For three difficult years, I tossed and turned, agonizing over how to help my mother. There was no mistaking the crisis; she was entangled in a train wreck that wouldn’t quit. Between her emphysema and her osteoporosis and her dodgy mind, she was in rough shape and no longer had the capacity to look out for herself. Adding torment to crisis, my impaired father was making things exponentially harder for her—and impeding my every attempt to intervene with zealous fury. 

My mother’s lungs were failing and her bones crumbling—but there she was, stumbling up stairways in her large split-level house, her 50 feet of oxygen tubing tangling under her feet, her knuckles white as she clung, gasping, to railings and walls. There she was panting over saucepans and plates and burning potatoes while my father impatiently awaited dinner in his armchair. There she was shuffling along, all 80 bony breathless pounds of her, to the basement washing machine, down three flights of stairs with her arms full of clothes and her oxygen tubes trailing and her forehead bruised from hitting the laundry tub on an earlier trip.

And recently, in the soaring heat of mid-July, there she was, her shoulders heaving, perspiration dripping down her deeply wrinkled face, my father making a show of opening the kitchen window while affixing duct tape over the turned-off switch for the air conditioner (“because sometimes she thinks she needs things,” he said—nearly knocking over the hairdresser I brought with me one scorching afternoon in his haste to block my path to the a/c thermostat—“but I know better”).

Her trays of medicine went untouched; her nebulizer gathered dust. There was rotten food in the ‘frig. She couldn’t bathe because my father consistently yanked out the bath chair and handheld shower I had installed in what had amounted to something like a guerilla action. Affronted, enraged, determined to regain sovereignity over house and wife, adamant that my mother was “doing just fine,” and increasingly tangled up in dementia’s tangles, by my father was harassing the home health aides I’d managed to shoehorn into the house, tenuously, two days a week. The concerned and resourceful Retha or Ifè would try to sneak into the filthy bathroom with a can of Lysol and there he’d be, close on their heels (“Don’t touch that faucet,” he’d warn, hovering, hectoring; “I’ll get a lawyer”).

How to extricate my mother from all this wreckage? I dreamt of crushed and twisted metal; I felt as though I needed, in every possible way, the Jaws of Life. I knew, tossing and turning, that I was out of my depth. Standing up to my father had been worse than worthless; it had seemed only to stir his blood; he became more pugnacious, more irrational, more fiercely combative.

My mother clearly needed to be wrested out of the house and into a supervised living arrangement. But how? Her doctors had proved to be of little help. Her pulmonary specialist, Dr. N., a sympathetic young woman whose soft voice carried a clipped British-inflection as well as an East Indian accent, saw my mother rarely, only long enough to cluck over the results of breathing tests her nurses had just completed with my mother. “You are doing remarkably well to be here at all with so little left of your lungs,” she said kindly to my mother, who had just managed to walk six feet in a test of respiratory function. “Just keep doing your best,” she concluded, smiling warmly at the end of these five-minute consults.

My mother’s primary care physician, Dr. U., obviously was the person who ought to be coordinating all aspects of my mother’s care. Yet Dr. U., a highly recommended gerontologist I’d wheedled into taking on my mother, seemed simply aggrieved to have in her examining room a patient of troublesome complication and need—and especially by the daughter who insisted on calling her attention to an unending chaparral of issues, of pressing consequence to my mother’s health, that sprawled inconveniently beyond Dr. U.’s crisp examining room.

Continued …
History Tossed and Turned, II
History Tossed and Turned, III
[In Back Story: Big Mess With Mom]