Hello, I must be going

It's unfortunate that the blog page that's been sitting unchanged over the past month sported a cartoon of a "Too Much Information" booth, as too little information has been more the theme since I posted it. 


Some weeks ago I finally managed to persuade my mother to come celebrate her 97th birthday to California from Connecticut to celebrate her 97th birthday with her west coast family. 


The whole family thought the trip was a fine idea: Mom was in great shape, and the proposition seemed to give her a new lease on life after years of grieving for my father. The whole family except my wife, the nurse, who thought it was a foolish and reckless idea but did not have the heart to tell me. 


Mom flew to Sacramento escorted by her grandnephew Garrett and his wife Beth, and after sleeping half a day to recover from the flight, ensconced herself on the verandah, where, as she visited with Garrett and Beth and Debbie and me and enjoyed the sight of the blackbirds bathing in our pool, she was her effervescent self.


My mother has been something of a miracle of nature. No-one who meets her suspects she's as old as she is, and some don't believe us when we tell them. Some thirteen years ago, during my son Jake's graduation from Wesleyan, my sister escorted Mom to the ladies' room the college had established in a field house. It was a sweltering day, and there was a long line of matrons waiting to get in. So my sister went to the head of the line and asked if the ladies would let her eighty-four year-old mother cut in line. "Of course, dear," they said, so Helen retrieved Mom and escorted her forward. But as she reached the head of the line Helen began to hear some grumbling, and finally overheard one woman say to another, "Eighty-four, my foot!" 


So it is understandable that her family -- some of whose members are hoarier than she - thinks she will live forever, or at least that she may be immune to the usual geriatric slings and arrows.  But then, in the wee hours of her birthday, Debbie and I awoke to the sound of a crash and ran in to find my mother crumpled up on the floor of the guest room, having slipped getting out of bed to go to the bathroom. Apparently she had grabbed an end table for support and it collapsed, and now here she lay in great pain. 


Soon the EMT folks arrived and transported her to the local hospital where she was diagnosed with that gravest of geriatric injuries: a fractured hip. It required partially replacing with a steel femur, and by two that afternoon she was under the knife. Once upon a time, a fractured hip was attended by clots and pneumonia and infection and amounted in most cases to a prolonged death sentence. But hip replacement surgery has removed a good deal of risk, and in fact, over the ensuing weeks, the hip was the least of her problems. 


She received extraordinary care: superior to anything she might have received back home. And though she greeted the physical therapists who attended her at the nursing facility into which we squeezed her as though they were the Spanish Inquisition, she made enough progress to be able to fly back east eventually and return to her apartment. 


Over the course of the five or six weeks she was here, I found I could not think of much else, and spent most of my time either visiting her or preparing to visit her -- collecting toiletries, checkbooks, mail, magazines, audio books from the library, snapshots off the web; writing various care givers back east; and reporting on her progress to the rest of the family. My errands and missives served the purpose of creating the illusion that I had some measure of control over something that was happening to someone else. That that someone else was my mother gave this purpose a special urgency, and the primal nature of my relationship, at 64, with my 97 year-old mother, left me with no extra energy to invest in this blog, and if the clumsy way in which this is written is any indication, I may in fact be returning to it prematurely.