It’s been a minute since I’ve updated THE RIGHT TO FOLLY, this diary of my struggle to get my mother to accept help. Partly because, thankfully, things have smoothed out, partly because I am out of the country, and partly because I’ve shriveled a bit in my creative output. I’ve been tired… and then this happened.
Sometimes the most healing thing I can do is remind myself that other people feel this too, that other people will feel lighter knowing they are not alone.
Schrödinger’s Tape
August 2025:
My mother, perched on the very edge of her twin bed, picks at her fraying jeans. This is not chic unraveling; this is her jeans falling apart. I’ve offered to take her shopping, something she used to love, but get a hard “No.” Her thick hair (not going to lie, I’m a bit jealous) is parted in the middle, swooping down either side of her forehead and then turning up like yak horns. She’s always hated that look. Someone must have combed her hair for her, which means she let them. This is good. Since I had to move her to assisted living she’s refused help with nearly everything, especially showering where she is a grave fall risk. The only thing she does allow? Bedside coffee delivery, and now apparently, combing her hair.
In the moment before she sees me, her eyes and the corners of her mouth are downturned. She has a mole on her neck, the size and color of a coffee bean that worries me, but her doctor says it’s fine. This visit will be our last for seven months, as I will be traveling in France, for work and pleasure. I am excited, of course, but also nervous to be so far away as I am my mother’s sole support.
Her face crinkles in delight when she catches me in her doorway. “You’re here.” When she smiles I note that her dental bridge is in place. She’s happy to be going to lunch.
Her purse has been upturned on her bed and she rakes her hand over the plastic hairbrush, mascara, keys that unlock nothing, her id, a credit card, lipstick, a pencil stub, and her tiny spiral notebook, exactly like the ones she’s kept my entire life. When I was around 10, I was obsessed with Harriet the Spy, and she’d buy for me a tiny notebook.
“Listen, before we go, I need to order some things.” She rifles past pages of scrawled lists:
books to read
shows to watch
key words
“Sunscreen… passwords…PG&E…. dogfood… checkbook. Wait a minute,” she snaps, though I have said nothing. She’s easily agitated when she cannot find what she needs.
The words on her list make me nervous. “You don’t have to worry about any of that.” We’ve re-homed her dog. She has no checks to write. I show her a large tube of sunscreen on her dresser.
“Don’t treat me like that,” she says.
It’s an art, answering and not answering her questions, getting her to let go. I squeeze out a dollop of the sunscreen, rub it onto the back of my hands. I don’t want age spots.
“I’m old, not retarded,” she says. Yes, that is her word. And yes, she was a special education teacher in the 70s, so yes, she should know better.
“We don’t say that anymore,” I remind her.
She growls her disgust. “I’m not a baby. How did I make it this far by myself?” She flicks through pages. “What about my bills?” Then she rattles off the list by heart: Verizon, Greensky, Medicare, P.G.&E., taxes, Comcast.
“You don’t have any bills. I took care of everything. We only have to pay the assisted living invoices and Medicare.”
“How can that be?” She stares at me and her eyes do that thing where she’s both present and not present, like Schrodinger’s cat, alive and not alive. She’s looking at me, she knows me, but she’s been temporarily dislodged from time. This here/not here is new/not new. Yes, it is more frequent since her diagnosis of dementia. When I was a little girl I sometimes got that blank look. My mother was an expert at being in the room yet unavailable, like a recalcitrant teenaged babysitter whose boyfriend waited down the block for the parents to return, or someone who smoked a bit too much weed, drank a bit too much jug wine, or was so deeply sad she cried at tv commercials for Maxwell House coffee. Yes, she is physically here, plucking at her jeans, but I’m not certain she is in her own head.
“I need scotch tape.”
“Okay.” What could she possible need tape for?
…
November 2025:
In the middle of the night France time, I got a text from Mrs. Rendo, the owner of my mother’s assisted living, telling me that my mother went to lunch and returned very drunk. And then another text saying she’d fallen and was sent to the hospital in an ambulance. Here in France, I’m nine hours ahead so it was 6a my time 9p California time. I texted with Mrs. Rendo and she said Ellen had fallen in her room and injured her head. She was conscious, verbal, but needed to be checked.
I waited a bit to call the hospital and when I did, the switchboard told me that she’d had a CT scan, a full examination, her wound was stapled shut and she had been discharged. By now it was nearly midnight in Calilfornia and I decided to wait till morning to call.
