Sundowning, or, the first time your mother doesn't know you
"You can’t leave. The baby is here. Your things are here."
My mother in the ER last week / Gulfport, FL // January 2025
January 12th, 2025 contained within it the first minute my mother didn’t know me in my entire life.
What a year January has been.
My dear friend’s sister died by suicide. My dear friend lost his home in Altadena and had to evacuate the fire with his family, including his 92 year-old grandmother. My dear friend is dying of cancer in New York. (In his 40s.) The broligarchy rears, fascism festers, and every trans person, woman, and human with even mildly uncertain immigration status in the United States is, rightly, terrified.
Here in Florida, my mom fell on her face right in front of me at church last week, on the threshold of the ladies room (busting her upper lip) and had to go to the E.R. where her CAT scan and her hand xrays came back negative but it turns out she has…..
The Flu.
I am so tired.
I am so so tired.
My body doesn’t seem to be able to sleep more than 5 hours a night these days, although I am desperate for sleep, jonesing for it, want a hit of 8 / 10 / 12 / 15 hours so, so bad. It’s not that I’m nightmaring. I can only recall one nightmare, actually, in which somebody stole my stuff and nobody in my orbit cared much. Pretty quotidian nightmare, given the everything.
What do you think it means?
I cleaned mom’s cuts with alcohol while crying, and a church member who is also a first responder doctored up a makeshift splint for her left pointer and middle fingers. The cupid’s bow of her upper lip was starting to swell but she didn’t seem to have knocked any teeth loose or hit the back of her head at all. And because she didn’t want to go to a hospital, or even an urgent care, I got her in the (borrowed) car, with some effort, and some help, and drove her back to her Assisted Living, accepting gratefully when her Minister, my friend, RevBen, offered to follow us.
On that Sunday morning, just a few hours earlier, when I picked her up, she was only accessing her weak-whispered voice, the one I have come to recognize as a harbinger (or sometimes, an outcome) of a bad day. I keep having to say, “I can’t hear you,” or, my more annoyed variation, “If you want me to hear you you’ve got to speak up.” Or sometimes, in Portuguese, more gently, “Mãe? Voçé é capaz de falar mais alto?”
“Mom? Are you capable of speaking louder?”
While we were in the car on the way back from church, she was telling me about my birth. Twelve hours of labor. She said that while I was growing in her she did all of the good things and very little of the other things. (That’s a quote , “very little of the other things.”) She’s a vegetarian now but while I was becoming handed and footed she ate ‘good meat’ and vegetables. She told me that I was perfectly healthy, and it was a perfectly healthy birth, and I didn’t have any serious health conditions through the first years of my life. (I don’t think I had any serious health conditions after that either, but I wasn’t in a contradicting mode. For once.) She seemed proud. I rarely hear my mother speak with pride about anything.
She said, completely lucid, totally clear-voiced, “I wish I was in conditions to have a baby.”
I said gently, “Yeah? You would like to have a baby?”
And she said with an air of… wistfulness? Nostalgia? “Yes, because it’s so exciting!” She said your body is changing all the time, and gaining weight. (Neither of which sound particularly appealing to me, but to my credit I simply listened.)
She asked if I ever regretted my decision not to have a baby and I said, lightly, “No. I’m not sure why. But no.”
This is true. I have had exactly one abortion and precisely zero regrets.
I used to tell people that I didn’t want a child when I was back in high school. Cue various versions of, “Wait until you meet the right person,” and, “Give it time.” I have given it time. I am 42. I do not want children. Thank you.
However! Even this late in the pregnancy game, I reserve the right to change my mind. I doubt that I will, but I also do not know what is coming to me, who is coming to me, and how that might change me.
My mom had me when she was 41. She wanted another, but she couldn’t do.
I asked about the miscarriage she had after she had me, and she said that it wasn’t a viable pregnancy, just a piece of meat at that point. I asked her if she felt sad about it and she said no. This is where she would usually insert the story about how I kept asking for a brother, please can I have a brother and she consulted with my morning babysitter, Dorothy, the most patient woman in the world, who said “Get her a cat,” and they got me Tigger, and then I never asked for a brother again. To hear her tell it.
I buy it.
Tigger was the best.
I swear that, despite how it looks in this photo, my feline brother did, in fact, love me / Long Island // circa 1995
I have always wanted a brother. I’ve collected a dozen or more over the years.
