Rebellious Thoughts of a Woman

We're each slugging along at our own pace.

Once the decision was made, the rush was on to find an assisted living community for my mother. The plan was for her to live there until she was strong enough (or convinced enough) to move out to where I live. This temporary solution in assisted living is called respite care, which is a way to hike up the monthly rate by providing a furnished studio apartment for up to 90 days, but at least you don’t have to pay the community fee (a one-time fee of several thousand dollars) or move in with any more than your clothing and a few family photos.

Being there would also be a break for me from being around and on-call. After having put my new life on hold to return to a place where I never felt at home, I was increasingly feeling that it was a sacrifice. I needed to leave before resentment billowed.

In a month, I’d return to take her to a follow-up medical appointment (after, thankfully, my brother and sister-in-law flew down amid Hurricane Milton for the procedure that should have happened when I was there but had been postponed) and pack up the clothes she wanted to bring with her. They will barely fill a suitcase, since so few clothes fit her since she’s shriveled in the past year. After living in Florida for more than ten years, her wardrobe is decidedly not appropriate for anything chillier than an air conditioner on full blast in 100-degree weather.

I’m trying to envision and manifest us living together in joyful harmony, her in her part of the house and me in mine, having an aide come regularly to help her and free me from taking care of her bodily functions. Would this test the limits of honoring one’s mother? What would I gain and lose in the arrangement? And, being honest with myself and my roommate limitations, I also wondered what she would gain and lose in the arrangement. To be ready for the failure or the reality (framing is key) contingency, I already visited an assisted living community in her soon-to-be hometown.

How people do the assisted living search when they work full-time or live out-of-town and possibly with youngish ones at home is beyond me. It was all-consuming: finding the places (even with the help of ‘A Place for Mom’) and getting input from people who’ve been down this road, conducting phone interviews and checking out websites, to winnow down the list of places to visit for what the standard mid-day hour-long tour. At least it was a short burst of time, but still, thinking about where would be best for someone else to live is not an easy task. It’s like looking for a present: when does what they want overtake what you would want to receive?

After visiting six places in one week, I was ok leaving aside the tainted word “facility” and using the more pleasant “community.” But “facility” had been hovering over me as I began the search, remembered the overwhelming smell of urine and decay from visiting my grandmother when she was in an old-age home. I had feared what I would face, and how I would rise to the occasion of needing to have a life but also respecting my mother’s right to live in a stink-free environment. Is the smell, I wondered as I was told the costs, the difference between what each could afford?

When I started the search, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but when I finished, I realized that there were a few pass/fail elements. Obviously, no smell. This was a challenge that each place I visited passed.

Next was length of hallways, which was not something that had been on my list before I started my visits. With most residents using walkers (my mother now included in that number) or wheelchairs (where they propel themselves by their feet, shuffling while seated) this turned out to be very important. It was surprising, then, to see that some corridors were so long that I figured this was how they got around providing daily exercise classes, since just getting to the dining room was an exhausting hike.

The dining room and food were, of course, important. This was one item that my mother was interested in, asking to see sample menus. She was pleased to see that pork wasn’t the mainstay of the place that I thought best for her.

The daily activities were also important for me, and I studied the calendar from each place as if it was a college course catalog. My mother, who thought that she would get out of doing any exercise and just sit in her room like at home, was less than enthused about the daily chair exercise and brain twisters that I was excited to tell her about. Once she won a round of trivia with her knowledge of baseball, thanks to my father and his love of New York baseball, she found this activity to be worthy of her time. We were both pleased to see that bingo was only a weekly event and that she could nap in the afternoon when the card players took over. I bet the dollar I put on her refrigerator door for bingo is still there.

Still to come. The people I met during those assisted-living community visits, with some positive stereotyping. How my mother turned from a non-believer to a believer. Re-living the stress of a high school cafeteria.

Have you been through this journey? I’d love to hear from you.

In a recent conversation with my 90-year-old mother, she said, “Someone asked me what’s my last name and I couldn’t remember.”

“Did you eventually remember?” I asked, stunned.

“Yes,” she said, before moving onto telling me what she had for lunch, which she had already told me.

When we spoke, I was in my relatively new home in Oregon, where she is to join me, and she was in the assisted living community in Florida where I brought her a few weeks ago. The distance was tangible.

Have I been delusional about her mental acuity, I wondered. I had noticed that she was forgetting things (thankfully, this was after she stopped cooking for herself, so we skipped the burning the toast, the kettle, and the house phase) and repeating stories, which I had (mostly) stopped calling her out on because what’s the harm in her telling a story again (and again and again) when the telling gives her so much pleasure (and, surely, I can survive a little boredom for her to feel that she’s having a wonderful conversation with her delightful daughter). But this does seem to be another step in her cognitive decline. On the plus side, it’s an opportunity for me to work on the character trait of patience.

