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possible last visit to my still-living mother
Thursday, July 18 2024
location: the couch in the Shaque, rural Augusta County, VA
Between the cannabis and the imperfect hydration, I hadn't slept well in the Shaque. The couch was reasonably comfortable, and there hadn't been any biting insects or loud noises. Overall, though, it was about the roughest night I'd spent since those times Gretchen and I spent nights in an Adirondack yurt back in the aughts. (I've also slept out under the stars and in other improvised places when biking or hitchhiking from one place to another, something I did as late as the age of thirty.) I went several times to the trailer at Creekside (across the road) to try to get Don to let me in, but he didn't respond either time (the second time was at around 10:00am). So I eventually just decided to drive into town. I have a policy of never buying bottled water, but perhaps I could find a fountain somewhere and fill a cup or a bottle. I ended up at Martin's, the supermarket my mother used to love out on US 250 near Walmart, and walked around looking for cold-brew coffee, bagels, and hummus. Martin's had all these things, though the bagels were in the opposite corner from the hummus that so perfectly goes with them. As for the coffee, the best I could find was some pre-sweetened Starbucks coffee with oat milk. (It can be hard to find products that aren't chock full of the sugar and fat that Americans expect in the things they consume.)
Back out at Creekside, I made myself a couple bagels with hummus and some nice tomatoes I'd picked from our garden in Hurley, the first of the year. Don was finally up and about, though he didn't want a bagel when I offered him one. When I told him I'd been forced to drink Coca-Cola for hydration last night, he was horrified. He regards everything in his limited world view as either a thing one should definitely do or a thing one should definitely not do, with no grey area between them or circumstances that might make a bad thing into an acceptable thing. He couldn't seem to process that I'd been left with no choice but to drink Coke and then (horror of horrors) not brush my teeth. In the end he decided apologies were in order, since he'd locked his door and barred my access to potable water. I said it wasn't a problem, but could he please leave the trailer door unlocked for the rest of my stay? He said no problem, that he only locked it because otherwise it wouldn't stay shut.
I asked Don if he wanted to visit our mother Hoagie in Fishersville and he said yeah, and then he proceeded to spend a long time getting ready (most of that time seemed to be him clipping his nails). This might've been when I took the opportunity to take shit. There was no way I'd be using any bathroom maintained by my brother (which meant I wouldn't be using either of the bathrooms at Creekside). So instead I went down to the floodplain just south of my childhood home, took off my pants, crossed Folly Mills Creek, and pooped on the shore that nobody can normally goes. I then used the creek itself as a bidet, meaning there was no toilet paper or even leaves necessary to leave me with a sparkling asshole.
As I was driving with Don to Fishersville, he suddenly mentioned that Hoagie was no longer at The Retreat; he said Joy Tarder had told him that her medical condition was such that she needed to be moved to a different facility. "Hmm, you think you could've told me that earlier?" I asked, more out of amusement at the absurdity than of anger. Don then tried to call Joy Tarder but couldn't get her. Then he called The Retreat and someone said they would call him back. I decided we should drive to The Retreat anyway.
When we got to The Retreat, it turned out our mother was very much still there and in the same room she'd been in from the beginning. So I don't know where that earlier misinformation had come from. We walked Hoagie's room, found it unlocked, and walked in. There she was, lying in a bed. She seemed to know who we were when we began talking to her, though as usual, she went back and forth between talking to me as her son Gus and as if I was some person who was not Gus. She was perfectly articulate, suggesting that the part of her brain that can assemble sentences is still just as sharp as ever. But underneath that layer is the layer that contains a model of reality, and that part was a jumbled mess. Nothing she confidently said to us could be taken as true and it was full of obvious absurdities, including that she'd been driving a car earlier today. Since arriving at The Retreat, she's never seemed to be clear on where she is. Sometimes she claims she is home or across the street from home. Other times she seems to think she's very temporarily somewhere else and we've arrived to "take" her "home." There's apparently little accumulation of awareness that she is not home, which is a small mercy I suppose.
Hoagie is beridden due to pain from arthritis, and occasionally that pain is intense. While we were there, she started moaning at the pain, so Don went and found a staffer who eventually came by with some droplets to administer under Hoagie's tongue. (She seemed to know the routine well, opening her mouth like a baby bird about to receive a worm.) We didn't stay long, since she wasn't really benefitting much by our presence. But, since this might've been the last time I would see her alive, I made a point of touching her hands and having her feel the two weeks of beard that had accumulated on my face. I also told her that I love her, which didn't really feel true at the time but was the right thing to say. There was a time when I definitely loved my mother, but those feelings had been badly damaged by her actions after her husband (my father) died. As we walked the corridors back out to the parking lot, tears welled up in my eyes. But I didn't feel anywhere near as sad about my mother as I did when my father was going through his end-of-life decline.
