My Family Feud and the Coronavirus, Round Two

Saturday night it dawns on me that something is fucked up. My mother left me a voicemail and when I call the rehab that she’s been living in (click here for that story) to return her call, there is no answer. The second time  she doesn’t pick up I feel a  tingling sensation crawl up my spine – the kind I get when I sense I’m about to be thrown into a crisis. An hour later, when her phone rings for the third time with no answer, I call the front desk and ask to be connected to her. Seconds later we are speaking and for the first time in two hours my pulse begins to slow.

I chalk it up to confusion caused by her medication – her inability to explain where she was or why she didn’t answer my first three calls.

But today, when the nice lady from her rehab’s recreation department FaceTimes me so I can have a virtual visit with her, I notice that my mother’s room looks different. Just as I’m about to ask if she’s been moved  to a different room, my mother says, “Darcy, I need you to find out if I have COVID. I can’t come live with you if I have it, can I?”

I cock my head to the side the way my dog does, wondering just how disoriented her medication can make her before saying, “Mom, you don’t have COVID. They tested you two weeks ago and you’re negative.”

Which is when the nice lady holding the iPad we’re speaking through informs me that on Saturday night my mother was moved to the COVID unit which is where she is now…

Half a dozen phone calls and emails later, a nurse at her facility confirms that my mother, having recently been tested, came back positive for COVID19. And was then moved to the COVID unit which is why I couldn’t reach her when I called her old room on Saturday.

That she contracted this disease was within our control. Or at least within the control of her other two children. I offered to take my mother out of the rehab two weeks ago when she first tested negative for COVID – offered to let her ride out the pandemic living with me – but I was overruled. Actually, overruled implies that I got a vote, which I did not since only my brothers are listed as her Power of Attorney. 

Our family rot is so deep it would take an oil drill to hit its core. 

So tonight I sit at my laptop attempting to wrap my head around the notion that my almost 89-year old mother with COPD has COVID-19, and will likely… I won’t finish the sentence. 

Members of my tribe remind me that I tried. I did everything I could. I was rendered powerless by my mother herself – a fact that illuminates just the tip of the iceberg that is my family’s toxicity. 

I write out these lines:
I tried.
I did everything I could.
I am powerless in this situation.
And for the better part of an hour I read them on loop.

I get it. She made her bed. This is one decision in five decades of decisions that both intentionally and (perhaps) unintentionally landed a mark on me. 

The irony of it may kill her. 

She doesn’t deserve my grief, or my struggle to find a loophole to save her.

But she’s my mother. And the flipside to forgiving her – which I spent years doing – is that I no longer have the anger to fuel my ability to be detached from this outcome, since this outcome is her life. 

Then there’s the part about dying alone.

Isn’t the most fundamental human fear that we’ll die alone?
Away from the people who are supposed to love us. 

Is there a scenario under which she conceivably dies in the presence of a child?
Or a friend?
Or anyone who knew her two months ago?

Best case scenario she recovers from COVID – and then what? She’s sent back to her assisted living facility, which has its own COVID outbreak, and which will likely preclude visitors until we have a vaccine, because my brother won’t let her come live with me?

She’s 89-years old. Is this how her story ends?

Searching for anything I can control, I contemplate scheduling this blog post to publish at a future point, when I am not muscling through the quicksand of this pandemic, when my mother’s fate is known, when I can edit this in the past tense because it is behind me. 

Publish it this week, a voice inside my head says.
Vulnerability is your stretch.
Vulnerability and surrendering to the reality that You. Are. Powerless. Surrender.

As the last word echoes in my head and I will myself to lean into powerlessness, the pulse on the side of my neck begins to beat harder, faster, until all I can hear is my heartbeat thundering through my body. 

Which is when my inner Jersey Bitch elbows her way front and center, taking over my body and mind, and says in the strongest of Jersey accents, No. Fucking. WAY. 

I draft an email to the owner of the fucking rehab, asking him if there’s any legal reason why my mother, who is completely alive and oriented, cannot A) Authorize me to be directly notified of any changes to her health, so I’m not reliant on the brothers notify me, and B) Decide for herself what her discharge plan is. 

And I hit send.