It was sudden. At 90. This need to go to assisted living, even if temporary. It was a before-after experience, where before she was out and about, driving herself to visit sick friends and shopping for new clothes, until she had an undiagnosed illness (with virus being the vague explanation) that resulted in a brief hospitalization at 89, and health issues every few months since then. Prior to that, she had been hospitalized in her 50s for women’s issues.

Which means that I’ve had many years of her good health during which I would see how other people’s parents have gotten cancer, or body parts replaced, or rapidly declined, or withered away. I expressed my concern for them and their parent (practicing the character traits of compassion and humility), giving them the opportunity to take all the space they needed to figure out their thoughts and, hoping—praying—that I would never have to deal with any of that myself. Now it’s my turn. And it is a lot. The switch from carefree retired adult to caretaker of parent (at any level of care) is not easy. On the bright side, I still respect her even after seeing her naked and being confronted with my extreme dismay at having to deal with someone else’s bodily functions, when that person is not an infant. There’s definitely a reason I never went into the medical field.

After a few weeks in rehab and then back in her apartment when I was visiting, she didn’t follow the plan and return to her old spry self. There were falls, because how does a woman who strode along the avenues of Manhattan ever get used to using a walker? And there was the confusion, not to be confused with her general lack of interest in anything other than her meals. Once I started cooking for her, I appreciated the “You know how to cook eggs” (stated daily), but not the “What’s for lunch?” while still eating breakfast.

Realizing that I couldn’t take care of her 24/7, as in couldn’t and wouldn’t, I decided (with the support of my brother and daughters) that she would need to go into assisted living until she’s strong enough for me to bring her to Oregon.

Next. Those visits and my insights gained from them. As well as the guilt-not guilt accompanied by my shuffling her off to assisted living.

October 7^th and its aftermath have become a new part of Jewish identity. This event seems to be within the canon of the stories of our honey-and-horseradish history. Will it join the “They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat” events of our past? I wonder how long it took for our ancestors to transition from a tragedy to a holiday for which we now use the word “celebrate”? It’s hard to imagine this loss being anything other than painful. But it also seems necessary to ensure commemoration of lives lost, injuries endured, trauma experienced, breaks on so many levels, and the uncompromising perseverance to overcome—together.

Meanwhile, we’re still fighting to live in peace in our homeland (and not be threatened by antisemites in the lands of our homes); and we’re figuring out how to experience the fall Jewish holidays when there are STILL 101 HOSTAGES being terrorized in Gaza, and Israel is being attacked from seven entities, and far too many Israeli citizens are spending more time on battlefields than playing fields or in the fields (literal and figurative) in which they live and work. While those left at home (and for far too many these are temporary homes), and these are mainly women, who are burdened with so much: it is as if they have become the national Stress Absorbers so that their partners can focus on their role as protectors and defenders. It means that the “I’m spent” that a friend recently expressed is part of the national mood. It also means that those of us not living there, especially Jews and Israelis—me—constantly feel our connection because, to rephrase Hillel, Who am I if I am not for my people? And if not now, when?

And while this painful situation—this war—results in more deaths in Israel, and Gaza, and Lebanon because hate is so powerful, it has also made the backbone of Jewish history upright and defiant. What do we need to move forward toward acceptance and empathy, leading to peace and not another round of war? We are determined.

One wish is for the morally deprived mouthpieces around the world to stop distorting reality and to start caring about living Jews. I know that this is a rhetorical question, though it shouldn’t be: How hard is it to care about everyone when that is precisely what you claim?

It occurs to me that this must be what it felt like to live within a bible story, wondering about the Light and from where it will come—and sometimes, in the darkest of nights, if it will come. Belief, emunah, as I am starting to realize, is something that you do, that you commit to, because you can’t bear the unfathomable pain that life can bring if it is only the finiteness of each of our lives. Existence—purpose and love and loss—must contribute to a unifying crescendo.

At a reading of the names of the victims of October 7^th at a memorial service, I noticed that so many Hebrew names relate to light. We, as a people, as a religion—as parents imagining our children—are always looking to create the light, to bring the light, to share the light. This as our intention: it could be a start if you let yourself see it.

Each time during the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services and during the memorial service, when we sang the Acheinu* (Our brothers and sisters) prayer/plea, I was overcome with emotion. I wasn’t remembering a specific person I had loved, rather it was a profound moment of loss surrounded by others in similar pain, and being comforted by the energy and emotion emanating from each of us. A powerful moment of connection, making me realize that I am never truly alone.

Perhaps, at this moment when my religion and my people are being maligned, it is when I find most meaning and support within them. Not just in the traditions, observances, and learning, but in the people who connect now and in time and space for millennia.

I am not alone. I am not broken. I am strengthened.

* Acheinu: Our brothers, our sisters, the entire family of Israel, the entire world, all who are in distress or taken into captivity, whether on the sea or on dry land, may the Ever-present One have mercy upon them and bring them out from narrowness to expanse, from darkness to light, from subjugation to redemption, now, speedily, and soon, and let us say, Amen.