I will never know what it’s like to have a blood brother. Then again, I hear (from people who have them) that not all siblings are created equal, and there’s certainly no guarantee that if I did have a brother, he would be… brotherly.
Here are some of my chosen brothers:
I wasn’t going to take my mother to the ER that Sunday because she refused (and when is the point at which you take the mantle of a grown person’s autonomy and affix it around your shoulders?). She said she was just so tired and wanted to go home. I took her back to the Assisted Living. We had that conversation about my birth and birthing in general on the way. It was the nicest conversation we’ve had in a year, maybe ever. I was gentle. Mom was lucid. And calm. And then. We were checking her back in to the Assisted Living. She was standing at the front desk while they asked her what happened, and she turned to me and said:
“Where’s the baby?”
We all — myself, Rev Ben, Susie at the front desk, and a lady that I didn’t recognize — looked at her with a mixture of fear and worry. (Forry? Weer?)
Then she said, “Where’s Lila?”
After an interminable pause I said, in the sort of tone you might use with a frightened woodland creature, “I’m Lila,” and after a beat, with a little less confidence added, “I’m your baby.”
She looked at me with her rheumy eyes, light brown now tinged a cataracty greyish around the edges and misted whitely across the top, and said, “No, the baby.”
And then she shook her head a little bit, said, “I’m dreaming,” and snapped out of it. But this is the first time my mother hasn’t known me in my whole entire life.
I was already concerned that she concussed herself by falling on her face but Where’sthebaby really took me over the edge and I decided we were going to urgent care straightaway, and put on my Adulting cape and planted my feet and dug my spurs in and said “We’re going.”
And let me tell you! For a woman who weighs barely above 90 pounds, who has shrunk five inches, who operates plastic cutlery with chicken bone arms, who can barely shuffle along relying on her walker with the tennis balls on it like the old man in Up, she planted her damn feet — and her walker! — with surprising strength and said, “I’m not going!”
Followed by this gem: “You don’t want me to make a scene!”
Well no indeed, I am not particularly interested in you making a scene, ma’am, and I am even less interested in your brain slowly hemorrhaging overnight.
She said she didn’t want to go, that she didn’t need to. It wasn’t that bad. Rather unconvincing, as her split lip was ballooning at the center, she couldn’t bend two of her fingers, and she thought it was 1983.
The Life Enrichment Director (that’s who she was, the new activities person — they fired my guy, my favorite guy, who looked like Zach Galfinakis and gave people hugs which everyone desperately needed because hardly anyone touches old people except to help them get dressed and stick them with needles, and healthcare is hard, and hardly anyone touches healthcare workers because it’s usually inappropriate but they are pouring their life force out all the live long day — they fired my favorite guy who was funny and twinkly-eyed and hugs people, and put the former dining room manager in his place. I don’t mean to disparage; I am sure that she has skills beyond managing a dining room, it’s just that he was the best thing about that facility. Sigh. Miss you Shaun!) Anyway, the new Life Enrichment Director stepped in and said, just to keep her calm, we could bring her up to her apartment, and she would call the paramedics in to evaluate her, and we could go from there.
BLESS BILINGUAL PARAMEDICS, EVERYONE.
The paramedics came with the cavalry. Two ambulance drivers, 3 EMT’s. They were coming out of the elevator with their gear as I came back up the stairs to the second floor, where my mom lives. The one who took charge was tall and broad-shouldered, with an accent.
“Habla castellano?” I asked.
“Si,” he responded.
Please speak Spanish with her. Her first language is Portuguese and she also speaks Spanish and it’s easier for her when she’s disoriented.
It was just so many people crowded around her, sitting tiny on the couch — those 2 drivers, the 3 EMT’s, their gear, me, my mom’s minister, like a dissertation defense in reverse. I would be overwhelmed by this, especially if I’ve just fallen down, even though I don’t have dementia (yet — oh god I hope not, please please please no). He sat, in a chair, calmly, with his paperwork, just across from her. I knelt on my shins on the floor. Rev Ben hung back in the kitchen. The others stood. No one could understand the exchange but mom, the paramedic, and me, as he explained to her, so calmly, so gently, that if it were his mom, he would want her to go to the hospital.
“It’s not bad,” she said, in Spanish.
“Yo sei, corazon,” he responded with the infinite patience of a man who looks at a patient and sees a person. A scared person. “I know, my heart,” he said.
And my little heart grew two sizes.
