would do anything in the world to get her there if she wants???”

Reading my sister’s words, my heart broke into a thousand pieces imagining Mom lying alone in her bed, in the middle of the night, confiding in some random nurse how she wished she could be in Maine, the place she loved best in all the world. If people could have soul places the same way they have soul mates, then our family’s summer camp on the St. Croix River in downeast Maine, where Mom had spent every summer of her life, was hers. The idea of Maine without Mom was one of the hardest things Sal, Lib and I were facing - it just seemed inconceivable she would never be there again.

How could it be we would never see her puttering around the kitchen again, fretting that there were too many leftovers in our tired, old fridge? Or standing at the porch rail watching her grand kids swim in the river below, maybe arguing with them that the tide just wasn't high enough to jump off the roof? Never see her catching that last bit of afternoon sun on the bench outside the front door, or walking across the gravel driveway to the bathhouse with just a towel wrapped around her?

No, Maine without Mom seemed impossible, and in that moment, hearing that she was still wishing she could go despite how sick she was, the idea of Mom without Maine felt equally unimaginable. We had to do something.

“I’m going to call and find out how much it would cost to get her there.” I wrote Lib back. “I guess we could just as easily sit in an ambulance on our way to Maine as in her room at Hospice talking about it.”

So I did. Having looked into the logistics of moving Mom to my house in Connecticut a few weeks earlier, I already had the name of an ambulance transport service I could call, and a few minutes later had their quote in hand: $6500 to get her from Perrysburg, Ohio to Robbinston, Maine, with an RN and oxygen included, plus room for me in the ambulance to go with her.

Not too bad, I thought, feeling a tingle of adrenaline at the possibility we might actually be able to pull this off.  $6500 was definitely a lot but, I reasoned, if Mom was in Maine then we wouldn’t need her apartment in Ohio anymore, so we’d be saving money by moving her.

I called Sal next because, well, it was only March and since the camp wasn’t winterized, Mom would actually have to stay with her and Paul in their farmhouse across the street, at least until the weather warmed up. But having spent her childhood summers in that same farmhouse, we were pretty sure Mom would be just as happy there as at the camp. Kind of like coming full circle back to where she started.

“What do you think?” I finally asked, after breathlessly explaining my idea. “Am I crazy to think we can do this?”

“I don’t think there’s anything any of us want more than for Mom to be here, looking out at her river, when she dies” Sal agreed, “so no, you’re not crazy. I’ll talk to Paul and start figuring things out on this end, but you probably need to talk to the doctor and see if they’d even let us take her.”

Propelled by the possibility of imminent action, of actually doing something to disrupt the lonely monotony of the past few days, I jumped out of bed and threw on my clothes. Rushing around the apartment as if late for a job, I grabbed all the things I’d need for the day - computer, phone, chargers, book, needlepoint - stuffing them hastily into my tote, before pulling on my coat and snatching up the car keys from the little pewter bowl Mom always kept them in. Locking the door behind me, I walked quickly down the long, carpeted hallway wishing, as I had since the day Mom had moved in the year before, that her apartment was closer to the elevator.

 Maybe she would have gone out more if she didn’t have to walk so far to get to it, I lamented for the millionth time as I pushed the button to go down. It was hard enough for me, a healthy 59 year-old, to schlep all my stuff down the long corridor, into the elevator, and out to the car. Imagine poor Mom, I thought, as the doors slid open in front of me, with her purse, and her walker and her oxygen. It must have been exhausting for her.

Grateful to have the elevator to myself and not have to make small talk with someone at such an early hour, I mindlessly stared at the brightly colored notices pinned to the wall in front of me, the same ones I’d been looking at for countless days. Chair Yoga, Movie Night, Daily Dinner Specials, Thursday Bridge...a myriad of choices to keep all the elderly residents busy and engaged. It had made me sad that Mom never wanted to join in on any of these activities, rarely making any effort to meet the other residents since she’d moved in. I have enough friends, she would tell me when I’d hesitantly suggest she try a little harder. I don’t need any more.

I suppose her reluctance was understandable - it takes an awful lot of energy to make new friends at any age, but even more so, I imagined, when you're 88 years old and all your friends are dying around you. But it was very unlike the mother I’d grown up with who’d always made a huge effort to meet new people, and insisted that her daughters do the same. When I was 14, a new family moved to Perrysburg with a daughter my age, and Mom made me ride my bike over to their house and introduce myself.

“Do I really have to?” I asked futilely, already knowing the answer, but really, really not wanting to go.

“Yes, Peg, you have to. How would you feel if you just moved here and didn’t know anyone?” Mom admonished, adding as she turned to leave my room, ‘It’s just the nice thing to do.”

As it turned out, Mom was right, and because she made me make that effort, the girl I grudgingly went to meet that day turned into one of my lifelong friends.

So yes, it had made me very sad to watch my once outgoing and social mother become somewhat reclusive when she moved into Swan Creek, but as I hurried across the empty lobby toward the main entrance, it occurred to me that maybe Mom had intuitively known she wouldn’t be there that long. That she would need her energy, not for making new friends or playing bridge or doing chair yoga, but for the ordeal that unknowingly lay ahead. Because, as we’d come to discover the past few weeks, dying is not always a passive process and, at least in Mom’s case, it can take an enormous amount of energy to let go.

Of course, that being said, I figured it couldn’t take that much more energy to lie in an ambulance stretcher driving cross country than in a hospital bed in a room at Hospice, especially if Mom knew where she was going. She’ll be so happy! I thought giddily as I pulled into the Hospice parking lot, the anticipation of telling her she was going to Maine making my pulse speed up.

But she was asleep when I got to her room a few minutes later, so I quietly hung up my coat, dropping my bag on the nearby table before tiptoeing back out to go find her nurse. But just as I got to the door, Mom’s aide walked in, so I excitedly told her about our plan.

‘Do you think they’ll let us do it?” I asked hopefully.

“It sounds like a wonderful idea”, she replied, smiling softly. ‘But let me go find Julie. She’ll know better than me.”

A few minutes later, Julie, one of Mom’s regular nurses and our absolute favorite, came into the room, and though she was smiling, she was also shaking her head slowly from side to side.

“No way?” I ventured, as we stood facing each other in the middle of the room.

“No way,” Julie concurred, though not unkindly.

“Even with a nurse on board to give her medications? And oxygen?” I pressed. “I think Mom would rather die in an ambulance if it meant there was a chance she could get to Maine.”

“I know she would,” Julie agreed, ‘but I’m afraid she would never make it. Not now. And the way things are,” she added gently, “if your mom were to pass somewhere between here and there, say the middle of Pennsylvania, the logistics get very complicated between medical examiners, and funeral homes…” her voice trailed off as she reached out to touch my hand. “I’m sorry. You girls are so sweet to want this for your mom. I wish it were different.”

“Me too,” I whispered sadly, looking over at my sleeping mother, thankful I hadn’t had a chance to get her hopes up, like I had my own. “I’d give anything to have it be different.”

To be continued...