I was visiting my mom at the rehab nursing home when I noticed the curly white cord snaking into the hospital-grade nightstand. I opened the drawer. The phone was in there.
I looked at my little mom—four foot eight, ninety pounds—sitting two feet away. There was no way she’d put it there. Two weeks earlier she’d fallen and broken her right clavicle and fractured her pelvis. Her right arm was strapped in a Velcro sling; she couldn’t move it. Whenever she even attempted a scoot, she screamed in pain.
I’d been trying to call for days. No answer.
I made my way down to the nurses’ station. The nurse’s arms were sleeved in colorful tattoos. I found myself staring at them while I waited, trying to make out what they were. I couldn’t. Finally, she said, “Can I help you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Why is my mom’s phone in the nightstand drawer?”
She paused, unsure what to say. “Well, she must have put it there.”
“Impossible,” I said. “It’s two feet from her arm that’s in a sling.”
Silence. Then: “I’ll tell the aides it should be near her—within reach.”
I thanked her, but walking back to my mom’s room I wondered: do they actually think about the people in these beds? Have they become so desensitized they can’t imagine their own mothers lying there? I also wondered: this must be the most depressing job—what makes someone choose it?
The next morning, around 11:30 am, I found my mom sleeping. Her tray table was pushed off to the side near the window. On it sat untouched oatmeal, congealed enough to look like the fake food used in commercials. The tea bag hung limply into the brown plastic mug; when I touched it, the mug was cold. The orange juice cap was still snug. Nothing had been touched. I pictured the tray arriving hours earlier, placed just out of reach, no one noticing.
It felt like a scene from one of those British detective shows I love: the DI pulls on gloves, surveys the evidence. The food hasn’t been touched. What happened here?
When the nurse arrived with my mom’s pain medication, I asked, “Why isn’t the tray table across her bed?”
“I’m per diem,” she said. “I don’t know your mom.”
I thought about the other 131 beds in this facility. The other 131 moms and dads. How many of their families were worrying about phones in drawers and trays pushed aside? How many would go home able to use a toilet or feed themselves again, and how many would die here or be sent to hospice?
My mom’s roommate, Val, was five years younger than my mom, who was ninety-eight. She still colored her hair and wore it in a tight perm. She’d had a massive coronary and a stent placed. She’d been living independently in assisted living, but now the plan was for her to move in with her granddaughter, who had two kids ages two and four. Big Italian family. We were a small Jewish one. They brought chocolate cake and shared it with my mom; I brought my homemade applesauce—the recipe my mom taught me—and shared it with Val. Val liked it more than my mom. She smiled. My mom made a face, like I’d botched her recipe. Both women were born in the Bronx.
Val told me my mom screamed in the night: “Oh God, I want to die!” She said it kept her awake. To Val, who was Catholic, it sounded like a prayer.
I’d never heard my mother say the word “God” in my life. She was probably high on oxy and delirious. I was certain she wasn’t calling out to God.
My mother went off to nursing school at the age of seventeen in 1945. One of her rotations was in a sanatorium for the wealthy, where she served high tea in china cups. There was even a bowling alley for the patients—she was a “pin girl,” she liked to say.
My first job after graduating from UC Berkeley School of Social Work in 1987 with my MSW was as director of social services at a small thirty-two-bed rehab in a skilled nursing facility. Most of the patients were stroke survivors in their seventies and eighties.
We used to bring all the patients to the recreation room and put their wheelchairs in a circle. I’d lead them in song, and those who couldn’t talk miraculously could sing. “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” rang up and down the institutional hallways.
It felt personal then, when we spent time with the patients and the charts were physical and we wrote our SOAP notes by hand. Now, I look up and down the corridor and see RNs,
PTs, and OTs pushing carts with computers, keying in their Medicare-compliant notes without looking up to see the blinking doorway lights—the ones signaling someone needs a bedpan.
Behind every blinking light, there’s a person. My mom is one of 132, room 108, bed 2.