Process of Disappearing

     I'm back in Melbourne, Florida, running through the halls of the nursing home looking for my mother. I've been in Ohio for four years, since 2004, taking care of another side of my extended family, but for three of those years, I flew back to see my 86-89-year-old mother in the nursing home every three or four months, to fight the nursing home people who weren't taking care of her. But after three years of visits, with my Ohio family well-situated and no longer needing my help, I was stuck in Ohio, bankrupt, living in a house with an upside-down mortgage that had been on the market for two years without a single visit from a buyer. I couldn't afford the plane tickets to fly back to Florida to see my mother in that fourth year.
     In the spring of 2008, before my sorry financial catastrophe showed up on papers, I sold my paid-off Ford Focus, rented a new Honda FIT, loaded up my Rottweiler and two parrots, plus enough of my stuff to keep me alive for the two months it would take for movers to deliver the rest of the few things I still owned, and drove back to Melbourne where I'd arranged with an owner to let me live in his slum strip-motel apartment with my Rottweiler, a dog breed declared by insurance companies to be dangerous and uninsurable for property owners.
     I drove into Melbourne late last night and now it's mid-morning, a year since I've seen my mother. Even before I left Melbourne in 2004, dementia had stolen her memory of my existence, but I sent her cards throughout the years to let her know I loved her and was thinking about her. And now I'm nearly in a panic. She isn't one of the withered vacant-staring sub-humans in the wheelchairs lining both sides of the hallways. Both beds in her room are made, and no one is in the bathroom. At least her clothes are still on her side of the closet, so I know she's alive, somewhere.
    Something tells me to look in the corner room next to her room. It's only large enough for two long tables where wheelchairs are rolled in through the door for meals and back out into the hallway at the end of feeding, leaving the tables in place like flattened-out food troughs for hogs. It's been hours after feeding, but there's still a person sitting all alone in a wheelchair in the back, facing that cinder block wall opposite the door, where sunlight shines through a long, high window, too high for even someone standing to see anything but the sky.
     I run to the wheelchair and peer around to the front of it to see my mother, half-asleep, her face around her nose and mouth crusty and colorful with dried food. How long has it been since anyone even bothered to wash her face? And did they forget her after breakfast and leave her sitting in here all by herself? I'm angry and feeling the tears coming. I want to blame the nursing home. No, I have to blame her husband for not advocating for her and for not giving her to my sister and me after we begged him, and for not letting us move her somewhere else, because he lives a mile away from this place. No, I have to blame my mother for signing her healthcare documents and her life away to him, instead of to either of her daughters for her care. Or maybe I could just be furious at Life itself.
     When I left Melbourne four years ago, I wanted to mothernap her, take her with me back to her hometown in Ohio, where I could take care of her. "Don't you dare," my sister said. She was right, for my safety. Knowing her hateful, wealthy husband, I could have ended up in prison.
     "Mother," I say to her, trying hard not to sob. "I'm your oldest daughter. How are you?"
      She looks at the wall, not at me. "I'm in the process of disappearing," she says, her voice loud in distress and despair. A few more of her front teeth are missing, maybe yanked out, from rotting, from not being brushed. She had all her own teeth when she came here five years ago.
     "No, you're not going to disappear. I'm here with you," I say, grabbing the handles of her wheelchair and whirling her around and out of the room, back into her room, where I position her wheelchair facing her bed, facing me sitting on her bed. It's then that I find handfuls of sealed envelopes, all the cards my sister and I and other relatives and friends have sent her over the last year, or maybe longer--never opened, just stuffed in bunches around the sides of the wheelchair seat. I start opening them one by one and reading them to her. She doesn't react. She doesn't know who they are, or what the messages mean to her.
     Now it's five years later. My mother died eight months after I returned to Melbourne. My Rottweiler died two years ago. I'm heartbroken but safe in an independent-living subsidized apartment with hundreds of other seniors for neighbors. I just turned 69 and have friends my age and older. I not only know them for who they are now, but for who they were, just like I knew my mother for who she was, like I know myself for who I was; oh not after we all have reinvented ourselves over and over all these years as age and life circumstances demanded, but for who we were when we were at our peak in our skills, paid or cared for as we journeyed through those productive years.
     Who would ever have guessed as they looked at my food-encrusted, disappearing mother that she was once the supervisor and head of word processing in the admissions office of Florida Institute of Technology? FIT's first computer, the OS6 was sold to her through the admissions office, with her in charge, and she was sent to Atlanta for training on it. And when she returned from that training, she discovered for herself how to make it do two more tasks that the trainers in Atlanta told her couldn't be done on it! When I got my first computer, with the old DOS system in the 1980's, my mother taught me how to use it. She was one smart cookie, and I used to tell her that! Hundreds of people came to her evening retirement party, held in the ritzy penthouse conference room. I've never seen a retirement party as elegant and respectful of her as that one!
     My friend battling breast cancer in Ohio was a loving elementary school teacher who knew how to teach and nurture children. She also earned graduate degrees, taught college classes, and established a university childcare center. Another friend was a highly respected major professor in a university. A neighbor in this tower where I live was a photographer for the New York Daily News in New York City. Another neighbor was a creative flower arranger whose beautiful arrangements were copied by florists and sold across the country and overseas. Another neighbor was a New York music promoter who worked for the major recording labels and from his talent for making friends with others, put one of Melanie's songs that he says everyone in his company hated, into the air waves and human brains' memories of unforgettable songs. Another good friend was the manager of a school cafeteria and also a food manager in a posh Chicago country club for many years. Most of my friends have reared children who grew up to be successful, productive adults. Another friend with an earned Ph.D. was a superintendent of human relations in a large school system.
