So for the last several months I’ve been worried about my mother’s function. Going on 90 yo, feeble, very limited eyesight, with some dementia, living ~4 hours away in New York, she was falling periodically, forgetting her meds, even blowing off doctor’s appointments. After a serious talk with her best friend about our mutual concern, I started calling her daily. Admittedly, a lot of the conversation was my noodging her about taking her meds (e.g. hypertension pill), and pushing her to admit someone other than myself to her apt., say to help clean (a very private, independent person).
Talked to her last Friday, as did a couple of her friends. Saturday afternoon her building’s superintendent, concerned that she (being a devout Orthodox Jew) had not come downstairs to go to synagogue, went up, entered her apt and found her dead in her bed. He called me (I’m not a believer) and I called the ambulance corp. But that’s about all we could get moving. Well, except for calls to the friends we had invited to our joint birthday party planned for Saturday evening. Whoops. (One couple missed the message canceling, and showed up; so it goes.)
A bit after sundown Saturday, we were able to get a call through to her rabbi, arrange for her body’s removal, and on his say-so, arrange for a funeral and burial on Sunday. My sweetheart and I packed, got a morning train into the city, and sped through the process.
You know what? As miserable as this was, and as I still am, I don’t have to worry about my mother’s safety any more. Dead is safe. During the period of worry, I had a couple of episodes of disorientation, which is what goes on when I’m stressed bad, say by weather changes plus arthritis pain plus something else challenging–or by exercise plus fear for my mother. The docs told me to go a bit easier when swimming and to up my nortriptaline from 40 mG to 75 mG each evening.
Back to the funereal doings. I was concerned about how my religious relatives would respond to us–me, the non-believer, and my wife, the non-Jew. As it turned out, they were fine, warm, even, except for one tartar of an aunt. The rabbi turned out to be a nice guy, who spoke very acceptingly when I interrupted his explanation of the rituals I would need to follow over the next week to explain that I’d found someone else to say kaddish, as I cannot voice any prayer with sincerity. (He seemed to forget this demurral on a couple of occasions further along, but that may just have been operation of his habit of dealing with mourners.)
At some point along here, I developed a headache, probably encouraged although probably not brought on by the hat I wore out of respect for the religious family and friends. Just a headache. Leaving Maryland, I’d taken along two cream cheese sandwiches on whole grain. One took me as far as the funeral parlor.
At the cemetery I got a bit frenetic digging, as we covered the coffin. Emotion can make me stupid. fortunately, no harm. We fulfilled all the rituals that were important to the community, and that’s the main reason we were there. From death to burial was well under 24 hours. That’s the way the Orthodox do it when they can. (Well, I can’t speak for the Greek or Russian Orthodox, just the Jewish.)
Once the limo had brought us and some of my mother’s friends back, my sweetheart and I headed downtown to find a hotel and some dinner. That turned out to be a mix of the fortunate and the tough. We found a moderate-priced (for manhattan) decent hotel room near Times Square and parked our bags, and then walked over to an ice rink. Overlooking it was a restaurant. The rink was a great distraction, and the food was needed. Unfortunately, this was the less-fortunate type of restaurant experience. I asked our server, “What’s in this sauce?” “I’m afraid I don’t know, and I can’t think of anyone who’s here now who would.” I ended up ordering a steak sandwich whose meat almost certainly had been marinaded in some trigger or triggers. Luckily, my wife only had room for half her salad, which was lightly dressed with a white balsamic vinegar-and-oil. Even so, by the time we’d walked the three blocks back to the hotel and hit our room, my head was spinning.
Monday, before we headed home, I went at it a lot more more carefully: dressingless green salad, a container of cottage cheese, . . . .
So this past week I’ve stuck to the house, a loose interpretation of the practice of “sitting shiva.” “Shivah” is hebrew for “seven,” referring to the days of acute mourning. We let friends and relatives know I was here, and specified some evenings as the times for visiting. The tradition is that visitors bring food, because mourners are not expected to do things such as cooking that would distract from dealing with grief. My fear was that well-meaning friends would bring foods that were full of triggers, and I’d have to either take risks with the MAV or with embarrassing friends,maybe even hurting feelings.
Fortunately, this has not been very much the case. My sweetie has provided some finger foods for people to enjoy while visiting, including one or two types of cracker that are safe for me to eat. And she can eat and drink whatever comes. Some very good friends shipped a package of dainties, not one of which I dared eat–but they weren’t here to see that. Other friends either knew enough not to bring food or didn’t seem to pay attention to who ate what.
So it’s worked pretty well. And I cry when I need to, and I send thank you cards to the people who came to the funeral,and I look through pictures of my mother. And with Friday night, now, officially Shiva ends, for those who care about these things. For me, I don’t know just when I’ll feel like getting back to handling business, but I’ve had a chance to heal a bit over the course of the week. My sweetheart as well, because she and my mother had grown to love each other. Fortunately, she is entitled to three days of bereavement leave.
One element I’m particularly grateful for is that mostly I experienced headaches and a little nausea by way of MAV; just the one room-spinning response to an unfortunate restaurant dish. When it’s bad, it can cause me seizure-type activity–from mild brain fog up to a memory gap. This has not happened. Well, my wife and I are both not at our sharpest, but it doesn’t take MAV to cause that when someone you love dies.