mom

By Rosalie Tirella

“I think she was sick before she got here,” the nurse at the rehab/nursing home (Holy Trinity on Barber Ave.) told me.

I had just left my mom’s room and walked to the nurse’s station at the end of the corridor to voice my concerns to the gaggle of nurses in charge of the care of a couple of dozen “patients” stricken with mild to moderate demetia – including my mom who is also there for “rehab” after a fall in her studio apartment. I am alarmed because I have never seen my mom so ill, so stuck in illness, a tube carrying oxygen to her lungs stuck up her nose, her arm bruised from the poking of IV needles. There she is, in her half of her “new” room (nice roommate) sitting alone in her wheelchair, her head bent forward, snoozing quietly.

When I visit my mom (almost every day), she seems awefully sleepy. Today, when I first entered her room, she was asleep again – totally alone, her head hanging forward again – how uncomfortable! How I missed her old pale pink wingback chair that she parked her little butt in for years as she watched cable news, catholic mass and the Red Sox. You are always in a wheel chair! I told her last time I visited. She said: It’s so comfortable, it doesn’t even feel like I am in a wheel chair.

I did some inspecting and, yes, there was lots of foam, a pillow behind her back, etc. “She’s languishing!” I screamed inside my head. I told myself: This is what people told me would happen if I stuck my mom in a nursing home.

There would be no recovery – only the slow (or speedy) descent into … death.

Where is her comfy wing back chair?!

“Ma,” do you want me to buy you a cute little easy chair for the window?” I ask her one time.

“No, no. I like this.”

“She’s always bounced back,” I tell the nursing home nurse, trying not to show my alarm. I should know! I was her primary care giver for more than four years. Every time she fell in her studio apartment, I sprang into action and rescued her! Saved my mom from the jaws of death. I was always PRESENT, following the ambulance that took her to Memorial Hospital, confering with the doctors/interns (kids) there, being nice to a passel of nurses and social workers, being nasty, threatening with a column when people seemed unresponsive – whatever it took to make my mother well again! I was the miracle lady! And my mom – 85 – always returned home! To her cat, her rosaries, her prayers, her little kitchen and coffee maker.

I don’t want to piss these nurses off, get off to a bad start with them, I tell myself. This could be a permanent thing. They take care of my mother. Her life is in their hands. I want to make them love her one one hundredth as much as I do!

Maybe then, my mom can get well! Well, enough to enjoy a few fruitful, comfortable years at this nursing home, where friends and family can visit and she can be safe. She gets three hot, square meals a day. She has all kinds of nice people taking her blood pressure, taking her temperature, combing her hair, putting her to bed. A time to be nurtured, even spoiled .. like a little baby. My old mother has come full circle.

I am now resigned to the fact that she can never return home. I have the heartbreaking task of closing up her apartment.

I smile at the nurse sitting at the nurse’s station, a lady in her sixties who does seem kind and does seem to like and care about my mom. I tell “Mary” that my mom has had pneumonia before and that several days of intravenous antibiotics usually knoocks out the infection in her lung.

“But we had to give her [oral anibiotics]… so that they would work on the infection on her leg,” Mary explained to me, looking a tad annoyed that me – a mere lay person – has the temerity to stick her nose where it doesn’t belong – in the MEDICAL PROFESSION.

Quiet please! MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS AT WORK! Mary told me she also gave her 50 milligrams of tresedone at night, to calm her down. And mymom gets some during the day. “She gets too busy,” Mary tells me. I am a little worried. My mom has never been sedated like this, and it seems nurse Mary has called the shots. The doctor of this nursing home hasn’t examined my mom. It looks like he rubberstamps what nurse Mary prescribes.

At one nursing home I worked at as an activities assistant decades ago, some nurses there were incredible – most were pretty average. There was even a dud or two – take the head nurse of the dementia unit there. She was always so solicitous of patients when their families were visiting, and then when they left, she would make fun of the patients … or sometimes take her shoes off and paint her toenails!

