Hard trip
One month into the pandemic, someone close to my mother called to inform me that she was losing her memory. Thirteen months later, after about a thousand hours of logging into bank and credit card accounts, grappling with six years of unpaid federal income taxes, and calling doctors and lawyers and faxing POAs, I was finally able to see her. Six days before I arrived, she made a trip to an emergency room that she has no recollection of visiting, received prescriptions for medications that she urgently needs, and managed to lose those prescriptions, causing another person who is close to her, who has been vital in helping her make it through the weekends, when the bookstore she’s owned for twenty-five years isn’t open, to tell me that it’s time to put her in assisted living. Which is something she absolutely does not want. And I don’t want. This week I learned that my mother values her independence more than her health.
On Tuesday she left her car running all afternoon because she forgot to turn it off. Yesterday I confirmed that her car insurance covers any driver of her car who has her permission to use it. I’m still working on finding someone I can trust to drive it for her. She’s agreed to give it up, but forgets that decision and drives the car anyway. She does not remember how to use Uber. She does remember how to use Instacart, through which she orders more groceries than she could ever possibly eat.
So I spent a few days in Miami. My mom got to hold her new granddaughter, whose name she can never remember, but whom she clearly adores. We had a little sip-and-see for the baby at Books & Books, I got to sneak away to the beach, and I finally got all the passwords I needed off her computer, to continue to vast and tedious project of untangling the things she’s either overpaying for or hasn’t paid or needs to pay (like taxes) soon. I canceled the life insurance policy that someone sold her. Today I plan to ask Aetna, politely, to refund the $232 monthly premium they charged her for it. I will continue making this request with decreasing levels of politeness until I succeed.
I want to put something here with lots of helpful links and facty morsels about taking care of one’s parents, but I’m too burned out. Seeing my mom lose her memory is hard. Traveling solo with a four-month-old is hard.
Here’s the Beers List of medications that may be inappropriate for older adults. And here’s the doctor who didn’t read that list and gave her Ambien, which made everything worse. Here’s Better Health While Aging, a site recommended by my sister-in-law, a geriatrician. And here’s the phone number at Instacart for customers sixty and up.
Read, read, read
Let’s get a little more cheerful now about the subject of aging and revisit The Great Man, Kate Christensen’s masterpiece about an artist, his widow, his biographer, and his mistress. Nearly all the characters are over sixty and it’s smart and hilarious, set in the art world in New York. I read it more than ten years ago and still remember lines from it, and the imagined insides of characters’ apartments, and I want to read it again. (It’s also way better than The Astral, which read to me like a recycled early manuscript that Christensen would not have picked up again if her publisher wasn’t begging for more.)
The first comparisons that I can think of for The Great Man are Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings and The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Messud, which in my mind seem to be set on the same block on the Upper West Side. But if you’re going to read Claire Messud, start with The Woman Upstairs, which opens with a rant straight from the pages of Thomas Bernhard, maybe Gargoyles in particular. I know I love a good rant. Which is going to serve as my entry in the Complaint Department for this week.
Updates
My brother got vaccinated! Credit goes to his daughter, Jessica, for making it happen. She is smart and super cool and I am bummed we always miss each other whenever one of us is in town.
And . . . Matt’s second piece for Insider just went online. It’s about an alleged CIA influence operation in U.S. politics and is, once again, paywalled, but that can be gotten around by subscribing and canceling.
Also
Last week I had a whole newsletter planned in my head about “The Millennial Vernacular of Fat Phobia,” a recent issue of Culture Study, then I got on that plane to Miami and everything went off the rails. Long story short, I was obsessed with Seventeen and YM back in the nineties, and it wasn’t until I read the above that I realized hunger is not actually a sign of thirst, which for thirty years I thought was true. To be a young woman or girl is to be constantly gaslit about the importance of one’s appearance, specifically one’s size. When I was ten years old I thought my thighs were too big when I sat.
For those few of you who missed me, here’s my most recent post for paid subscribers, “What Toddlers Want,” which is now unlocked.
A picture
Phones my mother broke. I brought them back to DC with a plan to have them fixed, but what am I supposed to do with them then?