Editor’s Note: This is a a feeble halting step in putting together the next book, while I await some editorial work on the recently completed first draft of the unconventional biography “Cocktails With the Admiral.” I did a pretty good job of keeping notes on the last years of my folks. It is a fun romp through dementia and other delights of sharing the family aging process. I am experiencing some of them myself, mild perhaps and maybe normal, but I am watching myself like a hawk.

The story below is from the next book- “The Adventures of Raven and Big Mama.” It was compiled from notes I jotted at the time about one of the frequent 800-mile drives from DC to Northern lower Michigan to check in on them. When I originally wrote this, they had a little over two months to live. I fully expected them to have years left, but it was not to be.

There is sadness that they are gone, particularly at this joyous time of the year, laden with so many memories. But I have to say that Raven and Big Mama made the whole adventure- from when they met in New York City after the war right up until they decided to leave it, three hours apart on January 3, 2012. Raven went first, a little after lunch. Big Mama was not informed of Dad’s passing, and she was reportedly chipper at lunch. At afternoon staff check on her apartment, she was found on the floor of her closet. Staff reported it looked like she was changing clothes to go out.

We know better, don’t we?

– Vic

delusions.jpg

I am in Virginia- I think. A pal caught me up short when I was first looking at the computer screen this morning and the rich Dazbog Russian-roasted caffeine had not kicked in yet.

I had some vivid dreams in the second installment of sleep last night which convinced me I was actually back in Michigan. The whole thing is perfectly understandable, since I am a little delusional still from the effort to shovel out what piled up after the office while on the drive Up North.

I was at the desk yesterday, looking out a chilly but glorious Virginia afternoon when Michigan came to me, right in the comfort and safety of my own desk. .

The cascade of calls began round two. First was the desk lady at Potemkin Village, who said some woman named Marion was bugging them to find out what had happened to Raven.

Marion is a piece of work. She was Mom’s best pal in the days when we were small, and is quite mad but still lucid. Her litany of woes surpasses anything we are working through- husband and two kids are dead, and both her remaining sons are either sick or under psychiatric care or both. Apparently, she had called Mom and then turned around to the front desk looking for answers. I told the Village I would call her, Marion, that is, and did so.

Marion is convinced that Mom needs a hearing aid, and that was her first point, once she realized who I was.

“Marion, increasingly I am confident this is not an audio but a cognitive issue, as it was for Raven.”

“I still think she needs a hearing aid.”

“Fine,” I said. “I will put it on the list.” I confirmed my contention a few calls later, but let me stay in general chronological order.

I walked Marion through the state of play, and that Raven is in the Bay Bluffs nursing home, not because he is so much worse, but because Mom has declined to the point that she can’t keep track of him, and he was wandering into other people’s apartments and scaring the crap out of other residents. “Hence,” I said, “Potemkin Village Assisted Living was giving him the boot, and we had no choice but to get him a more intensive level of care. Bay Bluffs was the nicest place available, I said, and closest to Mom and the house. So we moved him.”

She seemed dubious about everything- stop me if that is starting to become a theme in all this- but I think I managed to get her calmed down enough to stay out of our business. Annook thinks she is a meddler, and that is the last thing we need at the moment. Although she can’t drive, she can telephone and that is all I need now is someone with great ideas.

She seemed to appreciate the truth, and said that she would try to visit Mom, not this week but perhaps next.

“Fine,” I said. “I am sure she would like to see you.”

Then I called Mom, and sure enough, she was very agitated. She said that she had stuck around the Challenged Lunch Room (CLR) waiting for “the big announcement,” but that everyone left. She was very concerned about missing it.

“Mom,” I said. “There was no announcement today.” Firmly.

“Not about the babies?”

“No Mom. Are you talking about Halloween? That was last night.”

“No,” she said. “That wasn’t it. It was about the big thing….”

I thought hard. There might have been some sort of holiday program at the Village, and since she has become unstuck in time, that might account for the confusion.

She also has a recurring delusion that features a group of twenty individuals, ten of whom are known, ten are unknown, some apparently are infants, and manifests appearances by Ernie Hemingway and her Dad, Irish Mike.

She asks if one of the older gentlemen across the CLR- the formal dining area- and we explored that idea. At one lunch last week, she indicated that sometimes it was one and sometimes the other. She was perfectly content with the inconsistency, and I like the elasticity of a good delusion. She has always been very good at figuring things out, like when she busted the accountant who was stealing money from the Historical Society, and she is still at it.

She thinks that part of this is about the planning for the International Hemingway Society having their meeting there in Petoskey next summer. It is quite a real event, and since she was the foremost local expert on Ernie’s time in Petoskey and Walloon Lake’s Horton Bay, it is not surprising that she is fixated on that as part of a unifying narrative.

That narrative is a little confusing, but consistent. It includes whatever movie she is watching on the Turner Classic Movie Channel on the cable, and Potemkin Village staff not as workers, but actors. Sometimes it is Ernie, or his brother (there still are Hemingway kin periodically at Walloon) and sometimes it is her Dad Mike that is seated across the room.

“I was sure there was going to be a big deal today.”

“Not today, Mom, for sure. Maybe Thanksgiving.”

“Oh, well that might be possible.”

“I am sure of it, Mom.” Then, she started pressing buttons on the phone, cutting out her voice and making me cringe at the sound emanating from the speakerphone on my desk. We talked for a while longer, I am not completely sure about what, but I seemed to be able to get her calmed down and get back to watching Robert Montgomery on the Turner Classic Movie Channel. After a while she, was relaxed enough to let me go.

I turned back to some business crap and got about fifteen minutes into it when the phone went off again. This time it was Bay Bluffs. The hairs went up on the back of my neck- but it was a thoroughly banal call. “Where is Raven’s electric razor?” said the nice lady.

“It is on the end-table next to the couch at Potemkin Village,” I said. “I guess I forgot to bring it over.”

“Do you have anyone who can deliver it?”

“No,” I said. “I will be back up at Thanksgiving and can get it over to you. He is going to look pretty rocky by then, though.”

“Oh, it is OK. The girls are shaving him with disposable razors, but they thought it would be safer and more comfortable with an electric.”

“I completely agree,” I said. The nice lady said she might be able to find someone to pick it up, and I offered that if that didn’t work I would take care of it myself. “Remember,” I said. “Sherry from Potemkin Village is there at the Bluffs every Wednesday to cut hair, and she knows Bill.”

The nice lady sounded dubious, and a lot of my communications these days features that aspect. It occurred to me that perhaps I am the one with the delusion.

In the minutes between calls, I booked the ticket to go back up for Thanksgiving, In’shallah. It is winter now, and God only knows what the elements will throw our way.

It occurs to me I can have an electric razor FedExed to Raven. I assume he can get mail. That task will go along with the fucking polygraph my customer has required me to take at noon.

I hate those things. It is nothing except a recurring requirement- I think- and with all the money they have spent on the machines and the examiners they have to use them- but I am getting powerfully tired of national security bullshit.

It all seems a little delusional, you know?

(The CLR at Potemkin Village. It was empty as Big Mama waited for the Big Announcement. Photo Socotra.)

Copyright 2017 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com