BLANCHE
The living are made of nothing but flaws. The dead, with each passing day in the afterlife, become more and more impeccable to those who remain earthbound.1
In January 2017, I found myself in Rutland, Vermont, because my mother had a heart attack. When I got there, she was out of intensive care and in her own room and seemed to be doing well.
Blanche lived independently throughout her senior years until she was ninety-three. At that age, she started to become very forgetful, which manifested in her leaving the front door open, the stove burners on, and the water running in the bathroom. She also suffered a fall, which traumatized her a bit.
Cheryl had been taking care of Mom for the last twenty years. They were very close and spent every day together. They had a humorous, loving, but antagonistic relationship. Mom could be very stubborn. However, after these forgetful incidents, Cheryl had to make the difficult decision to put her in an assisted living facility, where she could be watched over all the time. Since Cheryl was at work during the week, it worried her to leave Mom unattended. She found a place which she thought would work: a Catholic home called The Loretto.
Mom hated every waking moment of it.
Still, she had a lovely little room with three windows and a refrigerator, a telephone, and a huge closet for her clothes and jewelry. All her life, Mom was impeccably dressed—always carefully color-coordinated and exquisitely presented. It aggravated her to no end when she couldn’t get everything absolutely right before she left the house—such as having the perfect earrings to match her outfit. She loved yellows and greens in her clothes and one particular red sweater from Loehmann’s, which I had given her for Christmas. She spent her days either doing her puzzle, “Word Hunt” or watching B&W movies on TCM. Her favorite shows were Perry Mason and Ironside, both starring Raymond Burr. When I told her that Raymond Burr was gay, she looked at me incredulously and said: “Not my Raymond Burr!” We had a great laugh. Although her mind had started to go, her wit was as sharp as ever and her comic timing was spot-on.
Whenever I visited Mom, I would always bring her plants and gorgeous bouquets of flowers for her windows. One day when I was visiting, she started insisting that she wanted to go back home to Brooklyn, even though she hadn’t lived there for twenty years. She also claimed that people at the Loretto were stealing from her.
“Ma,” I said, “no one is stealing from you!”
“You don’t know, Michael Anthony! “You don’t live here. They steal from me!” She also started suffering from “Sundowning”:
The term “sundowning” refers to a state of confusion occurring in the late afternoon and spanning into the night . . . Sundowning isn’t a disease, but a group of symptoms that occur at a specific time of the day that may affect people with dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease. The exact cause of this behavior is unknown.2
She would become very difficult to talk to as the day went on. So, I would quickly change the subject, such as:
“Ma! Do you want some French fries from McDonalds?”
Or:
“Would you like to take a walk outside and sit in the rocking chairs together?”
I said whatever I could so her focus wouldn’t veer too far into a dark place.
I would also sit close to her and join her in doing her word-search puzzles but once I started taking pictures and shooting video clips of her, she would get annoyed: “I’m making a little movie on you, Ma!” I’d say.
“Don’t bother! Leave me alone! I don’t take no pictures. I have enough pictures!”
“But this is a little movie, Ma!” I said.
“Oh, shut up!”
“Come on, Ma!”
“Oh, all right!”
“I love you!”
“And I adore you!” she said.
I’m so grateful that I knew to make these little clips of Blanche because otherwise I would forget the sound of her voice, which was very important to me. I watch these clips all the time and they fill me with such joy and sometimes even a good cry. Ever since she passed, I have shared the clips on social media. People have loved her salty comments, which were both loving and funny. Blanche was the real deal.
After she had the heart attack, she got a little better and was home for a bit. But then she contracted pneumonia. Toward the end of January, she was not feeling well, so Cheryl took her to the hospital.
Cheryl called me, and I immediately packed my bag and got on the five-hour Amtrak train ride to Castleton, Vermont, the last stop in the state. When I arrived, Cheryl’s friends, Carol and Linda, picked me up at the station and took me directly to the hospital.
When I walked in and saw her, Mom definitely didn’t look good. I said, “Mom, where are your teeth?”
“They stole my teeth!” she insisted.
“Mom, no one stole your teeth! I think you put them in a tissue and accidentally threw them away.” Well, Mom was one to argue and she continued on with me about the teeth.
“Ma, I’m not here to argue. Let’s just relax.”
Her breathing was very labored from the pneumonia. It didn’t seem like it was getting any better. They gave her some sedatives so she wouldn’t be so worried and anxious about it all.
They did all kinds of scans and X-rays, but she really was going downhill. The pneumonia was taking over. She just laid there, barely able to breathe. It was horrible to watch. Our emotions were running high. Fortunately, Linda was a nurse at the same hospital. She and her partner, Carol, were exceptional friends by being there for us as we went through the last hours of my mother’s life.
The doctor suggested a very small dose of morphine. Cheryl and I looked at each other, knowing that a little bit of morphine was the beginning of the end. At ninety-four, it was just too difficult to overcome what was happening to her.
During the next three days, we slept at the hospital. On February 2, after the doctor administered some more morphine, Cheryl and I stood close to her hospital bed. I brushed my hand across her forehead and kissed her cheek. It was emotional and very surreal. For a moment, Cheryl walked away; I think it was much too much for her to handle. Then Mom quietly whispered something to me in Spanish, which I didn’t understand, so I mentioned it to Cheryl when she returned.
“Michael! She’s on morphine, she didn’t say anything!”
Cheryl walked back to the side of the bed where I was, and Mom said she loved us and then said, “You two are very funny people.”
Those were her last words, and it was very typical of Blanche to inject humor into what was a truly heartbreaking moment.
As Mom was slipping in and out of consciousness, her breathing became more labored and then it stopped. It was near 6 p.m. Cheryl and I started sobbing, in a complete state of shock—not believing she was gone. We continued to kiss her head, her cheek, rub her hands. We didn’t want to let go.
Eventually, we were knocked back into reality and we slowly started gathering up her things—a battery-powered, St. Jude light she had gotten at the Dollar Store, her eyeglasses, and the remainder of her clothes.
That night, Cheryl and I went back to Mom’s apartment and it all felt so bizarre. We finally needed to get some food, so we went to a local Chinese restaurant and ate, cried, and talked about Mom.
During the last ten years, since I got sober, I had made a commitment to get closer to my mom, to make up for the long period of time I had neglected my family in favor of my career. I then started taking the Amtrak up to Castleton to see her every six weeks.
It was a blessing to be able to get to know her again over those long weekends. Sometimes those visits with her were very quiet but they were so important and made all the difference in the world to me. They were often about the little things like holding hands and watching black-and-white movies together. We always had a good laugh which made those visits even more poignant.
I also called her every morning after my AA meeting. When she died, and I realized I would no longer have those routines with my mom—that was the beginning of a very different world for me.
Keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life.
—St. Jude