I don’t know.
Been down in FL for some time now, not having been back to NY since November ’21.
Will be leaving FL in early April, staying in Westchester for a few weeks — or maybe a lot more. After all, I did inherit — sadly — Mum’s house.
I saw people this past summer in a big stone faux castle with their minds lost. I saw them in wheelchairs in the hallways, sitting in armchairs blankly looking at TV programs they did not understand, or simply shuffling about, aimlessly, in various states of undress, looking for a nurse, a doctor, an orderly, to make it all right again, to help them call spouses long ago dead.
Others were trapped in their beds, screaming in the shadows, with no other person there in their rooms to listen to them dying.
It was the time of COVID. Hard to find nursing home help.
Yet my mother required round the clock care, she said, though because of the morphine, she slept so much of time, and was mostly unaware of their presence.
I dont want to wake up alone, she said.
I want someone to be there.
In the time of COVID.
I would sit with her, at first in the summer, when she was still eating, and then later, when she decided to stop, because the doctors would not kill her, despite her suffering.
I sat by her ever day, as she did things that upset me, but this was my mother, my best friend when I was a boy, when she was a young woman so full of life, so beautiful, so full of the strength needed to deal with the things we as a family of immigrants had to then suddenly overcome.
And now she was nearly 90. And dying.
The pain must have been searing. Why won’t they kill me? she said. It’s what I want.
I sat there.
Day after day. Watching her get weaker, smaller, watching the hair fall out of her head, watching her toenails turns yellow and grey — watching her eyes get milky and strange — and trying not think of the vile people who surrounded her like vultures and the end of her life, the ones who said they were such good friends, the ones who could not be bothered to visit her final resting place after she passed.
I cannot write about this any more.
I shall try again another time.
Leaving Amerika 