At 5p my time, 8a California time, my phone blew up. My mother and my friend calling. My friend said, “Your mother has escaped, she’s at her old home. She called a cab.” My mother said, “Someone else lives in my house! Why didn’t you tell me you sold my house?” The new owner got on the phone, “Your mother arrived at 7:30 this morning, knocking on our door. She’s confused. We’re worried.”
Trying to piece it together. She got drunk. She fell. She went to the hospital. They sent her back to her assisted living. The next morning she took a cab to her old home. My friend, the new owners, the neighbors, Mrs. Rendo, me, everyone was frantic.
On the phone, I reminded my mother we’d sold her house. “You don’t live there. Why are you drinking? You fell. You cannot drink. Why did you call a cab? Please.” I raised my voice and for that I am ashamed.
…
August 2025:
Snugged beside my mother on her bed, thigh to thigh, shoulder to shoulder, we clicked through office supplies on Amazon, filling the shopping cart with highlighters, thumbtacks, gluesticks, pens, and a small package of scotch tape. Of course it wasn’t as much fun as being in Office Max, smelling the erasures. Oh how heavy the reams of computer paper are, landing with a thud in the basket. We fell down the rabbit hole together, we were giddy! Why not the glitter tape? Why not the rainbow assortment of markers. Look at all the possibilities for creation, organization, happy productivity— the raison d’être for going to an office supply store in the first place. Running a hand over empty file folders, post-it flags, so many blank pages to fill.
When my children were in elementary school a visit to Palace Arts was an after school prize. Tables of paint, construction paper, markers, and pastels. The poster board rack for school projects, tablets of watercolor paper, rows of journals.
And oh, the pens! Stores always place a small spiral notebook near the pens. When I was a girl I wrote my name there. Trying out different spellings, different slants, Nathalee, Nataleah, Natasha… how I yearned to be sophisticated. I wonder, when my mother was a girl, did she try writing her name in the tiny spiral notebooks? Mary Ellen, Ellen, Eileen, and her favorite nickname, Penny. Did she yearn for a different self as I did?
An office supply store, even a virtual one, is a place of self-invention isn’t it?
We pressed the checkout button.
…
November 2025:
After her accident, my mother did not call a cab. After her treatment at the hospital, and her ‘discharge’ she was left alone in the waiting room. All night. When I called the hospital in the middle of the night to follow up on her care, she was actually still sitting there, confused, massive gauze around her head, clotted blood in her hair, crumpled pajamas, waiting for someone to come take her home. God, I hope she had slippers. I hope she wasn’t cold.
The hospital left her there. They did not call me. They did not call her assisted living as they are meant to do when an elderly patient arrives alone with a packet of information: whom to call, diagnoses, medications, advance directives, POLST.
Finally, at the change of shift, the new nurse called her a cab and sent her to the only address my mother knew by heart, her old home. That’s when my phone blew up. That’s when I, not knowing anything about her night, raised my voice. All the frustration of the past year swamped me. Reams of unpaid bills, her lies about falling, hostile refusal to move, rotten food in the refrigerator, calls to adult protective services, until she was found on the floor in her home with the gas on and forced to move. Still and again, I thought, here we are. I am so sorry about all of it.
The new owners of her home wrapped her in a blanket, set her in a chair in her garden. They gave her tea and finally the grief of losing her home moved through her, she keened.
…
Of course my mother ordered rolls of scotch tape. Her life has come completely undone. How else will she hold everything together?
…
When I was born, my father left my mother in the hospital. She was twenty-two, alone in the charity ward of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. She made a collect call to her father to tell him the news.
“Collect call from Mary Ellen,” the operator said. “Will you accept the charges?”
Silence. And then her father said, “No.”
My mother yelled over the operator, “I’m in the hospital. I have a daughter.”
“Sir, will you accept the charges?” the operator repeated.
“No.”
…
It has always been up to my mother to hold everything together.
I assume the box from Amazon arrived, full of possibility and tape. I’m not certain she opened it.
…
December 2025:
I awoke this morning to a text from my mother:
oh…my heart.
Oh, my heart, too. So much grief and pain--yet you always find the humor, insight, and metaphor to make meaning of it. Thank you for sharing.
So heartbreaking what you’re going through 😔