My Trip (So Far!) Part 1
Shit and Roaches, Excuse Me Palmetto Bugs
Tuesday Oct 14th
Well, I am here in South Louisiana now and I think my experience so far can be succinctly summed up by an episode last night. I had purchased a bundle of flowers in lovely fall colors to brighten up the nearly empty home. Looking through my mother’s collection of high end vases I decided to go for broke and use the huge cut glass lavaliere that’s big enough to bathe in. I pulled it down from a high shelf and an enormous roach fell on my head. Yep.
I screamed and ran before I realized the palmetto bug variety of roach was long dead.
I flew in on Sunday. It was a shitshow. My plane in Liberia had gate changes three times before they changed planes and we left very late after having to scrabble up an outside set of metal steps instead of a jet bridge. Flew into Dallas and my next flight was changed planes and gates after an hour’s delay. Turns out the shitter was out of service on the original plane.
Shit and roaches, what a weird time.
Dallas was fun though because my former sister in law was on the same flight. We hung out and just had a good time. She warned me that the last time she tried to take this flight to her home in Louisiana they changes planes and gates and then canceled until the morning. We even sat very near each other in first class continuing the conversations.
When I got into the small airport late Sunday evening the taxi I’d ordered two days before was not there, and not answering my call. We landed about 90 minutes later and I guess he got tired of waiting and ditched me. I decided to rent a car because I knew from recent experience that the car rental desk stays open until 1 am. Apparently not on Sunday. I ended up taking a crazy overpriced Uber all the way to my mother’s mid century modern home on the country club golf course.
Getting up on Monday morning I called my aunt, the good aunt not the crappy hysterical one, and told her I was here. Turns out she was having something of a melt down trying to pay for the private nursing staff online. I drove out to her house and we still could not get Zelle to work on anyone’s account. She ended up writing a check after I explained we don’t do checks in Costa Rica. I no longer have a check book. ‘
We went out to the retirement community to see my mother, and see how she was getting along with the private nurse. Turns out the answer was not well. The nurse the agency sent was a Pentecostal preacher from the Chicago area. I liked her, but she was very talkative and when her back was turned mom kept mouthing that she was in hell. I know she’s just a basement troll at heart, like both my son and I. We’re all introverts, and it’s hard to spend a 12 hour day listening to someone trying to save your soul for Jesus who never stops talking to draw a breath.
Getting home from there last night I sort of crashed, hit a wall, and decided I was too sick to check on my mother today. I went out just long enough today to run a couple of local errands and buy all the things that the nursing staff is insisting she have. I spent close to $400. I had to buy more sheets, some clothing items, towels, wash clothes, etc. toiletries. Things no one even knew she was out of.
Turns out her towels and sheets are mysteriously vanishing. All that’s about to stop because tomorrow I’m touring the memory care place nearby. She really needs to be moved. We also, my aunt and I, overheard staff at the retirement place giggling about her and saying some very inappropriate things. I am shocked, my maw in law was there ten years and loved it. I did stop in the office and have a rather unfriendly chat with the manager. I hate to complain but what they said was sickening.
Was not even my only uncomfortable run in this week. On Monday before I figured out that my aunt needed me I’d donned leggings, a t-shirt and a big old bandanna on my head so I could clean and clean I did. Dust flew! Later as I drove to my aunt’s I got stopped a few blocks from the house. By an overenthusiastic sheriff’s deputy. Turns out he took one look at the bandanna on the head and thought I “looked Mexican” He thought his happy ass was going bust whoever it was and call ICE to haul them away. He was upset to see my American passport with my very unLatino name on it and hear my local Southern accent. I didn’t know bandannas equal undocumented at all.
Goose, Goose, Golf Cart
Wed 15th October 2025
Work up this morning to the sounds of geese loudly protesting. Apparently the migrating Canada geese took one look at the glistening lake in the middle of the country club golf course and decided this was the place to stop, rest, eat a few bugs, whatever else it is that those hissing black and white Canada geese do. The grounds keeper was unamused, riding his golf cart around and around trying to chase them off. This evening it happened again and he was out there on the course again, driving that cart like he was Mario Andretti of golf carts futilely trying to shift them out of there. Weird bird rodeo.
Had to cancel the visit to memory care because on Monday I’d started coughing and wheezing in front of the staff. Late yesterday I got the call that I needed to test negative to Covid, Flu A, Flu B and strep throat before showing up to see momma again. Morning spent at doc in the box for testing. Negative on all four, this is just my usual asthma goes haywire nonsense any time I’m this close to the Exxon refinery.
Good thing to because early afternoon I got a call that mom was peeing on herself. I had to take myself off to get pull up adult diapers and a rubber mattress protector. More rushing around, more buying expensive stuff again. Then they called to say she only had one pair of panties, so out I went again to chase down panties for Bottomless Betty.
Between the shopping and dropping off trips I tried to rest and read. Just started Tim Curry’s autobiography “Vagabond” and picked up a haunted Baton Rouge book. Looked at the haunted sites in the book and they missed a few, like nearly every chemical plant and refinery has crazy stories about those that died on the job and are still around. One of the wildest things I’ve seen was the night a friend of mine and I dared to go into the old abandoned Lady of the Lake hospital in the downtown. Much activity. Later I found out that the area of the basement where we had been was the hospital morgue. Spooky stuff just in time for Halloween!
Tomorrow promises to be somewhat crazy. Back of the car filled with new bedding and towels to replace those lifted by the staff, or lost in the laundry. Then on to the tours. Oh joyeaux!
I have to start counting the silver, crystal and her Queen’s Gold gold rimmed china. I’m eating off them right now because all the practical dishware went with mom. I feel especially fancy dining off gold rimmed china, crystal and silver. Aunt and I will be starting to cull and sent things to St. Vincent de Paul. So many crazy expensive things in the house.
One of the weirdest discoveries of this week was finding a bizarre little hidden nest of pillows and dirty bedding in the closet beneath the staircase. Apparently she was sometimes sleeping in there. Until June I had no idea she had dementia this badly. I found this place looking for the locked safe. I’m going to have to get a locksmith in to blow the door on the safe. No idea what’s in there, could be Monopoly Money or expired coupons to Piggly Wiggly instead of anything worth having. Mom cannot remember the code to crack the safe.
Bazinga! Success!
Thursday 16th October
Today went better than I ever dreamed. My aunt and I visited the closest memory care place to her house, near where I used to live, and ended up signing upon the dotted line. The place is nicer than the one she’s in right now. We both loved it! It’s much cheaper than I thought too. Right now we’re paying about 4,600 a money in assisted living plus 15K a month in private nursing and memory care in this nicer place is going to run a mere 7000 a month. Very reasonable.
We went out to lunch and came up with a strategy on how to handle getting the check books and credit cards away from Bottomless Betty. We did it! I have to have the checkbook so I can pay for the new place starting tomorrow. They’ll move her the next week. I need to go buy a bed tomorrow as her room will not take a queen sized bed and all the other furniture in her apartment right now. All of it will be coming back to the house at least until we sell the house. Going to St. Vincent de Paul to be resold.
Tomorrow will be another long day. I may actually be able to go home to Costa Rica pretty quickly
Sweater Puppies or Oysters on the Half Shell and Pocketbooks
Saturday 18th October
The Pentecostal minister was back yesterday, and boy is that woman a joyous firecracker who says the most outrageous things! She was telling me about trying to get a bra on my mother, how she’d loop it around and fasten it around mom, and my mother would stand there. No more idea on what to do than just stand there. Miss Pentecost said, “Miss Betty, your eyeballs are dragging the ground,” or my personal favorite “Those oysters are escaping their half shells!” before she had to guide those rampant tiny sweater puppies into the bra cups.
The other thing she talked about that had me in stitches was when she described helping mom bathe and telling her to ‘wash your pocketbook.’ Gotta be one of the funniest descriptors for vagina I’ve heard in a long, long time! This lady is just making me laugh hard during this pretty terrible time.
Found out from staff that it was more than my mother dusting the grand piano in the buff. There have been a pile of nudey-rudey moments last week, and most of them involving aggressive threatening behavior. I know she’s capable of it indeed, but really how much damage can she really do, she’s under five feet tall and perhaps 91 pounds soaking wet.
Speaking of outrageously skinny and tiny, I saw what she looked like in leggings while she was at the beauty shop getting her hair trimmed. When mom got up from the beauty parlor chair I just about fell out. Her poor derriere has zero adipose tissue. Her butt is an inny now. Maybe I got the extra butt because mine’s not getting any smaller. The years of anorexia has started catching up with her I’m sad to say.
Mom was very unhappy with her new haircut, and started to get loud about it. My aunt insisted on a pixie cut because of how out of it my mother has been. She really needed something that doesn’t take a lot of fixing. My aunt and I tried to calm her down to no avail. Fortunately our friendly Pentecostian nurse jollied her out of her mood and distracted her from the cut. That woman is worth her weight in gold.
After three days with my mother I knew quite a lot about her, Miss Paula, from her childhood in the Cabrini Green, to her life as a teenage mother through moving to Louisiana, all about her kids, her husband and just about any other subject you could think of.
One rather tense several hours was when social workers from the community mom will be transitioning to in a few days showed up to do an assessment. We were on tenterhooks as the social workers and our lovely nurse took no pains to hide the why they were doing an assessment. I was afraid that the jig was up. We hadn’t told mom yet because she’s so impaired it’s just going to create fear, frustration and likely trigger more aggression.
The assessment was revealing. She thinks it’s 1900, didn’t know her birthday, name, my name, my aunt’s name, her late husband’s name and a whole bunch of other things. She was frustrated and feisty during the meeting, but at least they see what they are up against. My aunt and I hid nothing. We’d already been extremely upfront with the new place about her level of impairment. She must go into the lowest level of memory care there.
Today I slept in awhile before heading out to buy furniture for the move. I picked out some lovely farmhouse type bed and dresser. Then I talked to several of my aunts at my youngest aunt’s house. Went home early and am toasting a successful week with a Hibiscus Cherry can of “Louie, Louie” seltzer. Getting addicted to the stuff.
Tomorrow I’m going to try to visit the church I used to attend as a child with my late father.
Comments