I can’t help it. My mom, old people have gotten under my skin. Even though I didn’t live with my mom, I took care of her – got her on the Meals on Wheels/lunch bag program, got her home health aides, personal care attendants. I was there every few days checking on her, making shopping lists, bringing in cleaning supplies or toiletries, keeping tabs on everything – the entire freakin’ operation. That’s what it became at the end – a freakin’, time-sucking operation. Exhausting!! – loving my mom! But she had loved me all these years, I told myself, and now foggy-brained and incapable of keeping up her own place, she needed her eldest daughter to swoop in an SAVE THE DAY. She has always expected it – and I have never disappointed her.

I won’t fail ya now, Ma! I tell myself as I watch her … letting go.

So, I want to tell Mary the nurse, I know a little bit about keeping my mom happy and healthy. For you to tell me “she came in sick” is BULL SHIT. Utter buck-passing. I am no fool. I tell her I want a doctor to check my mom and that i will make a special appointment with a gerontologist – a doc who specializes in old people! – to make sure she is on the right meds. Mary frowns. She says he may not even be allowed on the premises, since he is not the doctor in charge at the nursing home – Holy Trinity. I am taken aback. I tell her: I want my mom seen by this excellent gerontologist. “Mary” says he has to be cleared – to make sure he has the right credentials. I want to say: You mean like you, bitch? A nurse PLAYING doctor for my mom and all the other demential patients here? (most of whom look drugged out, as they have their chairs parked around “Mary’s” nurses station – quiet, drugged up little babies. No problem at all caring for such quiet, subdued seniors.

I want to rush into my mom’s room, grab my mom in her wheel chair and roll her out of this place – forever!

But my hands are tied. What can I do? I cannot unhook my little mother from her metal, ugly oxygen tank. I cannot drive her to the hospital and demand the docs “make things happen.” Been there – done that – four times! And Ma can’t go home because THE STATE of MASSACHUSETTS HAS CUT HER SERVICES/MEALS thanks to Elder Services of Worcester, whose nurses/social workers tell me she will be much better cared for at a nursing home. … this nursing home, Holy Trinity, where I can see her looking bloated, drugged up, attached to tubes, arms black and blue …. .

And yet Mom is quietly happy. She tells me the people at the home are so nice, everyone is so gentle with her, they take such good care of her, the food is excellent, they always bring her her coffee. She likes her roommate, too. And she he seems … happy. It’s as if the attention and all the nursing staff and activities staff coming and going is llike a tonic to her. A people person her whole life, my mother now, through her anxiety and tiredness, stresses she doesn’t want to go back to Illyrian Gardens, a place now filled with tight ass staff, a senior citizens complex now run by people who don’t even like senior citizens. I always knew this. My mom did, too, but she repressed her true feeling because she so loved living in her little studio apartment.

Now she calls a spade a spade. She says: “I wasn’t happy there [Illyrian Gardens] – the people … ” and she makes a face. “They [director and staff] were snobs!”

She used the word “snob,” but what my mom meant was that: the staff at Illyrian Garden never cared about her, never stopped by her apartment to say hello or wish her well. No smiles, no pats on the shoulders. Definitely no hugs.

Here at this new place, a nurse told me: “You mother is so nice – we all love her.”

She seemed sincere. I chose to believe her.

Still, the medical care seems substandard.

I have to leave now. I walk back to my mom’s room. “Ma,” I say to her, “I have to go.” I grab her hand off the utility table where she has a plastic cup filled with coffee waiting for her (I will bring her her super duper official huge Red Sox mug tomorrow!). My mom’s little bed side table is covered with the prayer books and photos and perfume bottle I brought for her from her apartment. I notice how warm her hand is. A fever perhaps from the infection in her lung (pneumonia) and in her leg (the bruise from her fall is not healing fast enough). I cannot believe her hand has gotten so gray, so veiny, so bony. Still, I love the warmth I am getting from her. I am loosely holding my mother’s hand in mine. I want to hold it forever.

