From the category archives:
The wonderful hospital sent my mom back home yesterday. Not home home, because she can’t go back to her apartment by herself. But home to the nursing home part of the retirement community where she lives.
She missed yesterday entirely. She missed everything about it, because she was someplace deep inside. She missed breakfast, lunch, and [...]
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My 92 year old mom is in the hospital.
She’s been there since Saturday and they haven’t done much. She had a very small stroke, and they were going to do a few tests to look for Other Things. But they already knew they wouldn’t treat her for the Other Things, so I asked them not [...]
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My mom’s wristwatch stopped working. It’s just the battery. I know this because I took her to get the battery replaced the last time her wristwatch stopped, which was a looooonnnnnnngggggg time ago. So long ago that she still went outside sometimes.
We went to a mall somewhere in Ohio to get it fixed. I remember [...]
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Tomorrow, I’ll be flying to Santa Barbara to watch my niece graduate from college. And the way you fly from Portland to Santa Barbara is to fly to Denver and make a right turn. Who knew?
I’ll be in Denver for 36 minutes, which is not quite enough time for a trip back to the wind [...]
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My sister was a devoted Red Cross volunteer. In the last years of her life, she spent a total of 534 days at disaster sites around the United States. She also worked with the International Red Cross Federation in the Balkans during the Kosovo conflict. She and her husband flew to Belarus and Georgia to [...]
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The college counseling process has officially started at Dancing Fairy’s school. They take seriously the process of deciding about college and sending in applications. Not seriously as in ‘everyone has to get into a really good school’, but seriously as in ‘there’s bound to be at least one good place for each graduate to end [...]
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Over the weekend, DF drove to two grocery stores and Office Depot. She parked, and she backed out of parking spaces. She made a left turn onto a four-lane, very busy street. She did great.
It was kind of a winding trip getting to the grocery stores, but she comes by that honestly. Nobody–and I mean [...]
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My two favorite goils in the whole entire world.
Dancing Nurse Tattoo Fairy
They laugh at (most of) my jokes. They make me laugh.
They play Scrabble and Canasta with me. They cut me yards and yards of slack.
They do pedicures, eyebrow maintenance, and give great neck rubs. They share their music.
Lucky, lucky me.
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The problem with living so far away from my mother is that I can’t see her. I can tell, over the phone, that she’s having trouble finding words and that the gaps in her memory are expanding like sinkholes.
But I can’t see how long it takes her to stand up from the couch. She rocks forward and gets [...]
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Dancing Fairy: a carhop at a drive-in. She starts Friday.
Nurse Tattoo: in her first interview on her first working day in Colorado, she landed a job that she’s excited about. She starts Wednesday.
Buster: still interviewing.
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