“But a small thing in your brain can turn into a very big thing over time. And we want you to be safe. Your daughter wants you to be safe.”
There is no way she would have agreed to go to the hospital otherwise. She wasn’t going for me. She wasn’t going for Rev Ben. She wasn’t going for any of the people working in the facility she calls home. She went for the paramedic. Because he reasoned with her, in a romance language, with care and softness and positive regard. She could have refused. She has before. Many times. In fact, I was on the phone the last time she refused. After one of her 10+ falls over the past month, I can’t even recall which one at this point. And the EMT (not this one, someone more ‘professional’ in their tone, less compassionate, less Hispanic) gave her their cognitive tests and concluded that she was of sound enough mind to make her own medical decisions, and let her stay in her home.
It is because she failed the EMT’s cognitive assessment in March that I am here in Florida now. This is why they force-admitted her to the hospital. This may be why she’s alive today.
She passed the cognitive test on that church Sunday, two weeks ago. And she agreed to go. Thanks to the bilingual paramedic.
He asked what hospital I preferred. I’ve only been to one hospital with her recently and I didn’t love it so he recommended one. I texted Adam to tell him I’d find someone else to pick him up from the airport. I drove his car over to the Pasadena ER. A 9 minute drive. I tried really hard to pay attention.
When I got there I parked where a sign said Emergency and walked through what seemed like the front door. There was no one at the desk. I walked through the halls. There was no one in the halls. I rounded the corner. No one. It was like a Black Mirror episode. Finally I walked my way into the actual ER, where they kindly ushered me out and into the waiting room.
And mom was not there.
The receptionist checked her system again.
Still no.
I walked outside and sat on the ground, just to have a little sun.
I didn’t recognize the ambulance in the drive. I scrolled Instagram for 10 minutes. And then I panicked because how did I beat the ambulance to the hospital by 15 WHOLE MINUTES.
Did she die?
Was she dead? And they had been trying to use extraordinary measures?
Is there another Pasadena ER?
(Nope.)
Why is this place so empty?
WHERE ARE THEY?
I went back to ask the receptionist again.
No, still nothing for Sulamita in the system.
She suggested I go talk to the other ambulance drivers, because they probably have her logged and could tell me which ambulance she would arrive in.
They didn’t know, and beyond that, they said if they did know, they couldn’t tell me.
I am the Power of Attorney! Inside Me screamed. I am the Health Care Proxy!
“Thanks,” I said.
“Sorry,” they said.
“I get it,” I said.
Another ambulance pulled up. It was them. Mom on a stretcher, sitting up. Not dead. Very concerned about her purse. Which was in her lap.
The good people at the Pasadena ER did a urinalysis, a CAT scan, and an x-ray. She didn’t have a UTI, her brain wasn’t bleeding, and she had no broken finger bones. She did have . . . . . The Flu.
That’s right.
The InFluenza. And we never would have known, because she wasn’t presenting with flu-like symptoms, except for exhaustion, which she has chronically, owing to the fact that she almost never sleeps. They gave her antibiotics, made her do a walking test, and sent her back with me.
When I returned her to the Assisted Living, got her a glass of water, and informed her aide what had happened, asking to check on her extra, that night, and to text me if she could (Thanks Zan!), I told mom that I was going now, and would she like a hug before I go, because I was very tired and wanted to lie down.
“No,” she said. “You stay here.”
I felt the bristling begin. I told my hackles to hold on a second.
“I’m going, Mom. Would you like a hug before I go?” I repeated.
“You can’t go,” she said.
“The baby is here. Your things are here.”
“Love you Mom,” I said, and stiffly walked out the door before I started sobbing. Better to do that shit in the stairwell. The stairwell never lets you down.
Mom needed a few things, so I got them on the ebike her birthday money bought me / St. Pete, FL // January 2025
I got a call the next day that she fell.
I got a call the day after that.
I got a call yesterday, even though she’s now in a rehab facility for a week or two, specifically designed to help her get strong enough not to fall, or, at the very least, to fall less. Her roommate Jenny called me an hour ago to tell me that she is extremely agitated because they are holding on to her wallet and her documents. Jenny thought if I came there and gave my mom some dollars she might calm down. But I know. Nothing will dissuade or distract her from the bone she’s got between her teeth, and right now that bone is getting her wallet. And if they won’t give it to her, because “policy” is more important that calming a demented person’s mind, then. I’m very sorry for her roommate. But the staff is going to have to handle that one.
I just can’t today.
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