By Ron O’Clair

My mother’s name was Evelyn. She died of a massive coronary when I was 16 in 1977 when she was 46.

One day she was there, and the next she was not.

As of this Mother’s Day, 41 people are directly descended from her, and continue to multiply as the years go by. She did live ling enough that she was a grandmother before she died, and would be a great-grandmother to 18 children were she alive today.

She loved all of her own children, and their children, and I know she would have had room in her heart for all those that have come since she died, she was that type of person, very giving of herself for other’s.

As Mother’s go, I suppose she was better than some, and not as good as other’s, but to me Click to continue »

By Rosalie Tirella

A few weeks ago, I walked by the kitchen calendar – a PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) calendar – to see if Mother’s Day did indeed fall the next Sunday, May 13. I smiled when I saw the photo of the rescued animal of the month right next to the “Sunday, May 13 – Mother’s Day” date: it was a color photo of a Golden hamster that some sweet PETA staffer had saved from a most horrible death! There sat the little cutie pie – on doll house furniture! In this case a hot pink plastic wing back chair. Adorable!

The little brown hamster reminded my of my “mothers” – my Bapy and my mom.

There I was 10 years old and a fifth grader at Lamartine Street School! There I was: a chubby kid who would soon have a little hamster walking and circling about in the palm of her chubby hand! A little girl who was setting up house … for an adorable little teddy bear!

Who bought the cage for me back then for my little hamster girl “Joy” and then my little hamster boy “Ben,” even though she was saw them as little rats without the long tail? Who bought the little test tube water bottle to hang on the hamster cage? Who bought the lime-green wood shavings for the bottom of the cage? And the box of Hartz hamster food? Who paid for all the silliness on a minimum wage pay check that should have gone for more important items.

Mom of course! Mrs. Tirella! A woman bowled over by poverty, a peripatetic, volatile husband and three little kids, who were growing up in a gritty neighborhood, fatherless, poor … . Still we managed to have fun, have adventures. I remember the day we got Joy. Mom, on Sunday, her only day off from the cleaners, took her three girls to Woolworth’s in downtown Worcester to buy what she considered to be …. a RODENT.

“Don’t lose him, Rosalie!” she had warned me, afraid that my new would escape his cage and “get into the woodwork” of our aparmtent and breed with the wild mice and wreak havoc on her tidy flat with the vinyl red sofa in the living room and the old Victrola in my sisters’ bedroom.

Still, despite here reservations, Mom bought my hamster for me. I can still picture my mother, standing off to the side in the Pet department of Woolworths, watching with a serious look on her face – my mother usually wore a very serious look in her face – as her favorite daughter (she could deny me nothing!) picked out a white little powder puff of a creature and then she shelled out a good chunk of her spending money so I could by my hamster and all the accoutrements – lime green woood shavings, test tube water bottle, metal exercise wheel – even a plastic play log to hide/sleep in. Then we – my mom my two sisters and I – walked home.

Once home, Mommy #2, my Polish immigrant grandmother, Bapy, would shove herself right into the mix, smack dab in the middle of my adventure, hovering over me in her flannel nightgown overwhich she had thrown another flannel night gown (she never wore dresses or even dusters) – just layers of flannel night gowns – even in summer. Bapy always smelled kinda ripe because she came from Poland and didn’t believe in baths or showers (you could catch a cold). She took sponge baths, during which she never really took over the night gowns she was wearing, just kinda washed under around them. I once watched in amazement. I was little and fascinated – she cussed in Polish, telling me to mind my own business. Thank God for diversions like hamsters!

My mother, by this time, had gone back to her routine; cooking Sunday dinner for her three girls, paying the bills at the kitchen table and boiling eggs for Bapy’s snack. We lived with Bapy and father who was Missing in Action – MIA – at the moment. She hated my dad and liked being the boss of the household. AND … she liked her boiled eggs. Seventeen years of life with Bapy – a dumpling shaped cutie who at 76 pretty much continued the Old Country ways she had brought to American in the 1920s. I never saw Bapy eat anything BUT hard boiled eggs and hard boiled egg sandwiches. She ate hard boiled eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner. She ate them with her Sanka coffee that my mother made for her and that Bapy wasked us to warm up for her during the day, usually in a small pan of boiling hot water.

