I got lucky. Chafed raw by years of her own mother-in-law, mine was careful to stay out of our lives—and if we asked her to referee, she took my side instinctively. This was a woman who’d taught her son to do his own laundry and expect no princesses; she had salted their casual conversations with a sharp “Men are pigs!” every time one behaved badly.
Jo’s fun, too, easy to please, delighted by everything from our dog to my cooking. She smiles easily and often, and had an honesty about her that was both wry and innocent. After spending my single years in the company of oft-suicidal bohemians and jaded activists, I found her presence soothing.
Even when she was widowed, too soon, she created no drama, just chose a studio apartment in the Central West End and made friends in the building. They’d have dinners at each other’s apartments, go to free symphony recitals and rush-hour movies.
She still did us the polite favor of pretending she needed us around, though. When we told her we were moving to Waterloo, for example, she gave a mock groan: “What if I get sick?”
“We’ll saddle up the horses, and we won’t rest them until we reach St. Louis,” Andrew deadpanned. “Mom, it’s a half-hour drive!”
She grinned, and we started talking about her upcoming trip to Texas with her new gentleman friend.
She’d been back a week when our phone rang at 1 a.m.
A kind policewoman told me the doorman had called 911 when Jo came down to the lobby distraught, unable to speak. I practically argued with the cop: Jo was healthier than anyone I knew, worked out, ate raw veggies for lunch, walked all over Forest Park. And (as though this were the clincher) we were meeting her for dinner the next night!
Selfishness, I sometimes think, keeps us sane. This arrogant presumption that what is good will remain—there’s no logic to it. Yet every time reality shatters another status quo, we start combing through the slivers, gluing together a new one.
For Jo, it would not include speech—but that realization came only after months of hoping.
First came crisis mode: trading shifts in the neuro-ICU, racing home to Google everything the doctors said.
Then came passive-layperson mode, in which we blindly did whatever they told us to do and waited for Jo to be moved wherever they said she would go next.
Then the startle: We needed to cancel her lease. Guilt had kicked in with that 1 a.m. call—how long had she been alone after the stroke? When the doctor gave his estimate—six hours—we swallowed hard. We should have been calling her every few hours every day! They could have given her medicine to reverse the damage if they’d caught it sooner! In the end, we returned to our senses: She’d been 71 and as healthy as a horse. She would have killed us for treating her like an infant.
But still. No more living alone.
So where would she live? She loathed small towns, loved the Central West End, saw her friends constantly.
“She could regain full speech and swallowing,” one physician assured us. “Or none of it.”
Last April 12, Jo went to a rehab center, where we were told she’d likely stay for at least three weeks. After the abrupt shifts from ER to ICU to a regular room, three weeks sounded like an eternity; we sighed with relief and settled into that new normal, bringing comfy pillows and audiobooks, helping drill her between therapy sessions, experimenting with radio headsets (they hurt, and I only later realized how fragile her head must feel, struck by a sort of lightning).
Meanwhile, we were “exploring our options” (the longer I live, the more I dread that phrase). If she got considerably better, maybe we could find her an apartment close by in Waterloo. If…not? We started compiling research on every kind of nursing home or assisted-living community between St. Louis and Waterloo. Meanwhile our dear friend Scott, a lawyer, kept pestering us about getting the power of attorney we’d thought Andrew already had. Turned out, Andrew just had medical power of attorney. He needed legal, Scott told us urgently, emailing at least once a day to see if Mrs. C. had signed the papers yet. “Scott, she can’t write clearly yet!” we’d zap back, trapped between her health and his law.
On April 17, a social worker called with “good news”: Jo would be discharged in a few days. Granted, she couldn’t swallow food or water or even her own saliva, let alone call 911 for help, but she was otherwise very healthy, so she couldn’t stay three weeks or even two—and a nursing home probably wouldn’t take her—but no worries, one of the nurses would teach us how to change the feeding bag and operate the suction pump—and of course Jo would need care 24/7, but perhaps we could find an adult day care near one of our workplaces?
“A day care that’s willing to flush a feeding tube every four hours?” I sputtered before regaining enough control to hang up and call my best friend, who’s a nurse. “She’s wrong, Jen, don’t worry about it,” my friend said (and had to repeat).
The social worker was indeed wrong, we learned on Monday, after a weekend madly calling and faxing every nursing home in the area. We’d found one in Waterloo that had speech therapy and an open bed. I was calmer.
By now, we were on autopilot: We called all Jo’s friends and closed down her apartment (reminded at the last minute by one of Jo’s shaky notes that she also had a big ol’ storage space in the basement). We’d sorted through Jo’s belongings (“When did my mother become a clotheshorse?” Andrew asked, bemused). We’d gotten the power of attorney and made a binder, logging every step as we changed the address on her bank account, pension, insurance, Medicare, Social Security… We even figured out her PIN and passwords (most of them), although we never did find a couple of credit cards (she drew a map of her desk Geraldo couldn’t have fathomed).
It was weird, an Alice trick of walking into someone else’s life without them there to explain anything. But she was making progress: not with the speech, which would tease us with a word or two, then vanish, but with swallowing and eating. Now the big question was back: Where next? I cleared a giant closet and mentally turned our living room and dining room into a bedroom suite. We’d get a “send help” button for the hours she’d be alone…
She gently took the piece of paper where we’d listed options, pointed to Rosedale House (a cozy little assisted-living center five minutes away), and wrote three words: “My own home.”
That night, I agonized: Was she just worried, as usual, about not bothering us? Finally, Andrew burst out laughing. “You know, Mom’s pretty honest. Did you ever stop to think she might really want her own space?”
We moved her to Rosedale in July. At first, we stopped by constantly, caught in that weird inversion of sudden parental responsibility for someone you’d rather have advising you. The stroke had carried her back to near helplessness, then quickly forward again, through toddler months of phonics-building nursery-rhyme songs (“Plucky pilgrims?” I asked dryly, and she rolled her eyes). Now this felt like college, with me running around shopping for new bedsheets and a stereo she could have in her suite at Rosedale.
One Tuesday late in August, we skipped our visit and walked up to the bandstand concert in the town square. We were heading for the ice-cream stand, savoring the calm that had returned to our lives, when I saw something dancing in my peripheral vision: a woman, waving energetically. Jo came walking toward us, smiling; the Rosedale House contingent had come to the concert, too. She hugged us, patted the dog, gave one of her lit-up smiles—and walked back to her new friends.
It all felt very normal.
