Carol Matos

I didn’t like the people who worked there. You know those holier-than-thou nurses. One of them advised me to tell my mother, “you can let go now.”  I asked the nurse to leave the room. A Korean woman in the next room had family surrounding her day and night. There was always somebody at her side. I left my mother every night. I left the night she died too. We hired a woman to be with her overnight. At 5:00 in the morning, the woman called me, crying, “your mama just died and she opened her eyes real wide and looked at me.” The very last thing my mother saw was an unknown face and that vacant image nailed itself to my brain. 

During those end days when I visited her at the hospice, I would walk the corridors looking into rooms. Most of the patients’ mouths were open as if asking for air. My mother’s mouth took that shape near the end, eyes closed, slowly starving. They did give her narcotics. With dementia your brain forgets how to swallow. Hearing is the last sense to lapse. I did talk to her.

A few weeks before coming to Cabrini she was living in a high-end home for dementia patients on the Upper East Side.  Expensive but poorly run. One day as I arrived, they were putting her into an ambulance.  She was so dehydrated she went into a coma. I rode in the ambulance next to her and the walls’ waves fell upon us. I sank in my broken boat. I wish now that I had sued them all.

In that place, patients had their own rooms and filled them with objects and photographs from a previous life in their homes. My sister and I decorated her room and tried to make it nice for her. She didn’t seem to care. Once, I noticed that somebody stole a piece of her jewelry. A bracelet that one of the other ladies admired. I thought it was wrong but on the other hand I thought it really doesn’t matter. It could make the thief feel a bit better.

Some of the people living there knew they were trapped. They sometimes tried to escape by the elevator when it stopped on their floor delivering food or guests. They would try to out-maneuver those who blocked their way. Illness is distance. I watched them travel in circles, their steering wheels spinning endlessly until they capsized. Can you imagine the futility?  Why hadn’t management thought of a better way for guests to arrive? I wanted to help them escape or tell them how to do it. Many nights I sat at the dinner table feeding my mother with other women who lived there. One elderly woman said she was a sorority girl at Columbia University.

I gave my mother a stuffed dog as she always wanted a dog. My mother played with the dog and held it close to her cheek. She asked me if the dog was real. I smiled at her. Maybe my smile was similar to her smile the time she woke up from her coma.  She saw my sister and me at the end of her bed and moving her eyes to each one of us back and forth over and over again. My mother won most beautiful girl in her high school graduation yearbook. They did those kind of things back then. Her face was very beautiful even at 92. Even coming out of a coma. She had never looked at either of us that way before. She looked at us like we were her newborn babies keeping her from loneliness.

She had been very healthy and agile through her eighties. She lost her mind slowly at first and then rapidly over the next year. She complained about it at first, recognizing the changes in her abilities. I denied it to her and perhaps that was wrong. She lost her power to remember words. First proper nouns, then regular nouns, and then verbs. She could barely think. On my birthday she sent me a card and wrote, “you are so lovely and most began for to be my blave to keep keep me and I love-love you.” With the density of her words I lost my buoyancy in deep waters. It hurts me to show it to you. 

During the final four days of my mother’s life, my sister couldn’t look at her. My sister would close her eyes and I would lead her to my mother’s bed. This way, with closed eyes, hand in mine, my sister too could whisper into my mother’s ear.