“Rosalie, make me my Sanka!” “Theresa make me my Sanka!” “Stephanie, make my Sanka!” And we kids would drop everything and run to her egg stained coffee mug and place it in the pan of water on the stove, turn up the gas flame and walk away … (me grumbling).

Bapy was a total survivor, a woman who ate hundreds of egg yolks but didn’t keel over from high cholesterol; a woman who hobbled about on arthritic knees but dulled the pain with a few aspirin a day; a woman who had two of her chidlren die at birth but went on to live to see four grown kids and a bevy of grandkids. Pushy. Very pushy. My mom conferred with Bapy on important matters and even when she didn’t ask Bapy, Bapy opined (aloud) for hours. The apartment was never ever quiet, until we went to bed – and even then Bapy wouldn’t go to bed. Instead she would doze on her easy chair at the head of the kitchen table. Waking up to go to the bathroom … or secretly feed my pet hamsters bits of bread from her egg sandwich. I would wake up to see mu VERY FAT hammies surrounded by bread chunks or birthday cake.

“Bapy!” I’d yell at her.

“Rosalie smart girl, but Missy Bossy!” she would declare in the middle of the apartment.

There she was on her throne – at the head of the kitichen table, where my mom had parked her lumpy old easy chair. No back room – or even bedroom – for this grandma. Oh, Bapy!

“Eat, Theresa!” she would say to my fussy kid sister, who was alway skinny/knobby kneed. But when my father threw in his two cents about his daughter’s weight: “Don’t you feed these kids?!” he would yell at my mother – Bapy’s face would get all red and twisted and she yell: “Shut up, you red devil! My father had red hair and later auburn colored hair, even though her was 100% Italian; his people were from Northern Italy, a place my grandmother urged him to return to And if he laughed at Bapy’s – this little whirlwind’s – feistiness, she would ratchet thiings up by maybe tearing her egg sandwich in half and throwing a good chunk of it at my father’s puss.

Very messy.

So many times I think of all the mothering I had as a kid. A world filled with opinionated, bossy, determined, sad, funny women. If it wasn’t my mom running the house (in a nice but firm way – she put us kids out to work at 14 and 1/s), it was my Bapy lecturing in Polish and pigeon English about my father, colds, ponies, ham, my aunts, our weight, our prettiness, our shoes, money matters, doctors …. and my hamsters.

My father used to say to my mother: “That’s right listen to Bapy! She’s a lawyer, judge and Indian chief!”

My Bapy would get up out of her chair as if to slug him but she was 4 feet, 11 inches high. My father just laughed. Which enrage Bapy and usually sent some egg sandwich my dad’s way.

On Sunday’s, mom would turn on the radio to the Polka show. It was the high light of my grandmother’s week. She would sing along to the old Polish songs and try to teach them to us! Sometimes she would get up and try to Poka but she was too crippled. So she would urge my mother to take over for her, and my mom would grab one of us kids and try to teach us the Polka’s steps. She was excellent! When we were really little, 3 and 4, it would be bath night on Polish radio night and my mother wouldn’t teach us to dance but let us run around the kitchen naked to the Polkas. My grandma, sitting chubby and happy in her lumpy chair, would tap her feet to the music and try to tap our buck naked little fannnies as we ran by her … squealing in dleight!

I pity kids today. Most grandmothers live in assisted living or nursing homes. Parents don’t want their parents budding in with their child rearing; they want to focus on their kids and not aging parents who also are people with needs. And today’s parents most likely wouldn’t want the perepetual chattering/bickering that filled our Green Island apartment, courtesy of all the people living there. It is much easier to enjoy grannies from the edge of a hospital bed in a home or a fancy meal spread out at Tatnuck Arms – a chandelier in the dining room, my friend once gushed to me, after she and her sisters placed their 85 year old dad there.

