Death in Slow Motion by Eleanor Cooney

Author:Eleanor Cooney
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Hungry Ghosts

I call her at the hospital every day. Sometimes she’s almost coherent. Mostly she’s so far out there I can’t even guess what she’s trying to say. Her electronic voice is tiny and distant. All I can do is enunciate desperate useless words into the telephone while she slips into another dimension, like talking in a dream, like losing radio contact with someone drifting into outer space. Conversations with the staff are even less encouraging. We hear of crying, fits, tantrums.

We drive down to visit her exactly one week into her stay. We called ahead to tell them we’re coming, and they warned us that she’d be wearing a sort of restraint vest. They make it sound like the most innocent version of such a garment. A “posey” vest, they call it. It’s just to keep her from hurting herself, they say. Her first night there, apparently, she got up to pee, leaked a little on the linoleum floor, slipped and fell and cut her hand. And she’s “restless,” as they put it. Gee, I think; if only I had a “posey” vest to wear with my new bonnet and gloves, I could be the grandest lady in the Easter parade. Dread congeals around me the closer we get to the hospital.

We are ushered into a side room set up for families and visitors. Coffee machine, dreary sofas, Reader’s Digest and Popular Mechanics on a table. We’ll confer with the psychologist before we visit my mother.

Remember William Macy’s car salesman in Fargo? It took me a while to recognize him out of context, but there he was in the person of the psychologist—big fakely sincere anxious watery eyes, lopsided grin, talking a streak of slippery blarney designed to divert us and hypnotize us so we won’t notice that he’s essentially saying nothing at all.

He flips through her already amazingly thick medical charts, letting us see bits and pieces but keeping a firm grip on it. He’s determined that we not actually hold it in our hands. Mitch especially knows that this is not legal. Families have every right to see medical records, but we tacitly agree that it would be impolitic to make a scene. He blathers on about medications, psychological tests, blood tests, EKGs, but it quickly becomes evident that their main business is to tinker with her multiple medications, scarcely cleaning her up the way I thought they would. They are simply doing their job: Fine-tuning her to be an ideal sedated nursing home candidate, a consumer of costly drugs.

An attendant comes in, says Mary has heard our voices and wants to see us. They bring her in. Take another little piece of my heart. The vest, which actually has a cute decorative pattern on it, cavorting lambs or bunnies or some fucking thing like that, has long dangling and very serious-looking canvas straps. The chains on Marley’s ghost. A nurse is holding my mother up; when she sees me, she forcefully shrugs the woman’s hand from her arm and says, “Let GO of me!” She hugs me as if she hasn’t seen me for ten years.

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