Saturday night, July 7, 2018: Sylvia Mohr’s Sojourn

Of Old Age, and Very Old Age

The story of my mother’s foray into very old age is more complicated than any piece of fiction could begin to hint at; a non-fiction account, however, would soon become tedious with her protracted reluctance to take advantage of her once sufficient, though dwindling resources. If she is puzzled as to how she no longer inquires about the unfamiliarity of her surroundings, she keeps it to herself. I myself retain a bemused astonishment at the unlikelihood of her dependency on me. I have three brothers in San Diego, and she lived in southern San Diego County for close to 90 percent of the past seven decades. The odds would favor her playing out the hand she dealt herself in San Diego, but a granddaughter’s truculent intervention led to a disastrous adventure, and my mother was moved to my vicinity in the late summer of 2016 because none of my other five siblings could undertake being responsible for monitoring day-to-day care.

She is now 96 years old, and will turn 97 in December. In trying to make her life as comfortable as possible the past two years, I feel no sense of emotional solvency. It is an existential compassion. “They call me and I go….” On Monday evening, the place I moved her to in Seal Beach called me to say that an ambulance was taking her to the emergency room. It is still not clear what caused her to lose consciousness, briefly, six days ago, but I have since spent a good portion of every day at the hospital or on the road finding yet another place to move her to. Fortunately, a skilled nursing facility in Long Beach had an open bed, which she arrived at on a gurney about four hours ago.

Fate has not been completely unkind. I managed to get everything done in preparation for today’s move by Thursday night, and so I was to stay indoors all Friday, when the heat was obnoxiously brutal. And much to my surprise I did have enough energy on Wednesday to head north and spend a few hours on the rooftop of my dear friends on MLK, Jr. Blvd. Granted that today was an all-day engagement with several bureaucracies and sets of workers in the medical profession, and tomorrow will be devoted to my wife’s mother’s situation; nevertheless, I have managed to endure another week with some provisions for respite. I especially regret, however, missing Alexis Fancher’s poetry reading in the late afternoon, to which I could have walked from my house in five minutes, should today have had a normal schedule in any sense of the word.

I have final papers to grade for my summer session class, and an overdue article for a MLA project. The challenge is not just to get all this done, but to meet the dozens of small requests I get for service of one sort or another. Sometimes I think I should be ashamed of having such a feeble breaking point, and other times I wonder how others do not pause and ask themselves how a life so damaged from the start has achieved anything deserving of remembrance.

Sunrise - Mom - 2017

Sunrise mom - 2018

(Photographs of Sylvia Mohr, Autumn, 2017, by Bill Mohr)

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