Here and Now

By Ed Staskus


It was in the middle of winter that Maggie Campbell started noticing her mother wasn't herself. The middle of winter meant it was dark as could be before six o'clock. A blizzard had blown in over Lake Erie. It was icy cold and the forecast was for more cold.
"Something's wrong with mom," Magie told her brother Brad.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"Something's up, maybe she's in another drug psychosis, because she's got issues."
Steve de Luca, Maggie's husband, and she had gone to Fort Lauderdale with her mother and Pete, her stepdad, to their house there. Alma got into a health problem and got put on steroids. They wreaked havoc with her. One thing led to another and she started overdoing and overdosing everything. It wasn't exactly anything new, but she went into a psychosis. They got her out of the hospital in Florida and went back to Ohio. When they did they had to detox her.
"Mom, you have to go back into care," Maggie told her getting off the plane in Cleveland. "You have got to get clean."
"I'm not going back to the hospital, Jay," she said. Her mother called Maggie the Jay Bird.
"Yes, you are. You're not done. There's something seriously wrong. You have to go back and finish."
"If you think I'm going back to the hospital, you're wrong, I'm not. I'm healthy as a horse."
When Maggie insisted, she got mad as a hornet and called her daughter everything but a cannibal. "I hope you're having fun!"
"If you think this is fun for me, you are seriously mistaken," Maggie said.
"Go to hell, Jay," she said.
"Maybe later, mom, but right now, I've got to get you to a hospital."
Even though Alma was angry up down and every which way, they got her there. Afterwards things got better, even though she wasn't sleeping well at night. She tossed and turned and woke up exhausted. Then she fell and broke her back. Maggie told her she needed surgery.
"I don't want to," Alma said. "I'm going to go on pain management instead."
"Oh, great," Maggie said to her brother. "She's going to take more drugs." Alma's house was already a pharmacy. The whole family knew about it but nobody was willing to do anything about it.
After a week of intense pain management Alma couldn't walk. She had to have surgery because of the way her vertebra broke. It was poking into a nerve. After surgery she seemed better, but she was high all the time, even more than she had been. She would take an OxyContin and then a couple of Percocet's and be gone like a kite in the sky. Maggie's mother was 78 years-old and was tripping. It wasn't anything new. She had taken drugs most of her life. It started when she became a nurse. After that it was going to the doctor, getting drugs, then seeing more doctors, and getting more drugs.
Maggie began noticing that after her mother started getting better she started getting worse. At first, they thought she had a urinary tract infection, as though it was one thing after another. They thought she was looking, sounding, and acting crazy because of the infection. But the doctor ruled out a urinary tract infection.
"I just have the flu," Alma said.
"Maybe it's about missing her drugs," Pete said. "She hasn't taken any medication in three weeks."
"What? Why isn't she taking her drugs?" Maggie asked. "She's a major hypochondriac. I mean, she lives to take drugs." All of a sudden, a woman who lived to take drugs wouldn't take a single pill. She wouldn't take her high blood pressure medicine, her thyroid medicine, or her asthma medicine. She had gone cold turkey.
"You have to take these," Maggie said.
"I was a nurse," Alma said. "You're not a nurse, What do you know?"
"Take your medicine."
"No."
On top of everything else Alma was diabetic and wouldn't take her insulin. "Don't you think it's time to measure her sugar?" Pete asked Maggie.
"She doesn't seem to have any idea about what to do to take care of herself," Maggie said. "It's like she doesn't know anymore that she needs insulin."
They took her back to the doctor's office. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. He said she might have had some mini strokes, which he was going to have to test for. When they finally got her to take her medications, she would only take them from Maggie. She had to put them in applesauce and feed them to Alma in the mush. She wouldn't take any from her son Brad. He was like their father and that made Alma mad. She never liked her first husband Fred.
"Do you want supper, mom?" Maggie asked.
"'No, I already ate some."
"That's what she says, even though she hasn't," Maggie told Pete. "You have to live in her world. There's no reasoning with her. You have to take all reasoning out of the conversation. Suppose she wants to have her hair brushed? You learn to use little white lies and trade-offs. 'You take your medicine, mom, and I'll brush your hair.' It's hard to watch. It's like seeing your mom revert back to childhood."
Maggie started doing art projects with Alma, just to keep her mind occupied.
"My brother helps a little, but my stepdad and I are who take care of her," Maggie told Steve. "My sister Bonnie, who hasn't talked to me in more than seven years, lives in a podunk somewhere. No one even knows the name of the town. My other sister, Elaine, has a hard time with it. It makes her depressed, even though she and my mom never got along. She can't deal with it and just stays away."
Maggie went to her mother's house on Mondays and Fridays. She gave her a bath every Monday. Fridays were usually a bad day all around, as though everything might come to an end at the end of the week. Home health care came in five days a week and made sure she took her medications. They wrote everything they did down in an iPad.
"She'll take pills from me, and sometimes from a stranger, although not always. One Thursday she slept for more than fourteen hours and when Friday morning got there still didn't want to get up."
"I don't want to," Alma said.
"But why, mom?"
"I don't know."
"I don't want to make you upset, but Tiffany's going to be here soon to give you your medicine. Do you remember Tiffany?"
"I don't forget, Jay. The doctor says I never forget. I was just there, so I know."
"OK, so that's what he said?"
"He says I don't have a memory problem at all."
"Mom, that's great," Maggie said. "I'm glad you don't have a memory problem,"
"That nurse, whoever she is, she can come here, but I won't get out of bed."
"I can guarantee you she will be here, so you be nice."
"Oh, I'm nice. I'm just not going to get up."
"That's not being nice."
"I know what's chirpy and what's not."
There were many things Alma no longer knew. There were some things she knew full well but there were fewer and fewer of them. What she still knew was slowly becoming a pile of broken mirrors.
Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com.

"Cross Walk" by Ed Staskus

A Cold War Thriller

"Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC." Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction
Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP
Late summer and early autumn, New York City, 1956. Stickball in the streets and the Mob on the make. President Eisenhower on his way to Ebbets Field for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A Hell's Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication