My Saturday morning visits aren’t as long as they used to be. If I make it to 15 minutes, it’s a good week. Lately, I’m out after 10 minutes.
She lays in her bed, awaiting the delivery of her breakfast. She refuses to eat in the common area with others on her floor, so she is among the last on her floor to get her tray, especially on weekends when staffing is so light. Last weekend, there were two people assigned to her floor with a bunch of others floating in and out as needed.
“Hi Jared.”
“Hi Mar.”1
“What did you bring me?”
“Same thing I bring every week. Pizzelles2 and chocolate.”
“Did you bring chocolate?”
I show her the boxes of gold-wrapped Ferrero Rocher chocolates.
“How are the girls3?”
“They’re good. School is fine. We’re keeping them busy but they’re trying to drive us insane.”
“What’s the weather like?”
“Cold and it snowed last night. Just kind of gray and gloomy.”
“What did you bring me?”
“Chocolate and pizzelles.”
“What’s the weather like?”
“Cold and gray. It snowed last night.”
“How are the girls?”
“They’re fine. Busy with school.”
“Is there a holiday this week?”
“Yes. President’s Day is on Monday and it’s the school break week.”
“What’s the weather like?”
“Cold.”
“Did you bring chocolate?”
“Yes.”
“Show it to me.”
I open the drawer and show her the box of Ferrero Rocher again.
“Do you know Allison Sweeney?”4
“Not personally. She’s an actress who does Hallmark movies and used to be in Days of Our Lives.”
“Look her up.”
“What do you want to know about her?”
“I don’t know.”
“How are the girls?”
“They’re fine.”
“Do I have black pants?”
Opens the closet long enough to look at two pairs of gray pants. Her black pants are in a bin of dirty clothes.
“Yes, Mar.”
“What’s the weather like?”
I glance at my watch. I’ve been in the room for six minutes. This is the hardest I have worked all week. I’m talking to a ghost, some woman in a bed whose bills I pay.
My aunt? She left almost seven years ago. The dog ran away from home.
A quick aside. I know what this is. I’ve accepted that my aunt has advanced from a mild cognitive impairment to dementia-related memory loss. It’s how I also know that I could stay there for 15 minutes or 15 hours and it wouldn’t matter. She has no concept of time and is just happy to see me. She measures time by meal delivery.
Does the diagnosis matter when all of the symptoms point to Alzheimer’s? We’re not searching for answers to what’s happening with a spry 60-year-old. My aunt turns 85 this year; 1 in 3 Americans over that age have Alzheimer’s. She’s safe and comfortable. I’m not sure what a diagnosis, and the associated CAT and PET scans, would accomplish beyond heightening her anxiety and giving the facility another billing code to use.
Mark Twain allegedly said or wrote5, “It doesn't matter the size of the dog in the fight, rather the size of the fight in the dog.”
My aunt was a pain in the ass, a label given to outspoken women in 1960s and 1970s. If she or someone was being wronged or she disagreed with your position, she fought back. Hard. Your feelings? Fuck your feelings. She hit harder than you did. Her dog was often bigger than the fight at hand.
As a schoolteacher, she antagonized her board of education in advocacy of her students. She antagonized her union for not following their rules. She fought for her students, teaching them the way she thought was right, embracing the difficult cases — special needs, problems at home, general pains in the asses — as challenges that only she could solve.
As a devout Catholic, she antagonized the church for limiting the role of women. She spat fire about Pope John Paul II and would shit-talk the local bishop if she didn’t like him. No dog is big enough for that fight.
As an aunt? Tough. Fair. Loving. My aunt never married. She would tell my sister that she didn’t need a man and that she was perfectly capable of doing things a man could6. She lugged my cousins, sister, and me to Disney World more times than I can count; she made it so my oldest was able to go, I was still toiling for a nonprofit. We were surrogate children to her, and she an extension of the matrilineal forces that ruled our family.
As an adult, she was a trusted source of advice for me, always with an open ear and the disclaimer that “you may not like what I’m going to say.”
When my mother was near the end, she was a constant presence at our house. After she passed, my aunt stepped up into some of the roles my mother wasn’t around to fill. She co-hosted the wedding shower when my sister and I got married, was there for our college graduations, and was among the first to get her hands on both of my kids after they were born.
She also became reliable childcare for me when we lived about a mile apart. When my oldest would spend a school holiday with her, Aunt Mar made sure no learning loss occurred. She ran age-appropriate program for her; reading and math mixed with play.
My aunt began acting erratically during the late summer of 2017. She was more eccentric, impulse buying things that didn’t make a ton of sense, but she had always been impulsive and a little flighty so I ignored it.
I don’t remember the exact day. She called me and told me that she couldn’t sleep in her house. It was a dungeon and she was trapped. I told her to watch a movie and fall asleep in her chair like she normally did. She wanted me to come down and stay there. I refused to leave my wife alone with our three(ish)-month old, knowing that my aunt would eventually demand that I not to go to work and stay there for the day. And the next day. And the one after that.
The dog forfeited.
Her friends jumped in to help, staying the night, as they were able. None of us knew exactly what was going on. The first good night of sleep she got came after the worst possible day. A friend stopped by to check on her, letting herself in and found her catatonic in her chair. I got a call, left work and took her to the hospital. She had not slept in nearly three days. After running bloodwork and other tests, she was discharged to CPEP7. I went home.
At about 2 a.m., I was called by the CPEP nurse to pick her up. Marietta had been seen by a psychiatrist and was being discharged because it was no longer safe for her to be there. When the nurse buzzed the door to let her out, she took off like a bat out of hell in her hospital gown and slippers. I grabbed her belongings, we went to the car, and she told me that she never wanted to go there again.
She went home and slept for 18 hours. I began looking for a place for her to live.
I was still in the aging services realm at the time and was able to get her into an independent living facility. She still came to our house for holidays and events, but she didn’t have the trouble of a house. There was a community. She could come and go as she pleased. I visited weekly to put out her meds and would stay for about an hour to visit and chat like we used to.
It was all fine until it wasn’t.
Slowly, she forfeited control to the anxiety. My loving, caring aunt became a cruel, selfish woman. She refused to come to family gatherings because my niece was evil. She knew full well that my niece was autistic, but it didn’t matter.
She wouldn’t do activities at the facility because all everyone did was gamble8. No one wanted to eat with her because she preferred to eat in quiet without conversation. It wasn’t just that she was trying to avoid conversation, she would shush people at her table that were trying to talk.
Covid exacerbated matters when her building was locked down to outside guests. I could still visit, but only to put out her pills. Our Saturdays were spent six feet apart; she got a little conversation but I was under orders to come and go. Her TV remained off, paranoid that she would screw something up with the remote. So there she sat.
In her room. A dungeon. Alone.
Three falls in 12 months puts you into a position where an independent living facility is no longer able to sufficiently care for your needs. So, skilled nursing became the next stop on our journey.
Life is about the fight. When you get knocked down, you stand back up and get back in the game. I’ve wondered what happened in the case of my aunt. Is this just some bitter old Italian lady shit? “I took care of you, now it’s your turn to take care of me.”9 Did something deeper, something she never wanted to confront, trigger an anxiety-fueled maelstrom that swamped the boat, leading her to believe that forfeiting was better than admitting and dealing with it?10
Or, was she so tired from a lifetime of fighting that there was no fight left in the dog?
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― Patrick Ness, The Rest of Us Just Live Here
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It’s pronounced “mair,” short for Marietta.
For the uninitiated, these are buttery Italian cookies made with a special press that looks like a waffle iron. I buy them at the grocery store.
My daughters.
This new obsession with Sammy from Days started a month or so ago. She asked me about her and I had to look her up to refresh my memory. Five minutes later, a commercial came on for a Hallmark movie starring her.
One of the most misquoted people in literature.
Though she is/was right, there is more than a bit of irony here.
In New York, CPEP is the Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program.
They took 10-cent bets for the Kentucky Derby and boards for SU games.
This runs strong in my family.
I think that your aunt and I would have been great colleagues.
My mom is pretty much non verbal at this point, her word recall was amongst the first major signs something was wrong. We don’t know anymore how much of her silence is her being unaware or just being unable to make the words happen. Visits are short and horrible, for me, not for her.