So Strange

I’ve been trying to reach my mother for the last couple of days. What that really means is that I’ve been dreading calling her, but when I finally muster up the courage the call doesn’t go through for some reason. The staff at the home seem sweet, but I don’t know if I’m really getting the A team during my early evening time slot.

There’s so much about this that’s so strange. Your mother is alive, but your contact to her is limited, supposedly for her own good. You’re told she doesn’t remember you, but then you have lucid conversations on the phone with her, she sounds like Mom. But then one of those conversations shifts and suddenly it’s word salad, a perfectly normal conversational incoherence. It dawns on you that when she seemed lucid was when you were doing the talking, carrying the load and she just had to respond, but when she went to talk, it was all garbled, signifying nothing.

The last word both my brother and I have gotten from her is that things were “not good”, but when she attempted to elaborate, the words got in the way. And now I can’t get through on the phone. My brother is working with people there to try and make it better, it should not be this hard