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Bloggy Blog #92

 In the February tundra that is upstate New York, in a hospital room some eleven-hundred plus miles away from me, a doctor named Oleg signed off on my mother’s death certificate. She had been in and out of the hospital for a couple months, after falling repeatedly at the apartment. My father had to call 911 a few times to help get her to the emergency room, and after the third or fourth time falling they just kept her there. At some point, she broke her hip. Then she may (or may not have?) caught COVID in the hospital. She wasn’t vaccinated. There was talk of sending her back home (potentially with COVID) which sounded rather suspect coming from medical professionals. Things at home seemed rather unclear about hospice care, so sending her back with a serious pandemic diagnosis didn’t seem like a great idea. My father is vaccinated, but would still have needed to come into close contact with her constantly if she went home. That didn’t end up needing to happen. 

I flew to Albany as soon as I could afford to. Outside the airport, I was met with the usual blustery northern air that whipped through my ill-prepared clothing selection. Winters could last through Memorial Day here, if they wanted. A friend scooped me up and brought me back to where my parents had been living since around 2008.

At the apartment was my father, in one of the back bedrooms, on the computer. The desk he was at lay awash with tiny notes, in his handwriting. Most of them list the phone numbers of his children and brother in-law. It’s how he remembers things these days. This was my mother’s old bedroom. Her clothes and many, many blankets were still in the large walk-in closet. Some of her shoes were still on the floor, by a big oak desk I’ve secretly wanted for years. On that desk lay prescriptions, bills, mechanical pencils, and more tiny notes dad had been jotting down for who knows how long. There’s a walker and a wheelchair, the latter my father was sitting in at the desk (he doesn’t quite need it - yet). Whatever chaos that room saw for the last month or so of my mother’s life was pretty clear to the naked eye. 


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