He was dead in less than a year.

But it was a convenient thing for them to do. It was certainly less messy, unlike my childhood and … Bapy’s hardboiled egg sandwiches.

By Rosalie Tirella

My mom had a stroke a few years ago and since then she has a kind of dementia. Not the Alzheimer’s Disease kind that sends you (eventually) into a nursing home/Alzheimers’ unit – just the kind where you’re dottie enough to drive everyone around you crazy. You see, the stroke left my mother with very little short-term memory. Conversations about today are pointless. You tell her stuff a thousand times … and still she forgets.

Shame on me. I have stopped visiting her. I mean have stopped visiting WITH her. I am there at her cozy little studio apartment on the West Side every few days, but it’s pretty much to re-heat her Meals on Wheels, make her bed, check to see if she’s OK and that her homemaker and personal care attendant are on the ball. It feels more like a part-time job than a visit with Mom. Sometimes we end up in a kind of screaming match. “Please!” I say to my mother, “Don’t say a word! ‘Cause I’ll go crazy!! I’ve already told you this 20 times!”

Then I make her her precious HUGE cup of coffee and run out the door.

Gone is my best bud. In her place, a weak, disorganized 85-year-old lady.

I feel more guilty than proud. Proud of myself that, as her primary care giver, I have made it possible for my mom to continue living in her studio apartment with her cat and her big TV always turned on to a Red Sox game. If I were living away, in Boston, like my two sisters, she would not be able to continue to live in her apartment. I have promised myself (and my mom though she doesn’t know it) that my mother will not languish in a nursing home – the kind of institution that this dumpling shaped but strong-willed little woman would not – could not – thrive in. The Old Country (Poland) is where my mother’s mother, my grandmother “Bapy,” hailed from. No one put anyone away in the Old Country. Your old, dottie parents were supposed to live with you, turn your hair gray (and make you dottie!) until it was their time to meet their Maker. “God’s will be done,” folks said as they buried their ancient parents who ended up their children at the end. This phrase was always code, in our Polish/Italian household for: “Hooray! Finally! This albatross (insert problem/crisis) has been cut from our necks!”

My Bapy lived with us until she died. She was a holy terror – a 4-foot-5-inch tall woman who could go mano to mano with my hot tempered Italian father. Once she went into the pantry and came out with a huge carving knife to prove her point! So when she (finally) died, my mom cried and said: “God’s will be done.” Which meant Thank you, God, for taking this cantankerous old woman out of my little children’s lives. For the first time in my 14 years on earth, the Tirella household of Green Island was wonderfully quiet. For a few hours at a stretch even!

Easter is when I best remember my grandmother and my mother in their prime, two women who had brutal lives, and yet never missed attedning mass on Good Friday, Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday in their EASTER BONNETS! My mom even wore gloves! All the women did in the 1950s and early 1960s. I can still picture my mother’s Easter gloves: they were cotton and went to the middle of your wrist. Their color: the softest powder pink.

I used to wonder: Why doesn’t Daddy love Mummy when she wears the prettiest gloves? When she tries so hard to make everybody happy? When she walks with us to jack and Jill’s children’s store on Green Street to buy me and my two sisters the prettiest Easter dresses?

My father never went to church and would never dress up for Easter mass. He thought it – religion – was a stupid excuse concocted by my mother. In his ignorance, he had had a Marxist epiphany: Religion is the Opiate of the masses. My father got it. “You’re as simple as the day is long!” he used to scream at my mother, his face as red as a tomato, the veins in his forehead raised and pulsating. “Keep praying!” he yelled. Which meant: You can never know what a shitty life you and your little girls have: your minimum wage job at the dry cleaners, the 60-hour work week you put in, the lack of financial support from me, no car, no vacations … nothing! – because you are too busy dressing up for Jesus, singing for God, enjoying Catholicism!

As an atheist, my father could wallow in his pointless life and perspective.

Still, I can’t – will never – forget my mom’s pink Easter gloves! When I was a little girl, they used to make me so happy! My mom used to let me try them on. Someday, they’ll be yours she told me.

