At Work Upstairs

I’ve been preoccupied with school these last months: going back to school after a long absence is hard work. Doable and satisfying but hard work.

My grandmother, my mother, and my aunt

My plans to visit my mother every couple of weeks fell apart in October and I’m not sure how to fix that in the winter term.  She’s living in an assisted living facility sixty miles away and I travel by bus. To visit her, I leave the apartment at about 10:30 in the morning and get back at about 7. The visit itself is about two hours: longer than that is too tiring for her.

I spend a lot of time in waiting rooms trying not to think about the many ways in which she is disappearing.

The other day she was delighting in a cat calendar which she probably bought as a gift for me. She can’t really read a calendar anymore: she’s unmoored in time.

Each time she sees that cat calendar it’s fresh and new to her: she rediscovered it three or four times over the course of my visit. And each time I got to see that giggle you can see in the photograph just behind the cat.

She’s disappearing but she is still there.