Grammar Bunny

Visiting my Mom in Chicago as She Transitions to Hospice Care.

Bunny in her younger days.

A guy once showed me a refrigerator magnet his mother had given him for his 50th birthday. It said, “You’re Never Too Old to be Disappointed in Your Middle-Aged Son.” Well, I can top that. I’m in Chicago, visiting with my 95-year-old mom, Bunny, who has Alzheimer’s and is being transitioned to hospice care — and yesterday she corrected my grammar. I had, you see, unthinkingly used “like” as a conjunction. She was slurring her words a little bit — this happens now when she gets tired — and at first I didn’t catch what she was saying. So she repeated it, emphasizing where I should have used “as” instead of “like.” And I, her 63-year-old son, standing in her room on the nursing-care floor of the Selfhelp Home, felt both chastened and blessed. In my shock and delight that she could still be this sharp, I immediately forgot what I’d (incorrectly) said. Like, totally.

“As!” my mom would yell at the TV screen. “As a cigarette should!”

My mother’s situation is less dire than the word “hospice” makes it sound. What her doctor is recommending is that she continue receiving the exact same care she’s been getting, only now supplemented by visits from hospice workers, who can help assess her needs. When I spoke to him on the phone last week, the doctor said she was still doing okay physically, but her cognitive abilities were deteriorating.

I said, “Should I jump on a plane right now?”

He said, “No, but if I were you, I’d go to see her within the next couple weeks. You’ll want to be with her before she slips further.”

I told the doctor that I’d volunteered at a hospice for several years, and my understanding was that for someone to be referred for hospice care, their doctor had to make the determination that they had no more than six months to live. He told me that this was technically correct, but that my mom could go on receiving this extra care indefinitely.

Which has left me somewhat confused, but mostly relieved.

I miss my mom’s laugh. She still smiles, radiantly, when I arrive for each day’s visit — but she doesn’t laugh.

Once, when I was nine years old, I was trying to teach her how to swim. We were in the pool at the the Hotel Paris, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was a pretty grand hotel, but for some reason they let riffraff like us use their pool for a small fee. My first task, as we stood together in the shallow end, was to get her to hold her breath and put her head under the water for a few seconds. She wouldn’t.

The Hotel Paris

I usually went to that pool with my dad, Paul, and sometimes also Sue, who’d just become my stepmother.

“Be careful,” my mom chided me, when I got frustrated at her refusal to follow my orders to submerge. “I’m the only mom you’ve got.”

“Not anymore!” I retorted.

She laughed then, and would laugh whenever she retold that story.

It’s time for me to wrap up this report and head over to Selfhelp to see my mom. It wasn’t always the case that she smiled so joyfully when she saw me. From what I could tell, she’d rarely been smiled at — much less doted on — by her own mother when she was a child. There had been two girls born before Bunny — Birdie (yes, Birdie!) and Cyril. Cyril, who had apparently been the favorite of Grandma Dora, died from a viral disease shortly before Mom was born. Dora, already depressed by her unhappiness in a marriage to a man she felt to be intellectually beneath her and by her longing for the art-school life she’d enjoyed in her her early adulthood in St. Petersburg, Russia, seems to have had a breakdown. According to my mom, when as a child she caught what seemed to be a common cold, Grandma Dora got so freaked out at another of her daughters becoming ill, she made Bunny stay in bed for a year! Dora always made it clear, my mom said, that her youngest daughter would never be able to measure up to the older sister who’d died.

Once, on a visit to my mom at her assisted-living apartment at Selfhelp, after her husband Frank had died but long before she began showing signs of dementia, I mentioned how Grandma Dora had always seemed like such a sweet old lady — fussing over me, always worrying that I was getting too thin (only a grandma could ever have had such a worry about me!), bringing me plates of Stella D’Oro cookies and bowls of sweets, and yelling, “Schnell! Schnell!” (“Hurry! Hurry!”) whenever I headed to the bathroom (Grandma and Grandpa’s apartment had a long hallway, and I suppose she was afraid I’d have an accident).

Perhaps I’d like a few more of these? I’m looking a little peaked!

My mother was quiet for a bit, then said, forcefully: “She was a monster!” I saw that Mom was trembling with rage. At that point, Grandma Dora had been dead for over 50 years.

Such is the enduring power of grief, of loss. It has shadowed my mother’s entire life — and it hasn’t always left much room, in our relationship, for her to express, or to receive, tenderness.

But I noticed a change when my son — Mom’s only grandchild — began coming with me to visit Grandma Bunny at Selfhelp. Oh, she was so delighted by him! Once, Mom said to me: “He’s so affectionate! Have you noticed how, whenever he’s about to leave my room, he lets his fingers just graze my arm?”

And now there’s that ease between her and me as well. There’s nothing complicated anymore.

Which isn’t to say, of course, that when I make a grammatical error, she’s just going to let it slide!