Unread mail
Yesterday I opened up some of my mother’s mail and found a bill for $45,903. It’s from a hospital (where else), and isn’t itemized—there’s just a description of service that says “emerg. observation,” prefaced by a date, followed by a message that says their records indicate that you, meaning my mother, do not have insurance. So today I’ll be digging through a pile underneath a note that says “important,” looking for my mom’s insurance cards, then spending an hour or whatever listening to music chosen by a billing department in Atlanta. The fleas of death.
I can’t complain. If it turns out she really does owe this money, her bank account now has enough to pay it. She died in May, had rental income, stopped needing $14,000 a month to pay her caregivers, and now—after covering final expenses, credit card debt, 16 weeks’ caregiver severance, and some overdue maintenance on the building she owned—the rental income has caught up. Compared to the costs of caring for the vast majority of older people in America, my siblings and I have been very, very lucky.
(For more about the terrifying cost of elder care, here are a couple of gift links to the New York Times series “Dying Broke,” about the costs of care in assisted-living facilities, which routinely overcharge patients while turning profits of more than 20 percent, and the near-impossibility of finding caregivers to help older people stay in their homes.)
It’s almost Christmas. For the last few years, big holidays meant worrying about caregiving, about how to find someone to work on Christmas while the people caring for my mother took a few days off, but this year . . . that’s over. On Wednesday we sold the building. I went to the bank and mailed my siblings their checks.
For years I used to nag my mom about her smoking. She smoked everywhere, and constantly, buying cartons of Virginia Slims and smoking each one only halfway, saving the rest of the cigarette for later. I’d cough and complain and open windows, then moved out after high school graduation (my boyfriend had his own apartment), vowing never to come back because the smoke was so bad. She didn’t quit until she started hospice care, 16 days before she died. Lung cancer moves fast. In a twisted way, though, this makes me feel like she and my brother and I were lucky too. Our mom was miserable with COPD and heart failure and had dementia. When I saw her last, a couple months before she died, she said something oblique to me that included the words “get it over with.” Now the holidays are here and there’s nothing left for her that I can do.
But still. The kids are growing fast—the big one just turned five—and they’re so beautiful and joyful and hilarious and smart, and I keep wanting to send her a picture. Check out how they play together now. They’ve made a fort out of the couch cushions, they’re batting one another with foam swords across the face, they’ve found a sticker book and can’t stop laughing at the poop ones—the two-year-old just put a poop sticker under an Elsa sticker and is falling over laughing because Elsa is now pooping—and my husband and I get to spend a few minutes, in their presence, having a normal adult conversation. (Who invented monotheism? The Zoroastrians?) The two-year-old is now insisting on male pronouns, that she/he is not a child but a boy doggie named Ocho—the name of my mother’s dog, whom our two-year-old found fascinating—and I want my mom to know about all this. Our five-year-old picked up some highlights about Jesus from a classmate this week, and came home preaching that God has a little brother. God and Santa Claus, he told us, do not know about each other.
My mom used to tell me a story about her father, who declared he’d rather be an atheist than go to Heaven with the bunch of racists at the Southern Baptist Church. I want to hear her tell it one more time, in her Southern accent, and ask her if she thinks we should tell the five-year-old about his family history of atheism yet. Even if all she’d do was chuckle and say sure, whatever, then forget the conversation minutes later. Her father was a heavy smoker, drove a gas truck, wore wingtip shoes, used to like to go out dancing with her mother anyplace that had a jukebox—they called it jukin’—and was her hero. I want to sit and listen to her talk about him one more time, haul up whatever story she remembers that I’ve heard a dozen times before. Sitting in his truck with him, on the beach, in darkness, watching the waterfront for U-boats. Watching him do calisthenics in the mornings. Losing him to lung cancer at 55.
I want to know exactly when my mother’s trademark stubbornness and independence began to turn into dementia. I know she had dementia back in 2018, when she couldn’t remember our firstborn’s name—the same name as her father’s. I wonder if she had it twenty years before that, when she lost track of me in high school, when I got good at sliding deep under her radar as she bustled right along, running her bookstore—or not running it, screwing up the bank accounts so that no one could divine, not even my father, how much the bookstore lost each year: a charity for used-book lovers all over Miami.
Now I have these piles of unopened mail. My brother sends them to me, the important stuff mixed with the junk, a letter from her long-term care insurer promising a reimbursement for the unused portion of her policy after she died, but so far no letter with a check. Here’s a collections notice from her internet provider at the bookstore. I’ve been avoiding all this—not opening the mail for months—which feels uncomfortably like her. We’ve also found some pictures of her, good ones that she chose to archive in a box instead of frame, so I’ve got those to go through too.
In other news
We sold the house to someone who agreed to all that language about tree protection that my lawyer and my realtor said was not a good idea. The buyer plans to flip the place for twice as much a year from now, possibly to the NFL player my realtor claims to know, who’s looking for investments in Miami, and here I am, with a piece of paper with tree-legalese. But now the trees are legally protected.
Here’s something else to cry about: this tear-jerking short video from The New York Times about being lonely. (Free gift link.) I love that it’s organized by decade, beginning with a lonely teenager and ending with a man in his 90s. Watch this and go give someone a call.
Read, read, read
This fall my book club made me read Les Miserables—all 1,300 pages! Getting through a book this long was not so much a reading journey as it was a lifestyle, but returning to it every night made me so happy, apart from when it wasn’t utterly horrifying/devastating/boring me with 50 pages about Waterloo only to completely horrify and devastate me in the middle of those 50 pages. I picked Christine Donougher’s translation, which felt elegant and fresh, both close to the world of Paris in the early 19th century and fully comprehensible by a non-Francophone like me. You don’t need me to tell you why to read a classic novel, but here’s my pitch: Read this if you’re into the romantics and want something Dickensian, in France.
Not in translation, but by a translator: Szilvia Molnar’s The Nursery is a thrillingly engulfing story of a new mother’s journey through postpartum insanity. Molnar is a translator, and manages to be both playful and exact about the experience of being trapped in an apartment where you’re not allowed to sleep—with a newborn to take care of, while recovering from giving birth. (The narrator’s husband hides the knives.) Read this if you want to know (or to remember) what those first few days of motherhood are like, or if you love a narrator who pulls you deep into her madness, suspending your reality as she loses her own.
Sigrid Nunez’s new novel, The Vulnerables, is my favorite pandemic book so far. I became a fan of Nunez after reading her National Book Award-winning The Friend (recommended for fans of Amy Hempel, dog lovers, anyone looking for a meditation on the death of a close friend), then became slightly less of a fan after reading her next book, What You Are Going Through (which involves a talking cat). Happily, The Vulnerables is quite good, and manages to make an experience we’ve all just lived through still feel interesting and new. It reminded me a lot of Elizabeth Strout’s pandemic/divorce novel Lucy By The Sea, only more fun.
If you’re in Miami
The last days of my mother’s bookstore, Dunbar Old Books, will be December 26th, 27th, and 28th. Miami historian Cesar Becerra will be running the sale.
A picture
One of the pictures that I found in a box! That’s my mom in purple and my dad on the left—a rare one where both of them are smiling. They were at a meeting of the Miami Memorabilia Collectors’ Club back in the 1990s.