     Who we all were--I could go on and on, but what I really want to do is describe how it feels to me to be in the process of disappearing. I don't think I'm the only one who has always derived my self-worth from the combination of my accomplishments and my ability to be compensated for my skills; compensated well enough to be able to buy groceries and pay Internet and TV charges, along with rent, or make mortgage payments; well enough to be financially independent with some of life's comforts.
     Today my food manager friend, with all of her organizational skills and expertise in preparing food, along with her abilities to get along with and motivate others, is now, seemingly effortlessly pulling off dinners and other major events for up to a hundred people, sometimes more, in a retirement community, without any monetary compensation. No one in that community could do what she does, and the organizations within that community are wealthy enough to pay her for her services, but they won't and don't.
     Maybe if I were a female politician, or in some other career, I could still be compensated for continuing to function in that career at my age, but as a female vocalist/keyboard player, singer-songwriter, who fronted a showband on the road; who used to have steady work in nightclubs and lounges and was invited to be the opening act at a major Melbourne hotel where hundreds came to hear me; who performed for months at a piano bar on Hilton Head Island; who put together and fronted a country band that I named "Colorado Gold" that opened a new nightclub in Colorado Springs, with a grand opening that was broadcast on the radio that night; who made at least $500 for a birthday or retirement party, and twice as much for New Year's Eve; who wrote and sold jingles for products, and in some cases, sang them on TV commercials; who's written and recorded songs and has five albums out--I'm the same performer, just older.
     The last nightclub performer job I was able to get was for one night a week, for six months in 2001. I was 57 years old, and my career ended there. My albums of music are out on the Internet. When someone buys a track, I'm paid $.001, and often nothing at all.
     Last week, the activities coordinator at the tower next to mine, owned by the same company, called me up on the afternoon of a birthday party being held in her building, to play the piano and sing as the entertainer for that party. Assuming it was being sponsored by the tower, which is all subsidized living, I didn't ask for compensation. It turned out, the woman's outside family gave her the party, attended by more than 70 people from all over town. I played for 1-1/2 hours, and as I was packing up my sound system, the daughter of the 90-year-old birthday girl offered me a little paperback book titled "God's Promises for Women," and on the back inside cover was lettered with a red stamp: "Prison Book Project, Sharpes, FL." I wanted to ask her if one of God's promises for women had anything to do with reaping what you sow--maybe that's only God's promise to men.
     A week later the book is still sitting in the donation place in the laundry room. I doubt that "God's Promises" matter to many of us living here. We already know them all anyway--we've chewed, swallowed and digested religion, and in my case, eliminated it. The only promise that counts anymore is that we're in the act of disappearing, and one day we'll disappear altogether.
     So how do I manage this time of my life? My doctor told me it's normal for anxiety to increase as we age and feel more out of control of our health and our lives. He prescribed Xanax for me. A small dosage of that and black tea, with its caffeine and aspirin properties, help me keep away the Boogie Man, my term for sadness and anxiety. I don't believe the terms "sadness" and "depression" are the same. By this age, we have enough grief to carry us through two more lifetimes.
     I'll never be able to convince myself of what is probably the truth, that even though the world doesn't deem my contributions as worthy of financial compensation, I'm still of value, not only as a human being, but for the skills and talents I can still give. Inside me, that belief feels like a lie. My value is only as high as other people deem it to be. And these days: well, I have to admit, it depends on who you ask.  
     I used to be an expert at reinventing myself. That's why I have more than 10,000 hours in each of three different financially-supporting careers. I've run out of the financially-supporting reinventions. With a Social Security check and subsidized housing, I don't need to make a living to support myself anymore, unless my teeth start rotting. Then I'll have to tie one end of a string to the tooth and the other end of the string to the doorknob, and slam the door shut to yank them out one by one. I won't be able to pay a dentist.
     What's left is finding comfort in doing what I love to do, simply because I love doing it, and that includes writing stories; playing music downstairs once a week free of charge for my neighbors; living in the moment; looking for times to listen to others and offer love and comfort; reawakening my outrageous adolescent sense of humor and my love for irony; and laughing.
     Management also requires doing things I don't like to do: taking the six flights of stairs to my apartment instead of the elevator several times a day and eating.
     Still, the scales continue tipping. Health problems are taking over, leaving me less time and energy to do what I love to do. It's also possible that I'm already dealing with dementia. I likely carry my parents' and grandparents' genes for several different forms of slowly losing your mind, in case you had one to begin with.
     Author Stephen King told the Vassar College graduates in his 2001 Commencement Address to make their lives "one long gift to others," because worldly goods are "smoke and mirrors" and "all that lasts is what you pass on." That idea would be real to me if I'd given birth to one or more children who had children, and generations would carry my genes, but I didn't. It's unlikely that I'll leave anything behind of any value for anyone.
     My friend in Ohio, Marilyn Tullys, the elementary teacher I mentioned earlier, is still an award-winning poet. She wrote this, which I believe is the truth about the entire process of aging and dying, in all of its forms.

Alzheimer's

His is a disappearing act,
dark cape flourishing
unexpectedly
the way a gypsy woman
softly flies her silk scarf
as quick fingers
grab your wallet.

Most valuable
of all your possessions,
your very identity
is lifted by stealth;
not even a fraction
of second
to sound alarm.

Observers gaping in dismay
and bafflement
gasp at the horrible
magic which
takes away
and draws nothing
from the hat.
  
You might think this is a dark, pessimistic piece, but I believe we old people need to remind you who are still young to make quality life choices for giving the world the most loving, most compassionate, most beautiful gifts you have to give, because--and if this isn't listed in the "God's Promises" book, it should be: life goes by really fast, and the process of disappearing is a forced march that will require every life skill you've ever learned.