Yes, You Can Go Home

You can't assume it will be the same as when you left, but most of the pieces will be there.

I left school last night to go up to Ellsworth to hang out with my grandmother, mom, uncle, and aunt in the hospital. Another fall and another crack to the head has sent Grammie to the ICU- not because her condition is immediately dire, but because she needed to be where she would have the most attentive attention. When I got there, she was all bandaged up and looked like Yoda in a bathing cap. One of the nurses had finished off the dressing with a pink gauze printed with purple hearts. The result was actually quite fetching and cheerful, and Grammie generally rocked the adorable old lady look. She was also mellow and pretty chipper, all told. Because her short term memory is so poor, she didn't realize she'd fallen, and wasn't really fretting much. The Zen of Dementia. She had her family kicking around, some hands to hold, and a good dinner. On a sixty second loop, or really any loop, that's not so bad.

Hopefully that superannuated Buddhism will serve her well as the family moves her to a new nursing facility, where, we hope, she will have a higher level of care. Her former home is, as are most old-age homes in this country, a for-profit establishment, which wrests earnings from Medicare by underpaying staff, and under staffing the facility. Not the best recipe for quality care. So we will try another home, run by another company. Mom would prefer to keep her at our real home- the one run by our family, but the family can't afford to have a household member not working. As far as aphorisms go, "money makes the world go around" does, all too often, hold up to scrutiny.

But I am home- have been for a while. And the evenings, generally few and far between, spent under the florescent lights at the Ellsworth hospital, are a big part of the reason why. I remember the fall of my first year on IAH, when Charlie had had another heart-related complication. I took the evening boat off, and as the light faded during the crossing, I was glad that while it did require a boat ride, it was a relatively easy matter to get where I needed to be. And last night, packing up Grammie's room at the old old home, it had just been a matter of a familiar drive through the familiar fog. The world has gone green, and springy, and soft the way that it does, and the conversation in the car spun around the axis of education, the way that it does. Mom also pointed out to Uncle Vern what I had also been thinking: "at least we're not packing up her room because she's dead." Then we all thought, but no one said: "this is a dress rehearsal." For her passing, and then for our own.

But many hands make for lighter work. And every season comes back around.