And the hats! My mom and grandmother were chruch going women in the 1940s and 1950s when everyone wore hats -just like they did in all those great Katherine Hepburn and Irene Dunne movies. American ladies – proper ladies – in their proper hats. Lace, feathers, geometric shapes that we so dramatic! Just watch Irene Dunne (with Cary Grant) in the 1940s classic film “The Awful Truth.” You’ll see what I mean!

I remember my grandmother’s Easter hat – a purple affair, with a few purplish berries and some maroonish netting to cover the eyes/top of your face. No matter how bad things got during the Great Depression or World War II my grandmother went to mass every day – walking down Lafayette Street, up Millbury Street to Richland Street, home of her parish, the little polish church, Our lady of Czetchova. In the spring and summer, and especially Easter week, she wore that hat. Maybe a decade ago my sister got a hold of Bapy’s Easter bonnet, composting with age. She took it and I hope has it tucked away safely in some box. Someday I plan to take anothe rlook at that Easter Bonnet!

When we were little kids attending Lamartine Street School, Miss Loftus our first grade teacher had all us girls make Easter bonnets out of construction paper. The flowers that adorned our hats? Pink and yellow and blue tissue paper works of art that we folded and cut and placed on green-pipe cleaners, their stems. And then old Miss Loftus – a spinster whose life was teaching – would take out a record and play “In Your Easter Bonnet” for us and then she made us learn the song. Then we got to march around the classroom in our pretty Easter bonnets. The highlight for us kids? Parading all over the hallways of Lamartine Street School, marching down to the main office where the secretaries oohed and ahhed and smiled at all the poor little Green Island kids wearing their cute/funny creations.

I always felt loved by the adults at Lamartince Street Schoold – from the teachers, to the office secretaries, to our janitor (Mr. Grey, I think he was called). Easter at Lamartine Street School – always fun.

And now. Well, now, I have become (probably) as godless as my father, who died several years ago. I did not try to lose my faith or my God. I just did. My sisters are still great, church-going Catholic girls. Somehow, with my father, poverty, a stint at Clark University where I fell deeply in love with my first boyfriend a Catholic boy who renounced God after her took a class on Neitesche and existentialism, somehow all this caused God to fade from my life. Not the teachings of God – just HIS protection – someone to look to in times of trouble. If there is no God, who the hell has my back?!

How, I ask myself these days, when I really do need a God to lean on, when I am swimming in the deep end of mid-life and could use a life guard, how did I lose my religion? The Old Country Catholicism that made me feel so safe as a child and young girl?

Where is my Easter bonnet?

By Rosalie Tirella

It was the mid-1970s, and I believed in love the way I would never believe in love again. There was the music on the radio – songs by James Taylor and Carole King. There were the movies that were hits – movies like The Way We Were starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford. There was my cousin “Tina” who was classic 1970s beautiful with her thick, chestnut hair that swung down to her butt and her pretty face and figure that literally (I witnessed this twice) stopped traffic as she walked down the street. I believed in TRUE LOVE, the PG version, even though my mom, Italian dad, my two sisters and my grandmother from Poland were pretty much living the “not-yet-rated” Martin Scorsesse version in Green Island.

The fantasy that I would meet and marry a tall and handsome boy who looked like Paul McCartney and played accoustic guitar – to and for me – took hold when I was 14 or so. I went around our Green Island apartment fantasizing about my Paul McCartney look-a-like and his lovely sad eyes and started writing poems – poems that I hoped would some day be lyrics to the melodies my true love composed for me.

This actually happened for my cousin Tina. My aunt and uncle were middle-class and could give their kids stuff my mom could never buy for us kids: stuff like an upright piano for Tina and private paino lessons. At 19 Tina was attending Anna Maria college and met a young guy from WPI college who played the accoustic guitar. He wrote songs for her and she wrote the lyrics and because she loved him so dearly composed very long and dramatic melodies on her piano. For him. For love.

I believed that when I was a bit older – in college like Tina – this would happen to me, too. I also believed that when I and my true love looked at each other it would be like when Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford looked at each other in The Way We Were – long, wistful glances – deep into the eyes. I would brush the wispy bangs out of my true love’s eyes, just the way Streisand had done to Redford when she and Redford (“Hummel” in the movie), said their final good-byes to each other on the streets of New York City. Cue the sad, lovely music: Streisand is singing “The Way We Were,” the theme song of the movie, written by Marvin Hamlish.

These days I am brushing the wispy – gray – hair out of my mother’s eyes – not some guy’s. My mother has changed during these past few years. She is 84. Two years ago, she could have run my business with one hand tied behind her back. Today I look deep into her eyes as she watches her beloved Red Sox on TV and see the old confidence, the old purposefulness, even severity gone. Her strongest personality traits and the ones I sometimes found the most vexing – poof. Gone forever.

Now she lives in a world that’s out of focus, a world where sentences need to be repeated, Meals on Wheels need to be delivered to her door every day, PCAs must shower her and homemakers must cook meals. And I, her only daughter living in town, must visit every day – to “check on” her and make sure everything is going smoothly. (a more complicated job – and it does become a job – than you would think)

A few years ago Mum knew all the Red Sox players and how well they were doing during the season. Batting averages, home runs, fouls – she could have been one of the TV commentators. And when a game became a nail biter, Mum would get up out of her easy chair and walk right up to the televsion – stand two or three inches away from the TV screen – and shout: “Come one! Come on! Go! Go!” And if the Red Sox prevailed, up went Mum’s crinkly little arms and out came “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” Cheers for her heroes! Manny and Ortiz and all the Sox players – they were her boys.

These days, the TV is on and she is watching her Red Sox, but she is seated at her little table without the Sox game schedule at her elbow, without the coffee cup rising to her lips after a good pitch or catch, without the frequent trips to the TV screen to cheer on her beloved Ortiz. The informed game talk is gone, replaced with occassional glances down at the big ugly black orthopedic shoes she wears now.

She says, “Do I have to wear these? They’re so heavy.”

Just like my heart is now.

Instead, I say: “Mum, you’ve fallen twice – you can’t wear your slippers anymore. These shoes give you support” (not really knowing what “support” means). I say: “Please, Ma, listen to the doctor so you don’t end up in a nursing home!”

Then PANIC! I panic because I know I am losing my best friend, my #1 booster, my closest confidente, my smartest, strongest, bravest ally! Mum panics because she doesn’t want to leave her cozy little studio apartment – the one that she has happily lived in and happily grown old in for more than 16 years. Her cat, her sofa, her little twin bed, her pals at the end of the corridor on her floor … gone forever to be replaced by johnnies and nurses aides dressing you a bit too hastily. And no Rosalie, her best buddy, hanging out with her, jabbering away about her problems.

Ma grows serious – too serious – to enjoy the Red Sox. I grow serious, too.

Taking her blue plastic comb out of the little box I have placed on the little folding table that sits to the left of her, I begin to comb her short hair. I look at all the little dime-store prayer books she used to read during the day, prayer books that she had memorized from years and years of reading and rereading them. Not any more: They sit untouched, unread – even coffee-stained. I had to throw out a couple of especially messy ones (when she wasn’t looking).

On Ma’s low table also sit little statues of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, Saint Theresa, Saint Martin and a ceramic angel holding my mum’s birthstone. I bought the little angel for her a few months ago and she loves it – has it positioned right where she can always see it. I comb Mum’s brittle gray hair to the side, and remind myself to make an appointment for her with a hairdresser that makes apartment calls. Mum has lost the little paper with her old hairdresser’s name and number on it and no longer remembers the person who used to come down and do her hair. Truth be told, I’ve forgotten the woman’s name, too.

I will have to find a new hairdresser for my mother – one who gives great “perms.” One who loves old people.

With my fingers I brush the wispy bangs out of my mom’s eyes, and the sad love music begins … .