SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 79
SINE QUA NON
water in the face of a punch drunk fighter. Of course, I was insulted. I have been calling
most every day for the last ten years to give my mom predictable, nourishing social contact.
How could she be so selfish as to put her blindness, chronic fatigue, arthritis, dementia,
schizophrenia, incontinence and cancer before my own needs? Just don’t pick up, ma. You
won’t hurt my feelings.
Further to paragraph three and my own avowed sins, my brother, Dwight, is the
uncontested saint in this story [and his wife, Ginny, no less an example of holy miracles
and heroic virtue]. Dwight has a hall pass and doesn’t need a telephone. He visits our mom
in her long-term care residence at least two or three times a week, reads bible stories to her
[which she loves], reviews with her the thumbs up/thumbs down section in the local paper,
sings along with her to her favourite songs on YouTube and sees to her appointments for
hair cutting and nail clipping. Oh, and Dwight routinely checks the phone to make sure it’s
working. One time, he had to call a technician because the phone hadn’t been working for a
whole week! Mom had cried wolf so often that I failed to credit her anguished howl. Forgive
me, mom, for assuming you will always be an unreliable witness. It’s a miscarriage of justice.
But getting mom on the phone has not always been an issue. Her physical and cognitive
decline over the last year has made our communication difficult. Before then, however, we had
years of daily chats that were often good fun. In fact, on those few evenings when we didn’t
connect, mom was usually chatting with friends in the common area of her residence. I know
this because I checked with nursing staff. Of course, I was glad for her but also somewhat
miffed that she would miss our appointed hour in order to talk to other shut-ins. Forgive me,
mom, for providing “predictable, nourishing social contact” while secretly desiring to cancel
your friends. Your challenges and mine are often a mirror too close.
Now, ironically, mom is bedridden with a phone two feet from her bedside, but
communication with her is much less a certainty. And on those infrequent occasions when
I reach mom, I try desperately to steer clear of the telephone as conversation piece. She will
say that the telephone is too difficult to use. Or that the telephone is out of reach. Or that
she doesn’t have a telephone. Or that the telephone is kept in her other room. Deflection of
this sort might go on for ten minutes. My wife summarizes nicely the absurdity of it all: you
haven’t been able to reach your mom for three or four days and, when you do, your telephone
call is all about missed telephone calls. I have learned to quickly cut off this kind of oratorio.
I say, It doesn’t matter, ma. We’re talking, now. How was your day?
Further to the above paragraph, I misspoke. My mother no longer actually uses the
word, telephone. She is fairly adept with thingamajig or whatchamacallit. But mom now has
a serious naming deficit with all kinds of words and telephone just happens to be one of them.
And when mom is not using one of her go-to synonyms to describe the telephone, she will
point at it and fully expect me to understand her visual cues. I tell her, in plainer language,
that I am less deus ex machina than the Wizard of Oz.
But we do have our own homespun version of Jeopardy! Mom often asks the question,
What do you call that? And I try to guess the word she’s looking for. The really difficult
questions - the triple stumpers - involve her asking me to find a word that is floating in deep
space without context or orientation. That’s typically when I transition into a game of animal,
vegetable or mineral? Of course, bless her heart, mom will have forgotten the target word
shortly after asking me to name it.
Further to naming deficits, I must say that, unbelievably, some of our conversation
exists in a kind of non-verbal, primeval, virtual reality. Often, mom will introduce a
game of charades on the phone by waving her arms this way and that. Then, she will ask
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