MY mother turned 89 last March. In the morning of April 7, she had a bad fall.
She fractured her left arm and hurt her left eye. The arm was cast and an eye doctor advised for an enucleation—the removal of an eye—after two days. The doctor decided there would be no medical intervention as regards my mother’s eye. She was released after three days.
We secured a young woman to be always beside her. We call this young woman her caregiver, which is an exaggeration because all she does is to look at my mother when she wakes up and moves around the room. Even then, it helps that someone is physically around her.
There are days when people at home start to leave and I see my mother becoming frantic. “Who will be with me?”
At night, things get worse. She hears knocking at the door. She confides how during nights when her legs bother her, she feels someone touching her. She would ask her caregiver to wake me up to tell me she has difficulty sleeping. This was before we brought her to a doctor, who specializes in the afflictions of the elderly. I am not always the ideal son. Sometimes, we go into a long discussion about her medicine. My mother reads the literature in the box of each medicine and she creates the most difficult and irritating questions out of the medical terms she could understand.
One time, in one of her anxiety attacks, I thought of embracing her. Soon, she was calm and almost asleep on my shoulder. The next evenings, with the phantom knocking on the windows getting stronger, I asked my mother to pray all the prayers that she had memorized.
I recited with her my favorite, Hail Holy Queen. I love the supplications in this prayer: To Thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. And after this our exile. For someone who declares himself always as not prayerful, I found the prayers working better for my mother. She calms down and not only that, she gets to sleep soon.
My mother is physically well now. Last month, we went to her orthopaedic doctor, who removed the cast around the upper part of her left arm. When we reached home, she was very quiet. At night, I woke up with her standing above me angry and puzzled that her arm was covered with that heavy cast. I told her that had been there for a month already.
She asks me each day when the cast will be fully removed. I tell her May 8. After a few minutes, she will ask the same questions again. I am not a good son and these repeated queries make me really impatient. But I persist and answer her to the best of my calmness.
An aunt from the distant island of Ticao visited us this week. She had sweet candies made from sweet potato, dried squid and assorted stories about kin and friends. This aunt also had death notices with her gossip. My mom found out from this cousin that the last of her two living friends had passed away. My mother did not cry. She merely smiled and started reminiscing her days with this friend and the other friends of her youth.
The day after that visit, my mother could not sleep. She started talking about the island. As I write this, she is talking about her dear friend who passed away, she was beautiful and she was married to the priest in the town. She repeats the story. She inserts between older memories the more recent ones. She talks of the only friend living. There are just two of us, she tells us.
I am not a good son but I am a good researcher. I listen to my mother’s memories and do a kind of content analysis. I am being social-scientific. The late bilingual expert Dr. Emy Pascasio asked me where I got the term “social-scientific.” That does not exist, she blared. I soon found out it was from a “social-scientific” paper. I am now counting the number of times my mother talks about something in the past. I am not merely being qualitative, I remember another mentor, the late Dr. Willy Arce who taught me how to describe but also not to shirk from counting. Willy also told me I need not go to far-out places because I could study my own village and kin. I remember Emy and Willy because, you see, we are like the Inuits and other tribes: When they fish in winter, a most difficult feat, they seek the strength of their ancestors. This research is like fishing in the dead of winter.
It is too early to form conclusions from my cursory research. The only conclusion I can make now is that ancient prayers can calm down old mothers. I have tentative generalization about how a warm embrace, especially those that come unexpected from an impatient son, works better than any anti-depressant.
I am not anymore irritated with Mama saying over and over those stories. I am using her remembrances to study how the elderly cope with short-term memory and the loss of friends and places. I listen for variants and compose the structure of her mind’s recollections.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com
Image credits: Jimbo Albano
1 comment
You are a good son and good luck on your study. I am 19 years away from her age and wish that I will be lucky to reach it.