This will seem out of place and bizarre. I think what I have to say belongs in this thread. Please try to read it through to the end.
Last night, I received the most terrible phone call I could have ever received.
The nursing home where my mother has been for the past several months called me.
My mother died last night.
The nurse told me my mother did not suffer. The nurse told me my mother died from her long-standing illness (vascular dementia, which my mother had been battling for nearly five years now), and not from COVID-19.
I had not seen my mother in over a month because there was a ban on external visitors entering the nursing home.But I spoke to her briefly last week. You see, when they banned external visitors, they also sent home staff they deemed to be "non-essential."
One of these non-essential staff members was a recreational technician. Last week, the home relaxed some of the restrictions and allowed the recreational technician to come back to work.
The recreational technician arranged two phone calls between me and my mother. My mother did not initiate the conversations. She had not been initiating conversations since early March at least. So, I asked "Ma, can you hear me?" Her response was along the lines of "Gimme a fucking minute, Motherfucker!"
Despite her severe physical (she has not been able to stand up since the end of December) and cognitive (she, a nurse in her working life, refused to eat anything solid, she often thought her socks were bank accounts, she often thought what was on the TV was real),
my mother retained her fighting spirit until the very end.
Last November, when she fell "while preparing to go to work" (she had not worked outside the house for decades), and I called the Ambulance, took her to the hospital, and then, when the orthopedists said they were not willing to operate and the ER doctor asked me if I was comfortable taking my mother back home, and I said no because my mother had injured herself in one of her delusions, I thought that was the worst day of my life. When the physio at the hospital told me (the initial plan was discharge to home temporarily, then placement) that, if I brought her back home, the chance of her having another fall was practically 100%, whereas, if I placed her in a facility, the risk of another fall diminished, I thought that was the worst day of my life. Last Christmas, when my mother refused to eat the chocolates I had brought her, and just repeated the same thing over and over and over and over and over all morning, I thought that was the worst day of my life.
Evidently, I was wrong on all counts. Yesterday and today are the worst day of my life...to date at least. There are no burials because of COVID-19, so I have arranged to have my mother's remains cremated. Then, when this COVID-19 is better understood, I will reunite my mother's earthly remains with that of her other children who have predeceased her.
This hurts. There is no two ways about it.
But it was not unexpected.
When my mother was first officially diagnosed with vascular dementia just over two years ago now (she had been symptomatic for about three years before that, but she was an old-fashioned woman who practically raised a family by herself, so she did not want to tell the doctor anything was wrong; most of all, I think she knew something was wrong, but just could not bring herself to admit it), the doctor told me that the prognosis was unidirectional. The only thing was that the medical literature on things like vascular dementia is not as well developed as it is for things like renal failure, and case studies had noted patients living 6-9 years post-diagnosis, so "when" was the question.
Until that question was answered, I resolved to fight to do everything I could for my mother. I failed. I fucked up enormously at the end, as you can tell by how things turned out. But I resolved to fight for my mother as long as she was alive.
I last saw her over a month ago. That is when lockdowns began. So, I turned to reading, always my favorite past time. I can read French, so I already read two books about Bir Hakeim, where, from 26 May to 11 June 1942, the French Foreign Legion and other small units of the French Army held off two German divisions, two Italian divisions, plus heavy bombardments from the Luftwaffe's Bf-110's and JU88s (i.e., the Luftwaffe's heavies.) I also started reading Harrison Salisbury's
900 Days about Leningrad.
I resolved to fight to survive this damned COVID-19 so I could be there for my mother at the end of it. In that objective, I failed, but that is nothing novel for me. My life is an extremely impressive collection of failures, so impressive that I am giving thought to calling the
Guinness Book and/or
National Geographic to see if I can get any prize money for "Lifetime filled with most failures."
But I am still not giving up. For one thing,my mother can no longer take care of her earthly remains.So, I must do that for her. For another thing, she wanted to be reunited with the children who predeceased her. So I must do that as well.
Then, comes the hardest part. When she was of right mind, my mother told me she wanted me to
live if she predeceased me. This is a general order and extremely vague, so extremely difficult to carry out.
But I am going to try.
Right now, I have a choice. I could do like Adolf, Goebbels, Schädle, Krebs, Burgdorf, Hewel and all the other fucking cowards did in April and May 1945 and bug out when the things got hairy. I could replay Weidling`s capitulation speech from {b]
Der Untergang[/b] over and over again and tell myself that that is the reality I have to resign myself to.
Or, I could do like Chris Hemsworth's "Jed Eckert" speech in the new (2012)
Red Dawn. Whatever its flaws (the characters kept the same clothes for months on end, seemingly never getting dirty or developing skin conditions as a result, the new
Red Dawn stands out from the original in large part because of the "Jed Eckert" speech. Unlike the 1984 version, 2012's "Jed Eckert" is a Marine home from being deployed to Najaf.
Near the beginning of the movie, after there is an unidentified helicopter flying overhead and the kids all duck, the younger kids (who, in the 2012 are
actual teenagers and not 20-somethings playing teenagers) say they want to go home. They get stopped by Adrianna Palicki's character who tells them their parents are not down there, but dead. Then, one of the older kids asks "We can't go home. We can't keep running. What are we supposed to do?"
"I'm gonna fight," begins "Jed Eckert. "I'm gonna fight. It's easier for me because I'm used to it--look, I don't want to sell it to you because it's too ugly and its too hard. But, when you're fighting in your own backyard, it hurts a little less and it makes a little more sense." Then, "Jed Eckert says something to the effect that they will find friends who will give them what they need to fight a guerilla war against the invaders.
I have been doing a "Jed Eckert" with my mother for years now. Because my mother's last order to me was to go on living, I intend to go on doing a "Jed Eckert." For some reason, despite all what I am going through right now between my ears and, even worse, between my sternum and my spinal column, doing a "Jed Eckert" still has more of an appeal to me than does doing an Adolf, a Goebbels, a Krebs and Burgdorff, a Schâdle or a Hewel.
What is more, because of my mother's situation, and because it could be genetic, I have been reading a very interesting book
Successful Aging by neuroscientist Dr. Daniel J. Levitin. Dr. Levitin says a crucial key component to maintaining cerebral function into old age is to
always be learning something new. To that end, I am trying to learn Russian. This is a big challenge because, for one thing, unlike French and German, the alphabet is different. But I am trying to learn by memorizing and singing Russian songs from the Soviet era. I apologize if I hurt anyone who has had to live under a Communist regime in real life. But there is just something about the way Soviet-era music was so elegantly and powerfully written that moves me, even though I hardly understand one word out of ten. So, here are some Soviet-era Russian songs I have memorized last year and this. They are all very rousing of the passions and of the will to fight.
"Varchavianka"
"Polyushka Pole" (a classic, the opening theme to the "The Battle of Russia"installment of the WWII US Army Signal Corps
Why We Fight series, and part of the opening themes of
The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming with Alan Arkin and Carl Reiner.
"Let's Go/V Put"
"Katyusha" (a love song along the lines of the Afrikaans "Sarie Marais," and not the Multiple Rocket Launcher/Stalin Organs)
Despite what I am going through, I fully intend to continue doing a "Jed Eckert" for as long as I can.
Now, let me apologize to any military Veterans reading this. I am obviously not a Veteran, hence my attraction to books about Bir Hakeim and Leningrad and hence my receptiveness to the "Jed Eckert" speech from the 2012
Red Dawn. I did not mean to trivialize the experience of any Veterans who are reading this. It is just, that, in my simple-mindedness, I am easily impressed by military things.
These were pictures no Italian ever believed to be possible and this military convoy was there in Bergamo already twice.
)
