My Mom’s Sudden Move To A Retirement Home Hid A Heartbreaking Truth I Never Saw Coming

On March 12, 2020, the day after Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announced they had COVID-19, my mother’s Toyota Camry pulled into my driveway, and out she stepped with two suitcases, the food from her refrigerator, her recycling and her cat, named Jello, howling and spitting in its carrier. 

“Just until we flatten the curve,” she said, reluctant to leave her apartment. “And not a minute more.” She lived with me for a year.

My mother and I are different people. She’s fussy. I’m casual — sloppy, even. She’s soft-spoken. I’m loud. She’s ladylike. I intentionally storm through a room. And while I know I’m not the refined young lady she hoped for as a daughter, she’s been my champion.

When I was young, I hated wearing dresses, so she sewed me pants. And when a male teacher told her, “Your daughter must wear dresses to school — pants are inappropriate,” she fired back, “You’re either going to let her wear pants, or you’re going to see her underwear, because she’s always upside-down on the monkey bars!” I got to wear pants. 

At the beginning, we managed to find joy and beauty in our togetherness during the lockdown. We visited the local arboretum, haunted our old town, even had a picnic on the porch of our old house. 

“Nobody lives here! Who’s going to care?”

We peeked in the windows and tried to see if any doors were unlocked. She stood watch for me while I crawled under the porch to see if old treasures I had hidden were still there.

“Nothing but spiders and dirt.”

I visited her room daily with chocolate chip cookies. “Wellness check,” I’d say, and she’d invite me into her too-warm space. I’d nudge Jello, ever a grumpy thing, off the armchair and sit down for a quick chat over the blaring television. It was during one of those visits that I first noticed something was off. 

“Mom, you shouldn’t watch the news 24 hours a day. It’s grim.”

“I leave it on for the company — the voices.”

“You live with me. That’s enough voices for anyone. If you have to watch TV, can you at least watch Netflix?” I handed her the remote.

“That thing’s too complicated. I like the news,” she said and took a dainty bite of her cookie. 

“For goodness’ sake! You just push this button here that says Netflix.” She waved me away.

The next day, she poured laundry detergent into our dryer. 

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said. “I’ll pay for it.”  

“It’s no big deal,” I said.

I’d once put the cereal box in the fridge and the milk in the cupboard. Our family can be spacey like that, so I wrote it off. 

But as her memory glitched more frequently, I found myself becoming impatient. It was easier to be annoyed with her, easier to look away from what might be happening to her, from what might one day happen to me. It was easier to imagine she was being lazy-minded or stubborn. 

“You just met with your surgeon two weeks ago, don’t you remember? Your pain is coming from your spine, not your hip, so you have to do physical therapy,” I told her one afternoon.

“Pardon?”

“DO YOUR PHYSICAL THERAPY! And can you wear your hearing aids? It’s very annoying to repeat myself all the time.”

“I don’t like physical therapy,” she said. “And anyway, you’re the only one I can’t hear.”