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Ode to a garrulous go-getter: Mom

By BARBARA MOCH
Published May 8, 2005

I'm thinking of my mother on this first Mother's Day without her ...

Rose, the youngest of 11 children, was born of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents on the west side of Chicago. I wish I knew more about her early life, but while my mother was an outgoing, garrulous woman, she was very private when it came to talking about herself.

I know she graduated from high school and went to work at the Checker Taxi Co. The tough-talking Chicago cabbies liked to tell her off-color jokes just to see her blush. She danced the Charleston and the Black Bottom, and she was Miss Checker Taxi of 1932. How about that? My mother, the beauty queen!

Mom died on April 14. From the gurney in the emergency room, she told me and my daughter Robin that this was her last dance.

"Ninety-three - that's old," she would exclaim during our conversations that covered the same ground on every visit to her assisted-living facility.

She'd ask if I'd come from work. "No, Mom, it's Saturday."

She'd ask about my daughters: "Are they happy?"

Then she'd tell me she was lonesome but also that everybody there was wonderful ... and they were. And lately she had started thanking me for coming to visit. Recently she had told me I was her "bright shining star." And she'd sometimes recollect that old saying: "A son is a son till he takes a wife ... " And I'd finish it: "but a daughter's a daughter the rest of your life."

Life started going downhill for Mom when she suffered a stroke in 1992 while still living in Chicago. Her speech and swallowing were severely affected. For a woman who loved to talk, it was catastrophic. On top of that, she needed a feeding tube, and that demoralized her.

I feared that she'd have to go to a nursing home for the rest of her life, but she rallied, refused to give up, passed the swallowing test and was able to go from rehab to assisted living to independent living. Her speech, while slurred, was fairly understandable once you got used to the cadence, but she was upset and embarrassed when people said they couldn't understand her.

After a second stroke, in 1995, she came to Florida. The move was not of her own choosing, but I no longer could be an effective caregiver from so far away. It was a bitter pill for her to swallow, living in an assisted-living facility among all those "old people." Only in the last few years of her life did she acknowledge that she was one of them.

Little by little, her physical and mental health deteriorated. She was diagnosed with macular degeneration and could no longer read. You'd never have known that, because she refused to part with the stacks of books in her room, always thinking that maybe if she just kept trying ...

She participated in activities at the ALF, playing bingo and poker (and she was very lucky in both) but in the past few years was unable to keep up. There were cognitive deficits as well, results of the two strokes. While she had been an avid movie fan and television viewer, these too went by the wayside. She couldn't concentrate, didn't want to try "talking books" or listening to the radio or TV.

She became incontinent and wheelchair-bound and, for the past year or two, needed assistance with everything except feeding herself. She was sometimes confused and uncertain, sometimes frightened that she wouldn't be able to find her room. She became more and more frail.

Mom had been a proud, stubborn, independent woman who never liked to ask for help, never wanted to "bother" people, and needing assistance with practically everything in the last years of her life was cruelly ironic.

When I got the phone call on a Saturday morning that Mom had been complaining of pain and was being taken to the hospital emergency room, I knew things had to be bad. My mother never complained. Not until after I signed the admitting forms did I learn that her primary physician didn't have privileges at that hospital. She knew the state of Mom's health and knew I didn't want any invasive procedures done or extraordinary measures taken.

The attending physician was very nice, very caring, but he didn't get around to calling Mom's doctor until she had already been poked, prodded, tested ... all the things I didn't want to happen. Finally, the message got through that she was to receive "comfort measures." Even so, the next morning, I got to the hospital just in time to stop an orderly from taking her down for a kidney ultrasound.

The last couple of days in the hospital, Mom was restless and agitated. Robin tearfully remarked that it shouldn't be this hard. We kept asking her, "Does something hurt? Are you in pain?" She didn't always respond, but when she did, it was a slurred "I'm fine." Still not a complainer.

Mom went into hospice care the following Wednesday afternoon. I got the phone call at 7:30 the next morning that she had passed away peacefully during the change of shift that morning.

I wish I could have spared her those last five days. I was so tactful in saying what I didn't want for her. Maybe I should have been more forceful. Would I have been seen as an uncaring daughter, just wanting to get the inevitable over with? Should I even have cared about how I was viewed by the hospital staff? And was it inevitable? My mother had come back from two major strokes, from a gastrointestinal bleed three years ago. Might she have come back from this?

I've had some time to reflect. And I still wish I had been stronger, more forceful, less compliant. I also wish I had brought hospice in earlier, because my mother could have used their help and their loving comfort. I think those 15 hours under hospice care were the most peaceful ones she experienced over that last week of her life. Robin and I left her that Wednesday evening with two nurses who were putting cool cloths on her forehead and speaking softly to her, telling her how glad they were that she had come to visit them.

I took my mother home to Chicago to be buried next to my dad. She was the last of those 11 children, but her nieces and nephews, now in their 70s and 80s, were there to pay their last respects to Aunt Rosie. She would have loved seeing them all together again. I'll always have that picture in my mind of each of them tossing shovelfuls of earth onto the casket on a beautiful, sunny spring day.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom.

Barbara Moch is on the Times staff.

[Last modified May 8, 2005, 00:45:19]