Since we were close to Waynesboro, Don had apologetically asked if we could also stop by Books-A-Million, knowing that I might take this request as a crasss attempt to exploit our somber visit to our dying mother. But that wasn't my feeling at all; life is for the living. So we went to Book-A-Million, and, after much deliberation, Don bought a book about sharks. Next I drove us to a Virginia ABC store so I could buy a half gallon of cheap gin. (Aristocrat gin is much cheaper than anything one can buy and New York and plenty good for my needs.) I then drove us to the nearby Walmart so I could buy orange juice, though I also bought a large bottle of shelf-stable unsweetened cold-press coffee, a bag of chips, some sort of salsa, and guacamole (since I needed something to eat tonight).
Back at Creekside, Don disappeared into his trailer and I retreated to the Shaque. (I'd been concerned that Don wouldn't leave me alone if I attempted to stay in the Shaque, but he's been great about just letting me be.) I'd taken a recreational percocet just before driving out to see Hoagie, and though it never really kicked in definitively, it was now starting to cause me acid reflux and indigestion, which was making the gin-and-juice I'd just fixed myself not quite as satisfying as I'd hoped. But I drank it anyway and watched some more episodes of the second season of House of the Dragon.
At some point I took a break from that to retrieve some nice touring bikes that I'd stored beneath the honey house back in 1989 and 1990. These bikes started out in Oberlin with a provenance I am not proud of. I'd tricked them out with extra panier racks and water bottle holders and ridden some of them all the way back to my childhood home, a partially-mountainous 400 mile route I would do in four days. Back when I'd stored them beneath the honey house, my main concern was that my brother Don would start riding them. And Don was terrible when it came to locking bikes, so if he did that, they would inevitably be stolen. So I'd connected them together with a big U-lock. I'd tried to extract them once before, but had been thwarted by that U-lock, whose key had long been lost. So on this trip, I'd brought a battery-powered angle grinder. That made short work of the U-lock, and soon I'd recovered three bikes. Their tires and the rubber jackets on the pivots the brake levers attach to had partially rotted away, but all the metal seemed sound. (They'd been mostly out of the elements for their 35 years of storage.) The tires were all very flat, but the two bikes with both wheels could be walked. I took them across the road and began attaching the bike rack to the back of the Forester. But once I had it installed, I realized it was probably upside-down. So I went back to Shaque to continue watching House of the Dragon. Not long after that, my acid reflux rose to a level that I could tell was turning into extreme nause. I just barely got out of the front door of the Shaque before vomitting an enormous volume of sour brown liquid. It was flecked with pieces of tomato from the two bagels I'd eaten earlier. After vomitting a couple times like this, spraying a slippery liquid all over the Shaque steps that I would eventually cause me to slip and nearly fall, I felt so much better that I could go back to drinking gin and juice.
This evening as I waited for a 150 mg dose of diphenhydramine to kick in, I wandered back over to the trailer and had Don fetch a fancy drone he'd told me about, one he'd never actually flown. He'd read the instructions, which were full of language that he read so literally that he'd couldn't bring himself to actually do anything with it. This had prevented the drone from ending up in the creek or in a tree, but it had also rendered it a complete waste of his very limited purchasing power. There were a number of problems that I quickly fixed, starting with a propeller guard Don had accidentally installed upside-down. (It never occurred to him to unscrew the tiny screws holding it in place and then install it right-side up.) He also thought the antennas on the remote were designed to hold his phone, which they were far too flimsy to do. He never noticed the pull-out tray there for that purpose. The biggest thing that had stumped Don, though, was the process of "calibration," which the instructions insisted be done far away from cellphones or metal objects. But it didn't say how far, and Don seemed to think that any metal or cellphones within, I don't know, 100 feet would be a problem. I scoffed at this, saying a lot such verbiage is included to try to limit liability and can be ignored. But Don can't get his brain into such a mode. It reminds me of how he responds to malware on his phone popping up and telling him things (another problem I fixed this evening). For some reason he can't understand the manipulative or legalistic intent behind messages and can only act on their literal content, and there's no way I can bring him the necessary perspective in a single evening. As I tried to figure out the drone, he kept reiterating the stuff I'd just told him he could safely ignore, and I got to the point where I was telling him, "You're sounding like a dumb-dumb! What did I just tell you about that verbiage?" I eventually got the drone to fly, which it did very nicely (since it uses GPS to keep it from drifting). But I never managed to pair Don's phone with it, which would've allowed him to watch a live feed from its camera. The instructions were vague about pairing, and I eventually just gave up on that.
The newish barn and the dilapidated chicken coop, viewed from slope above the floodplain. Note all the plants coming in now that there is no grazing except by deer.
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That chicken coop is probably at least as old as me. It had chickens in it when I was a kid.
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Don today at The Retreat in Fishersville when we were visiting our mother Hoagie.
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Hoagie in her hospital bed today at The Retreat, surrounded by her art.
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Above my head where I lay on the couch in the Shaque.
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The view out to the door from the couch in the Shaque.
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