Well, I’ve been trying to reach my mother for days now, and haven’t gotten an answer to my phone calls.

When you have a 75-year-old parent 1,800 miles away from you, this is not a good thing. Especially when you have the kind of 75-year old parent who recently smote an entire grocery store by riding through it on a borrowed electric scooter.

Anyway, I’ve been calling her every few hours, and I had gotten very good at thinking up reasons that she wasn’t answering the phone. Things like, Oh, she must be walking her dog…Now she’s in the laundry room. Oh, I’ll bet now she’s out by the pool. (Well? It’s not that cold in Florida–she might be out by the pool.) It’s night now, so she’s probably just playing bingo in the rec hall. Or…perhaps she’s found another scooter and is heading for the drug store this time.

But you know how how you know when none of those things is the right answer? Finally I found the phone number for the manager of the apartment building where she lives, and the woman said, “Oh, honey, she was taken to the hospital today.”

It’s always interesting when your nerve endings all go PING at one time.

Then, thanks to HPAA and their very successful Program to Prevent Family Members From Locating the Hospitalized Elderly, I spent nearly a half day trying to determine which hospital she might be in, and then another three hours or so trying to convince diligent hospital employees that I was not an enemy of the state, even though I did not know the secret code number that would prove that my mother was really my mother and that I had a right–I would have said a duty–to talk to her.

But at last the secret code was given to me by a committee of social workers, who had determined somehow that my mother really would like to speak with me. (Perhaps they simply asked her if I could be given the secret code, and she said yes, but if so, it seemed much more James Bondian a process than that. There was much transferring of phone lines and clicks and beeps, as well as heavy silences, before I was given the high-level clearance I needed.) 

Well. She was in the geriatric psych ward, a place that she has always talked about in the glowing terms that other people use when they mention their vacation resorts at a four-star hotel. The food is nice, the social workers are “lovely girls who really care,” the nurses come in to chat, and even though the doctors are always being pesky and trying to come up with a treatment plan that will remove her from her rightful bed there, even they can be attentive, handsome young men who really know how to pay attention. If she could have her little dog, Bear, there with her, it would be heaven on earth.

“I’m fine,” she said to me on the phone. “For God’s sake, stop worrying about me! I just took a few too many sleeping pills somehow, and then fell down in the middle of the night, and cut my arm and got a black eye and bled all over the carpet and pulled the phone out of the wall, and couldn’t remember my name…but I’m absolutely wonderful right now!”

I try to talk about what’s next for her. She doesn’t want to live up here near me, and she doesn’t want to live in an assisted living facility like she lived in last year, where the other residents were too old and drooled waaaay too much to be what you could call fun, or even presentable. She wants, she says, to live on her own. She wants to be 35 again and go on cruises and then come home and redecorate her apartment for the ninth time.

Somehow, though, I feel as though I’ve peeked at the back of the book. She is growing old and infirm. We go through this again and again: She gets depressed, then takes too many pills, falls down, goes to the hospital, gets placed on medication, then feels so much better that, in celebration, she buys up two of everything they sell on Home Shopping Network in one impassioned, exuberant, bankruptcy-invoking shopping spree…then gets depressed, then takes pills….etc., etc.

Tonight, though, she will allow no talk of leaving the hospital, or of finding an assisted living facility–even one near the beach, where she could hear the seagulls and walk with her little dog on the sand. There is to be no pesky doctorish talk about treatment plans and the wringing of hands for what-do-we-do-next.

Tonight, you see, she is having a hamburger for dinner, and she has a funny nurse to talk to, and some comedy shows to watch on television–and me, her daughter, on the phone, paying attention, and, for right now at least, all of us are asking, “What can we do for you? What do you need?”

And tonight that’s enough for her to be happy.